On Wed, 20 Mar 2002, Max B. Sawicky wrote:
> > Allies and espionage
> >
> > It is rather strange that the US media seems to be
> > ignoring what may well be the most explosive story
> > since the 11 September attacks -- the alleged break-up
> > of a major Israeli espionage operation in the USA.
>
> Food for conspiranoia indeed, isn't it odd that the only U.S. network
> that has covered this is Fox, and then they pulled their own web pages?
> Google don't lie.
And it has also been noted that Le Monde, the one intellectually respectable European paper to highlight this story recently, recently bought the internet intelligence service (Executive Intelligence Review) that originally pushed the story, so venality might have played a role in their editorial decision.
Personally, based on my knowledge of the life-cycle of young Israelis, I found the story the US put out when they were kicked out of the country completely convincing, and I've yet to see a good reason why it should be called into question, to wit: they were neither spies nor art students. Rather they were involved in a very common art scam where they bought commercially produced art for $10 a shot and sold it on the street for whatever they could get under the pretense of having being a struggling artist.
All Israelis have to do compulsory army service, and it drives most of them crazy, of course. So before or after college they typically make a trip as far away from Israel as they can get (except, amusing enough, it's usually the same far away places that their friends went, because most of them are also provincial. So there are now well-worn trails where Hebrew is spoken in the farthest reaches of Peru, Thailand and India.) Before this trek takes place, however, they have to make enough money to finance it, which is usually done in America. (And some of them decide they prefer doing their wild oats sowing here, anyway.) One familiar method is to work for on the Isaeli moving companies in New York, live 6 to an apartment, and build up a wad of cash to blow in Thailand. Another is this art scam, which makes less, but which also takes a lot less out of you and let's you live touristy places rather than New York.
Anyway, it looks like what happened was some of them were in Florida. In itself, that's not so weird -- there is literally a half a million Israelis in this country, and a lot of them like the sun. And they were acting suspicious, and they were networked all over the country (they're all kids the same age, making the same trip in the same country in the age of email, and trading notes on the art of scamming on top of that), so they got picked up. There was clearly suspicion on the part of the FBI, I don't think there's any doubt about that. But the odds seem to be that these guys were basically in the same boat as young arab middle easterners on September 12th -- wrong place, wrong time, tiny venal sin made them look suspicious, and they got fucked. Immeasurably less fucked than if they'd been Arabs, no doubt about that. But fucked nonetheless.
Of course I probably have an iron clad reputation as a softy when it comes to conspiracies. But I'll be happy to alter my opinion if someone can give me a good reason why thinking they were spies is more plausible.
Michael