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A few loose-ish threads
All visitors, vendors and
contractors are required to get a pass at the office before they can get on
base, base spokesmen said. But if the men indeed did work for a moving company
with a DOD contract, they were presumably routinely required to provide
identification. So why had they acted so "nervous and apprehensive," according
to base personnel, when asked to provide identification at the pass and
identification office?
Navy
officials couldn’t comment.
Also, we
persisted, if the men worked for a moving-and-storage company with a DOD
contract, wouldn’t they have known not to show up with expired passports and
without valid work permits?
“We require a show of proper
identification with photo id at all times,” the spokesman replied crisply.
Presumably the two Israelis
already knew that.
Thankfully there was one
subject on which the Navy spokesman was prepared to wax eloquent... The
bomb-sniffing guard dogs at the base were filled with the right stuff, and
possessed a high level of skill & accuracy.
"The military dogs were
alerted to a scent in the cab of the truck," a base spokesman had stated.
"Guards immediately closed access to the base.”
“Do they often test false
positives?” we inquired.
Not at
all. “The idea that they would pick up a false positive is highly unlikely,”
sniffed the base spokesman.

"Its a
mystery. There's lots of 'em."
Why did
highly-trained military guard dogs alert to the presence of explosive residue in
a briefcase
in the moving van?
Although
it was little-publicized, in the Mars Hill incident law enforcement stated that
'their' Israeli moving van tested positive for drugs in the field. They were
later told by the FBI it had been a false positive. Some remained skeptical.
The Navy
official's main talking
point was that no questions were necessary because officials at the nuclear
submarine base in St. Marys, Ga. believe there was no criminal intent on the
part of the two Israelis when they tried to enter the tightly guarded facility.
Obviously
they're not worried. Why should we be?
In an interview with the MadCowMorningNews
a military
spokesman divulged
that the moving company the men work for, Advantage Moving & Storage, Inc., of
Norcross, GA., has a contract with the Department of Defense.
Advantage Moving, we learned
in a check with the Georgia Secretary of State's office, was incorporated barely
a year ago, on May 12, 2003, which hardly seems enough time to win a contract to move military personnel
with the U.S. Department of Defense.
Are they just really fast
workers? What, then?
The company is owned by an Israeli named Yair Knafo,
we learned, and listed as active but in
"non-compliance" in the Georgia Secretary of State’s Office. A switchboard operator said last Monday the company's spokesman was out of
the office and unavailable for comment about how long the men worked for the
company and how they got jobs without valid permits to work in the United
States.
When we called Friday afternoon the
woman who answered the phone informed us the company's spokesman was still away
from his desk.
Maybe he
just takes a really long lunch.
He certainly had been successful brazening it
out. And nobody said a word. Well, we did. But we got there late.
But... wouldn't you expect
local Atlanta reporters to hound his doorstep for comment, or to get an
interview with one of the two young movers who'd caused a whole friggin' U.S.
NAVY nuclear base to shut down?
Apparently not.
Enough already with the moving vans

Based
only on what's been reported, its hard not to conclude that something strange
is going on.
Since
September 11th, 2001, when five "movers" from a Miami company called Urban
Moving System's were arrested as they watched and allegedly celebrated as the
Twin Towers crumbled, there have been numerous incidents involving Israelis in
moving vans around the U.S.
In fact,
you can fill a virtual shoebox with news clippings just since 9/11 from places
around the country where locals have been startled by "Israeli Movers Doing
Inexplicable Things Before Being Deported.”
The
Jerusalem Post reported on Oct. 26, 2001 that five Israeli men
with box-cutters and multiple passports were detained in New Jersey on the day
of the attack after being spotted laughing and posing for photographs with
the smoking Twin Towers in the background.
The
men were
held in FBI custody for 71 days before being quietly released, amid news
accounts stating the men
would be deported back to Israel for immigration
violations. The moving firm they worked,
Urban Moving Systems, was
Israeli-owned. Its owner, Dominick Suter reportedly dropped the business and left the
country.
We're just taking pictures. Nice Tower.
Then in
October of 2001 two Israeli men in a moving van were arrested after being found
with detailed video footage of the Sears Tower in Chicago. They were taken into
custody by the FBI, and handed over, in what is beginning to seem like another
pattern, to the Immigration and Naturalization Service for deportation.
No word
on whether they got flown home in coach.
In May 2002 Fox News first
reported that two Israelis with altered passports were apprehended in a rental
truck containing traces of TNT and plastic explosives after local police became
suspicious at the truck driver's insistence that they were moving furniture, a
claim that did not seem to mesh with the late hour. They were on a state highway
bordering Whidbey Island Naval Air Station, the home of the Navy’s fleet of
electronic warfare Prowler jets.
Perhaps Israeli movers have
just developed a market niche, specializing in delivering furniture to customers
near U.S. Navy facilities. It seems the only possible explanation, other than a
federally-orchestrated cover-up of whatever is really going on.
There
is the New Mexico incident. And recently we learned of one near Detroit... The
list, as they say, it do go on.
We get letters
Compounding
the troublesome nature of the current incident is the place and time where it
occurred: Kings Bay is very near Sea Island, which will host the G-8 Summit this
month, which puts a more serious and slightly-sinister spin on the story.
Today the
"Israeli Moving Van" story has taken on a life of its own. With few hard facts
available, its becoming a sort of uneasy urban legend, increasing the feeling of many Americans
who no longer trust the
motives and statements of federal authorities the way they did before 9/11.
About our
virtual gavel-to-gavel coverage of the ongoing mystery of Israeli movers
loitering outside sensitive U.S. facilities, one reader wrote, fairly snorting,
“Israelis in moving vans? I'd have thought that they'd have sprouted a new
cover by now after the bunch that got busted on 9/11 in New Jersey.”
Another
reader had a slightly more droll take on the mystery. “Do you think its just
that we can’t we meet our furniture moving requirements with domestic talent?”
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