The Stern-Intel News AlertRichard Shandrshand@shaw.ca 28 Sep 02
Israel and 9/11Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers and Pentagon, a news alert entitled "News Embargo After Israeli Link Leak" began circulating on the internet. The alert, allegedly originating from David Stern of Stern-Intel (Canada), charged that the Israeli Mossad was responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 9/11.
The websites circulating the news alert represent a diverse mixture of political and religious ideologies. However, insofar as I am aware, only a few people actually attempted to contact David Stern to verify the story - and none succeeded. A search of the internet reveals that this is this news alert is the only item originating from "Stern-Intel". I could not find any other trace of an entity with this name. Is the news alert a deliberate piece of disinformation? Locating and identifying the author would go a long way towards answering this question, but could he be found?
The Seed is Planted(Times are based on a 24-hour clock and are calibrated to Pacific Daylight Time using the Greenwich Mean Time offset.) September13, 2001
6:59:42 PDT
Ummahnews.com
An internet search of all six news services revealed no evidence that the Stern-Intel news alert was posted on any of these websites.
7:45:01 PDT (10:45:01 -0400)
9:05:25 PDT (12:05:25 -0400)
14:14:01 PDT (17:14:01 -0400)
The Story SpreadsOther websites also posted the the news alert for information purposes. September14, 2001
18:14 PDT (6:14 PM)
18:19 PDT (3:19 AM, Sep 15 - Croatia)
The Stern-Intel news alert eventually appeared on several news websites in Pakistan. The source is changed, however, ostensibly to give the story more credibility. September16, 2001
12:15:20 PM (time zone not given)
September17, 2001
18:47:42 PDT (09:47:42 +0800 - Sep.18)
The article from Pakistannation.net was forwarded to me by an acquaintance. I live in the greater Vancouver area and know that the Vancouver Times does not exist. This roused my curiosity and I endeavored to discover who was actually behind the story. I soon traced the earliest bi-line date for the Stern-Intel news alert through Finnish Indy Media to the Eco News Service website, which is also located in Vancouver. (The Indy Media network serves as an anti-globalizaton platform.) At this point I had more pressing priorities and discontinued my investigation without contacting anyone.
By mid September, numerous other websites picked up the Stern-Intel news alert, but most give their source as one of the websites above. khilafah.com was also given as a source by a number of websites. It uploaded the story on Sep 17 from an unidentified source.
Kaleem Omar/Mullah Mohd Omar
During this period other individuals posted the Stern-Intel news alert to additional news groups, which disseminated the story even further.
Other websites posting the alert after Sep 15
I picked up the investigation again on May 2, 2002 and begin contacting people and conducting an extensive search of the internet. After ten days, I located the posting of the MMN e-mail on EMED-L (Listserve for Emergency Medical Practioners, University of California, San Francisco).
David Stern is a rather common Jewish name. Most likely it was used as a pseudonym since anyone can sign up for Hotmail using a fictitious name. Still, I thought an internet search of the name might be worthwhile. The most prominent person with this name is the current commissioner of the NBA. Of the many David Sterns listed on the internet, only a few appear to have any relevance to this investigation though. One is a lawyer for Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, an al-Qaeda member convicted the 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassy in Dar esSalaam. Another is a Jewish convert to Christianity who moved from the US to Jerusalem under the "Law of Return" and is active there as an evangelical missionary. Neither was seriously considered as a contender for the David Stern I was looking for, however.
The name that appears most often in internet searches is David L. Stern, who lives in Hillsboro, Oregon and works as a cryptographer expert with Intel Corp. However, when asked about the Stern-Intel News Alert by Nicholas Stix, columnist with TooGoodReports, he responded, "I am not a reporter and have no knowledge of this 'military intelligence' article."
Individuals who either had connections with military intelligence or the shadowy world of political conspiracies were also contacted. None of these leads panned out. A stylometric analysis (i.e. frequency of word use, sentence length, punctuation style, etc.) of the Stern-Intel report and textual comparison with other texts on the internet might feasibly be used to uncover the author. Perhaps someone with the resources and time will undertake such a search. Until there is a breakthrough, the identity of the real David Stern will remain as elusive as ever.
The Stern-Intel news alert has never been substantiated and all attempts to contact the author have failed. As Mario Profaca of Spy News pointed out, "David Stern" could have been hand picked as an alias because both the first name and family name are common amongst Jewish people ("David's Star", stern [German] = star). In addition the name recalls the Stern gang which fought against the British in Palestine before the formation of the state of Israel. The identity of who really authored the Stern-Intel news alert may never be known.
The Stern-Intel news alert should serve as a litmus test for responsible journalism on the internet. It is to their credit that three of the Muslim news services I contacted did not publish the story because it could not be substantiated and the fourth issued a disclaimer only hours after disseminating it. However, within two days the news alert began to receive wide and uncritical acceptance across the internet, including Muslim fundamentalist, evangelical Christian, Communist and neo-Nazi websites. A good test of these sites' trustworthiness would be to contact the webmasters with the results of this investigation and see whether or not they take any action, such as issuing a reader advisory.
It is vital that the internet continue to provide a forum for free speech and the dissemination of information that might otherwise be buried by establishment media. It is equally important that those viewing this morass of information exercise judgement and discretion. The Stern-Intel report may indeed be deliberate disinformation but to what purpose and for whose benefit? Was it simply anti-Israel black propaganda or could it have been devised to undermine the credibility of valid reports about Mossad covert ops in the U.S.?
Almost everyone I contacted responded to my e-mail request and provided me with information. Thanks in particular to the following individuals for their help in preparing this report. (The names are listed in the chronological order in which they were contacted.)
Alfred Webre, editor of the Eco News Service
Others that I would like to acknowledge for their assistance include:
Omer Bin Abdulla, editor of Islamic Horizons
If you have any additional information regarding the Stern-Intel News Alert and/or the possible identity of the author, please contact:
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