What did Israel know in advance of 9/11 attacks?

Christopher Ketcham, a freelance journalist who has written for Harper's and Salon, writes in a 7000 word article in CounterPunch: "The questions [regarding the Israeli 'moving company workers' celebrating the 9/11 attack on the New Jersey waterfront, and 'more than 120 young Israeli citizens, posing as art students'] are disturbing enough to warrant a Congressional investigation. . . . Yet none of this information found its way into Congress's joint committee report on the attacks, and it was not even tangentially referenced in the nearly 600 pages of the 9/11 Commission's final report."

Ketcham adds: "What is perhaps most damning is that the Israelis' celebration on the New Jersey waterfront occurred in the first sixteen minutes after the initial crash, when no one was aware this was a terrorist attack."

A former CIA counterterrorism officer told Ketcham: "There was no question but that [the order to close down the investigation] came from the White House. It was immediately assumed at CIA headquarters that this basically was going to be a cover-up so that the Israelis would not be implicated in any way in 9/11. Bear in mind that this was a political issue, not a law enforcement or intelligence issue. If somebody says we don't want the Israelis implicated in this - we know that they've been spying the hell out of us, we know that they possibly had information in advance of the attacks, but this would be a political nightmare to deal with."

According to Ketcham the media and U.S. government have been silenced by "the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA), which operated in tandem with the two most highly visible powerhouse Israel lobbyists, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)."

"It's plausible that the intelligence prompting the shutdown of the [Islamic] Holy Land Foundation came from 'art student' spies in the Richardson area", writes Ketcham.