What do the 1992 crash of El Al Flt 1862 and 9/11 have in common?

These for starters:

1) Israel and Mossad

2) Massive cover-up and scandal

3) Thousands of rescue workers and civilians coming down with chronic and strange illnesses

4) Blatant lies and hypocrisy

October 4, 2009 marked the 17th anniversary of the worst air disaster in Dutch history. It also was the date of the beginning of one of the largest scandals and cover-ups in the history of the Dutch government and it involved Israel, Mossad, the US, El Al, secret and illegal chemical weapons transfers, unconfirmed allegations of weapons-grade plutonium, and as many as 2,000 local residents and firemen eventually reporting health complaints they believe were caused by the crash. Many reported loss of hair in the weeks after the crash, a sign of radiation disease.

Israeli El Al flight 1862, a Boeing 747, crashes into apartment buildings in Bijlmeer, a suburb of Amsterdam, killing 39 people on the ground and four aboard the plane

Oh, and what was the US doing sending massive amounts of WMD's to the Middle East? So, the US has long been concerned about keeping Weapons of Mass Destruction out of the Middle East - MY ASS!

Remember this story when you next hear some cable news pundit pontificating about why we have to bomb those nasty people in the Middle East.

Just remember the aftermath of the Bijlmermeer air disaster, and you'll never have to ask yourself again why so much of the world listens to our rhetoric, and thinks we're just full of it.

Here's some other shocking facts that were eventually discovered from that disaster:

* Once combined, the chemicals aboard El Al Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city. International transport of such materials is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty, signed by the U.S.

* Soil samples taken at the crash site have turned up evidence suggesting that nuclear weapons technology was being illegally shipped from the U.S. to Israel.

Date: 02-11-99
In a saga that could have been scripted by the X-Files, Dutch journalists have been investigating the 1992 crash in Amsterdam of an El Al cargo jet on its way from New York to Tel Aviv. Now the Dutch parliament is taking up their charges that the jet carried a secret Israeli military shipment of weapons-grade plutonium and the chemical ingredients for sarin. As many as 2,000 local residents and firemen reported health complaints they believe were caused by the crash. Meanwhile, the El Al cargo jet flights continue to stop over at Schiphol, raising fears that the commercial airport is a hub for secret weapons transfers. PNS associate editor Yoichi Clark Shimatsu is an investigative reporter and former editor of the English-language Japan Times Weekly in Tokyo.

AMSTERDAM -- The Dutch Parliament is just this month holding public hearings to determine vital facts about an October, 1992 airplane accident.

The El Al Boeing 747 crashed into an apartment building in Bijlmeer, a suburb of Amsterdam, killing 39 people on the ground and four aboard the plane. It was carrying a secret cargo that included the main chemical ingredients for the nerve gas sarin as well as depleted uranium (DU). Dutch journalists allege it was carrying weapons-grade plutonium as well.

As many as 2,000 local residents and firemen have reported health complaints that they attribute to the crash. Many report loss of hair in the weeks after the crash, a sign of radiation disease.

The hearings at The Hague follow six years of investigation by Dutch journalists Vincent Dekker and Pierre Heyboer with the Volkskrant newspaper. The most important witnesses will not be present, however -- officials of the Bush administration.

The flight stopped at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport for refueling en route from New York to Tel Aviv. On October 4 last year, the sixth anniversary of the crash, Dutch transport ministry leaked to a newspaper an El Al bill of landing that shows the plane was carrying 190 liters of dimethy methylphosphonate (DMMP), four liters of isopropanol and an undisclosed amount of hydroflouric acid.

The chemicals were being sent to a super-secret weapons facility, called the Israel Institute of Biological Research (IIBR) south of Tel Aviv.

The Israeli government has claimed that the chemicals were intended for testing gas masks. But most military services use only a few grams for such purposes. The chemicals aboard the El Al jet were enough to produce 270 kilograms of sarin nerve gas -- enough to annihilate the populations of many major cities.

The sarin components came from the Solkatronics chemical plant in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, then owned by Solvay, a chemical corporation based in Brussels, Belgium. International transport of such materials is a violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty, signed by the U.S.

The El Al jet also carried at least 800 kilograms of depleted uranium (DU), used as ballast to balance the jet's cargo. Burned DU releases uranium dust, which is known to cause lung cancer and other diseases.

Dutch authorities and El Al admit Flight LY1862 carried sarin components and DU, but refuse to provide details on six tons of military cargo. According to airport security personnel, the plane carried seven pallets of unspecified munitions.

Journalist Dekker claims, on the basis of leaks from Dutch officials, that the jet carried 27 kilograms of weapons-grade plutonium, enough to make seven warheads the size of the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.

In addition, soil samples taken at the crash site have turned up evidence suggesting that nuclear weapons technology was being illegally shipped from the U.S. to Israel.

The El Al jet landed and took off at Schiphol, one of the world's busiest civilian airports, and flew across the most densely populated area of Europe. If 27 kilograms of plutonium had bounced into the burning wreckage, nearly all of Western Europe would have faced a nuclear emergency bigger than the Chernobyl accident.

Dutch and Israeli authorities apparently organized a cover-up. Most documents taken from El Al officials have disappeared. Police audio tapes and 42 videotapes taken by the firefighters were shredded. Firemen claimed that they turned in the cockpit voice recorder, or "black box," but the government denies that it was ever found. Metal parts from the wreckage were recycled and melted down before a proper investigation could begin.

Residents report seeing helicopters, painted black and without markings, landing in their neighborhood. Others tell of a French-speaking team searching the area, and a group of men speaking English, some clad in white chemical protective suits, carrying a heavy box covered with a white cloth.

The Dutch authorities have denied that these events ever happened.

Journalists say Dutch security officials have told them that the Netherlands has allowed Israel to make secret military air shipments through Schiphol since the 1950s. The shipments apparently are outside the Atlantic Alliance military treaties because the aircraft going to Israel are not refueled at NATO air bases but at the commercial airport of Schiphol.

"Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers because El Al has special status there. Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport," said Henk van der Belt, a member of an investigation team set up by Bijlmeer residents.

Every Sunday at sundown, an El Al cargo plane stops at Schiphol, refueling midway on the long journey between New York and Tel Aviv. All Israel-bound cargo is put inside a vacuum chamber in an underground bunker to test it for bombs equipped with altimeter triggers. But the flight does not appear on any airport video monitors -- there is not even an El Al check-in counter. Documents for air freight to Israel are handled inside an unmarked room.

A photo taken just before the 1992 accident showed that the engine of the El Al jet was off-center, indicating it was previously damaged.

Airport workers in Cologne, Germany, where the jet refueled on its way to New York, say the plane collided with an airport ground vehicle there. In other words, the cargo jet loaded with U.S.-made sarin, uranium and plutonium could have crashed in New York but it turned out to be a time-bomb flying to the heart of Europe.

The New York Times
6 Years After Crash, Talk of Cover-Up
By MARLISE SIMONS
Published: Sunday, February 7, 1999
http://www.nytimes.com/1999/02/07/world/6-years-after-crash-talk-of-cove...

Mr. Prijt and more than 1,100 other rescue workers and residents believe they were somehow contaminated that night by the burning aircraft, or its mysterious cargo -- first described by El Al as ''perfumes and machine parts'' and finally revealed last October to include vats of chemicals that can be used in the manufacture of the deadly nerve gas Sarin.
[...]
Yet a further 20 tons of the 114-ton cargo are still unidentified, and the relevant travel documents are still missing. El Al has said this cargo was destined for the Israeli Ministry of Defense but it cannot disclose its nature for ''reasons of national security.'' An Israeli Defense Ministry spokesman has said the freight consigned to the ministry did not include dangerous goods.
[...]
The parliamentary commission wants to know why El Al at first refused to hand over any waybills, and what was the role of Israeli security agents who appeared at the site in protective gear within an hour after the crash.
[...]
The Dutch Government has produced several reports, but never answered all the nagging questions. ''The changing stories about the plane, and the foot-dragging, can only be explained because it involves Israel, with which we have a special relationship,'' the NRC Handelsblad concluded in an editorial.
[...]
During the cleanup, some 300 pounds of the plane's depleted uranium was never accounted for and may have burned. Laboratory tests done last year on 15 people who were near the crash site found four samples with high uranium content.
[...]
Among them was Elly Prijt, 44, who has mysterious black scars on her neck and her legs, as though someone stubbed out cigarettes on her skin. After the crash, she had joined her husband in helping victims. ''I'm exhausted and I'm getting different infections all the time,'' she said recently.
[...]
More than 1,100 people responded, reporting sleeplessness and fatigue, pain in their joints, and respiratory problems, said Joris Ijzermans, the physician who heads the team.
[...]
Maria Herts says she has been short of breath since the crash, which happened just a few hundred yards from where she lived, and killed her sister and brother-in-law. Boeing and El Al, which have paid undisclosed damages to an unknown number of crash victims -- and made them sign a secrecy clause -- have not yet paid the damages for Ms. Herts' young nephew.
[...]
''All this has been dragging on for too long, the claims, the unexamined illnesses,'' said Mr. van der Goen, the lawyer. ''It's scandalous that such a thing can happen in a European country.''

http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2006/10/specialty_chemi.html

04 OCTOBER 2006

Lawrence of Cyberia

"Specialty Chemicals"

If you've never wondered why so much of the world thinks our justifications for invading, bombing, sanctioning and destabilizing various parts of the Middle East are a pile of crap, today might be a good day to start. Because today is the fourteenth anniversary of the Bijlmermeer air disaster, whose sordid aftermath opened up a whole can of worms relating to secret weapons trafficking and unaccountable government, which really gives the lie to all the worthy motivations we claim for our policies. If you want to know just how little our government and our allies' governments really care for all those good causes we say we are bequesting the Middle East - rule of law, non-proliferation, democratic and accountable government, etc. – you only have to look at the Bijlmermeer tragedy.

At 6:21pm on 4 October 1992, a Boeing 747 airliner of the Israeli airline El Al took off from Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport for Tel Aviv, following a stopover en route from New York. The plane suffered catastrophic mechanical failure soon after takeoff, losing one right-side engine, which sheared off taking the second with it. The pilot attempted to loop back to make an emergency landing at Schiphol, but lost control short of the airfield. Flight 1862 crashed about 10 minutes after take-off into the Groeneveen and Kruitberg apartment buildings in Bijlmermeer, a working class suburb in south-eastern Amsterdam. Photo left (Associated Press).

The crash of El Al cargo flight LY1862 became the worst air disaster in Dutch history, killing at least 47 people directly, and destroying in subsequent months the health of hundreds of local residents. (Although stonewalling and outright lying by the Dutch and Israeli authorities meant that it was only in 1999 – after a comprehensive expose by investigative journalists at a Dutch newspaper – that a parliamentary enquiry officially acknowledged that the high rate of chronic illness among local residents was a direct result of toxic substances released as a result of the crash).

Local residents had suspected very early on that LY1862 was not a routine flight. Eyewitnesses reported seeing men in hazmat suits removing unidentified debris from the site immediately after the crash. And in the months that followed hundreds of local people and rescue workers complained of a range of chronic health problems, including depression, fatigue and listlessness, breathing difficulties and stomach pains. Tests commissioned by a Dutch citizens' group revealed traces of uranium at the crash site and abnormally high levels of uranium in the bodies of survivors. An independent Dutch nuclear research group revealed that – despite government claims to the contrary – only about half of the depleted uranium that the plane had been carrying as ballast had ever been recovered. As for the 114 tons of cargo on flight 1862: El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide."

Almost six years after the event, on 30 September 1998, editors Harm van den Berg and Karel Knip of the Dutch paper NRC Handelsblad published the results of an extensive investigation they had carried out into the crash. They had obtained the freight documentation for the flight, and made public for the first time its real cargo. The manifest confirmed the plane was carrying 400 kilograms of depleted uranium as ballast, but also showed that it carried among its cargo about 10 tons of assorted chemicals. The chemicals included ten 18.9-litre plastic drums of dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP), and smaller amounts of isopropanol and hydrogen fluoride: three of the four chemical precursors for the production of Sarin nerve gas.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's office immediately denied that Flight 1862 had been carrying Sarin precursors. When this was contradicted hours later by an El Al spokesman, the Prime Minister's office acknowledged that the chemicals were onboard but stated that "the material was non-toxic and was to have been used to test filters that protect against chemical weapons". An explanation that Earth Island Journal found "puzzling", since "it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city".

The Shipper's Declaration of Dangerous Goods published by NRC Handelsblad showed that the DMMP consignment was en route to the Israel Institute for Biological Research (IIBR). The IIBR is located in Nes Ziona, about 20kms south of Tel Aviv, on what used to be the extensive estate of the Al-Taji Al-Farouki family of Ramleh, who were dispossessed in 1948. The family mansion (pictured, left) that was the home of Shukri Al-Taji remains today as the entrance to the IIBR, which was built on the family citrus groves.

The IIBR's web site describes the institute as "a governmental, applied research institute specializing in the fields of biology, medicinal chemistry and environmental sciences", though it is actually believed to be the front organisation for the Israeli government's development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons. A biologist formerly associated with the IIBR told the London Times on 4 October 1998: "There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon...which is not manufactured at the institute."

The freight documentation showed that the DMMP was supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania, which marketed itself as "a leading and innovative manufacturer of ultrahigh-purity gases, chemicals and gas handling equipment". (Solkatronic was bought out in November 1997 by Air Products and Chemicals, Inc. whose web site describes the company as a "manufacturer of… specialty chemicals", which is one way of referring to nerve agents, I suppose). As a chemical weapons precursor, DMMP is subject to tight export controls by the U.S. government, but Solkatronic confirmed that it had requested and received from the U.S. Department of Commerce the export licences necessary to ship to the IIBR the chemicals that went down with Flight 1862.

Following the revelations published in Handelsblad, the Dutch government finally established a parliamentary enquiry into the Bijlmer air disaster. The enquiry, under the chairmanship of Christian Democrat deputy Theo Meijer, heard testimony from about 80 witnesses over four months (Jan-Apr 1999), summarising its conclusions in a 2,000 page report. The main findings of the Meijer Report were:

1. that toxic substances had been released by the crash of Flight 1862 and ensuing fire, and that the chronic illnesses suffered by rescuers and local residents were indeed directly linked to the disaster.
2. that El Al had inexplicably failed to co-operate with crash investigators, despite high-levels requests from the Netherlands to Israel that it should do so. (In fact it was not until February 1999 that the Israelis finally provided the Dutch government with a full listing of the military cargo on the flight, having maintained until then that that information no longer existed).
3. that Dutch government ministers had repeatedly given unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information about the crash to Parliament, and thence to the Dutch people, in the aftermath of the disaster.

But more enlightening than the commission's formal conclusions were the peripheral details that the enquiry uncovered, which provided some interesting context for the whole affair. For instance, the commission discovered the previously-undisclosed tapes of conversations between El Al employees and Schiphol Air Traffic Control on the evening of the disaster, showing that within minutes of the crash traffic controllers knew that the downed plane contained "poison", "ammunition" and "flammable liquid", and that it would be best to "keep these things under the lid". And the Dutch Attorney General testified before the commission that the El Al security unit at Schiphol wasn't actually an El Al security unit at all, but a front operation for the Mossad. And airport employees testified that since 1973, the Netherlands' authorities had allowed El Al planes to transfer cargo at Schiphol Airport without being inspected by customs or by the Dutch Flight Safety Board; and that every Sunday evening an El Al cargo flight arrived from Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv, whose arrival was never displayed on airport monitors, whose cargo was not checked and whose documentation was processed separately from regular freight traffic...

It's all a bit sordid isn't it? And we'd never have known about any of it, were it not for metal fatigue in a pin attaching engine three to the right wing of flight 1862.

Remember this story when you next hear some cable news pundit pontificating about why we have to bomb those nasty people in the Middle East.

When you hear that we must bomb Syria because it allows Iranian weapons to transit its territory, remember how our own Dutch allies have been deliberately turning a blind eye for years as one of its major international airports is used as a transit point for our shipment of illicit, non-conventional weapons into the Middle East.

Remember too that at the exact same time that the U.S. Administration was demanding that Iraq be sanctioned and its children starved because Saddam Hussein was developing Chemical and Biological Weapons, our Department of Commerce was (and presumably still is) issuing export licences to facilitate the production of exactly the same weapons in Israel.

And next time you hear George Bush talk about the gift of democracy that we are bringing to the Middle East, reflect on the transparency and accountability of our own democracy, and particularly that of our Dutch ally, which preferred for years to leave its own citizens chronically ill and without a diagnosis of their condition, rather than reveal the kinds of operations it was allowing Israel to carry out at Schiphol Airport.

And remember when you hear that we have to bomb Iran for its alleged and unproven contravention of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, that the U.S. – a member of the Chemical Weapons Convention – really is faciliating proliferation of Chemical Weapons to a non-member state (Israel).

Just remember the aftermath of the Bijlmermeer air disaster, and you'll never have to ask yourself again why so much of the world listens to our rhetoric, and thinks we're just full of it.

Sources:

Israel says El Al crash chemical 'non-toxic'; BBC News, 2 Oct 1998.
Israeli jets equipped for chemical warfare by Uzi Mahnaimi; The Sunday Times (London), 4 Oct 1998.
Flight 1862 and Israel's chemical secrets by Mouin Rabbani; orig. Middle East International, 16 Oct 1998.
El Al crash linked to illnesses; BBC News, 22 Apr 1999.
Uranium Skies: What Was Aboard Flight 1862? by Gar Smith; Earth Island Journal, Vol. 14 No. 4 (Winter '99/2000).
Israeli WMD by Neil Sammonds; ZNet, October 11, 2002.
Traces of poison by Salman Abu-Sitta; Al-Ahram Weekly, 27 Feb-5 Mar 2003.
Bijlmerramp by Martin Wisse; Wis[s]e Words, 4 Oct 2005.
Profile: Solkatronic Chemicals Inc; Cooperative Research.