Yet Moron Jonathan Elinoff

It becomes more obvious why Elinoff decided to break his "art students" story on Kevin "We should support the Taliban" Barrett's show. Of course, most of what Elinoff has to say has been published before; most notably by Christopher Ketcham in Counterpunch (reprinted here). What Elinoff is laboring mightily to do is to get us to connect the dots. Look, there was an arts project in the World Trade Center! Dot! Look there's an arts student mystery. Dot! Connect the dots! But there is zero indication that the Israeli arts students are connected in anyway to the (remember) Austrian and German artists known as Gelatin staying in the World Trade Center.

There's some good discussion of the claim that Serfati and others were renting an apartment close to where Mohamed Atta lived in Hollywood, Florida here. As it turns out:

As you can read below, the DEA picked up a group of Israelis for questioning on March 1, 2001, including Hanane Sarfati, 24 (also referred to as Hanan Serfaty in the DEA memo; the French report has yet another spelling), Eli Cohen, 23, and Oshirt Zaguri, 23. Cohen and Zaguri gave their addresses as apartments 207 and 4205 respectively in the building at 701 S. 21st Street. Apparently French intelligence has trouble understanding American address nomenclature. Anyway, two and a half months later, on May 13, Atta and Al-Shehi moved into their own rented apartment at 1818 Jackson Street, a half mile south west of the place Cohen and Zaguri had been staying at. (They apparently picked the place after a couple nights at the Bimini Motel Apartments, several kilometres east). There is no evidence the two pairs of Mediterranean tourists were ever renting their respective apartments at the same time: obviously spying on Atta when Atta was actually IN TOWN would have been too easy for these highly trained Mossad SpyKids (23? Come on...), so they decided to do their spying months before he even ARRIVED.

The Art Students Story

Of course it starts with a tiny morsel of truth, which he surrounds with a gigantic, oozing mass of TROOF. Here's the real story from the New York Times:

In short, the book belies the extravagance of the feat it seems to document: the covert installation, and brief use, of a balcony on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, 1,100 feet above the earth. Eight photographs -- some grainy, all taken from a great distance -- depict one tower's vast eastern facade, marred by a tiny molelike growth: a lone figure dressed in a white jacket, standing in a lectern-size box.

Elinoff states that they illegally lived in the towers; I don't know whether that's true. The New York Times says that they were legally there:

In the spring of 2000, Gelatin and 14 other artists shared free studio space on the 91st floor, where the group's artmaking appeared to consist of building a clubhouse out of cardboard boxes.

However, most office buildings do not allow people to "live" there 24/7, so in terms of living there he may be right, but Elinoff is definitely concealing the fact that they were in the building legally.

As to the claim that Austrian and German art students were somehow tied to the Mossad, it's laughable. That Elinoff claims he has "exclusive" information is even funnier; exclusive with the exception of the New York Times, I suppose.

At any rate, they were out of the towers by August of 2001, when the story was written in the Times. I suppose the Troofers will push the theory that these were the guys who brought the super-duper nanothermite into the building.