Fox News reporters
freed for $2 million
Terrorists used cash for arms to 'hit Zionists,'
payment said to encourage more abductions

JERUSALEM – Palestinian terror groups and security organizations in the Gaza Strip received $2 million from a U.S. source in exchange for the release of Fox News employees Steve Centanni and Olaf Wiig, who were kidnapped here last summer, a senior leader of one of the groups suspected of the abductions told WND.

The terror leader, from the Gaza-based Popular Resistance Committees, said his organization's share of the money was used to purchase weapons, which he said would be utilized "to hit the Zionists."

He said he expects the payments for Centanni and Wiig's freedom will encourage Palestinian groups to carry out further kidnappings.

Officials associated with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party and its security organization, the Preventative Security Services, confirmed to WND money was paid for the release of the Fox News reporters.

A senior leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, the declared "military wing" of Fatah, said the group received a small percentage of the $2 million, which all parties interviewed said was transferred in cash.

(Story continues below)

Centanni and Wiig were released last August after being held hostage by terrorists in Gaza for nearly two weeks. Shortly before their release, a video was issued showing the two dressed in beige Arab-style robes and appearing to convert to Islam. Wiig, a New Zealand citizen, gave an anti-Western speech, with his face expressionless. Centanni later explained he and Wiig were forced to convert to Islam at gunpoint.

One week after the abduction WND broke the story a clan from the Gaza Strip which leads terror cells of the Popular Resistance Committees were prime suspects in the kidnappings. Senior Palestinian officials told WND their investigation into the abductions led them to the Dugmash family, based in Khan Yunis and Gaza City. They said they have "evidence" the clan was "heavily involved."

Members of the Dugmash clan lead the "Saladin resistance department" of the Popular Resistance Committees, an umbrella of Palestinian terror groups which previously carried out anti-U.S. attacks, including the bombing in 2003 of a U.S. convoy in Gaza in which three American government contractors were killed. The Committtees is also responsible for scores of anti-Israel shooting attacks and bombings and for a large number of rocket attacks against Jewish communities near Gaza.


Cameraman Olaf Wiig

The senior leader of the Committees, speaking to WND on condition of anonymity, would not say whether members of his group carried out the Fox News kidnappings, but he admitted the Committees received money for "aiding" in the release of Centanni and Wiig.

The terror leader said $2 million cash was transferred to the Preventative Security Services, the main Fatah security forces in Gaza, for distribution to various parties.

He said the largest portion of the money was provided to the Committees' Dugmash clan, which Israeli security officials say is heavily involved in the smuggling of weapons and drugs into Gaza and which openly has led anti-Israel terror attacks on behalf of the Popular Resistance Committees. The Committees leader would not provide the exact sum transferred to the clan, but said it exceeded $1 million.

Smaller sums of cash were given to select members of the Preventative Security Services, officially to pay them as "private citizens" for working overtime to free Centanni and Wiig, the terror leader said. He said most of the Security Services members who were paid are associated with elements of the Dugmash clan. A member of the Security Services confirmed the cash transfers.

A sum of about $20,000 was provided to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, the Committees leader said, explaining the organization was paid to avoid conflict with militants from Abbas' Fatah party. The Committees is closely associated with Hamas, while the Brigades is a member of the rival Fatah party.

A leader of the Brigades in the northern Gaza Strip confirmed the money was received but maintained his group was not involved with the kidnappings.

The Popular Resistance Committees leader said aside from the large cash transfer to the Dugmash section of his group, the Committees as an organization received about $150,000.

He said the money was used to purchase weapons.

"We used 100 percent of the money for one precise goal – our war against the Zionists," the Committees leader said.

He said weapons purchased included rockets.

"Regarding the others (the Dugmash clan of the Committees) who received the money, I can tell you one thing is very clear – this went also to be used against the Zionists. I can't say every cent went to buy bombs, maybe it also went to pay for salaries, smuggling, buying shelter."

The Committees leader said he "knows" the money came from the U.S. as part of a deal to free Centanni and Wiig but could not identify exactly which organization or government entity transferred the cash.

Fox source says it's possible

A spokeswoman for Fox News Channel told WND she could not provide an official statement about whether Fox was aware of money paid to free its two employees.

A source at Fox told WND many parties were involved with the freedom of Centanni and Wiig, including the U.S. government, and that it was possible money was paid.

A State Department spokesman said his agency did not pay for the release of the Fox News employees.

The senior Committees leader and members of Fatah's Preventative Security Services told WND that as part of the cash transfer, leaders of the Security Services pledged to ensure against further kidnappings of Americans in the Palestinian territories.

But the Committees leader balked at the promise.

"This is just so the Americans can turn the affair into a beautiful thing by saying they have a pledge," said the terror leader.

"Maybe the Preventive Security Services took the promise but we didn't. They have no way of enforcing it. The Palestinian groups can still kidnap Americans. Maybe for a short period the groups will not kidnap Americans to show respect for the promises, but if there is an escalation, we will not hesitate to kidnap Americans."

The leader spoke three days after his organization and three other Palestinian terror groups signed a statement warning the U.S. is officially a target for Palestinian attacks, both in the region and abroad.

He told WND the cash transfers for the release of Centanni and Wiig likely will embolden Palestinian terror groups to carry out further abductions.

"This does encourage people to continue kidnappings," said the terror leader.

Something to Hide
Why won't WorldNetDaily's Aaron Klein tell the truth about the violent, extremist backgrounds of the right-wing Israelis he writes about?

By Terry Krepel
Posted 1/13/2006

You have to wonder: What is WorldNetDaily Jerusalem bureau chief Aaron Klein trying to hide?

Last August, ConWebWatch detailed Klein's history of obscuring, whitewashing or completely ignoring the backgrounds of his story subjects when that background involved links to right-wing Israeli groups with a history of extremism and violence, in particular the Kach/Kahane Chai movement. Most egregiously, Klein described an AWOL Israeli soldier who opened fire on a bus, killing four Arabs and wounding a dozen more, as being "murdered" by a "mob of Palestinians" who witnessed the massacre -- a description Klein felt no need to apply to the soldier's innocent victims.

Related articles on ConWebWatch:
Where the Killer Is a Victim

Another WND Retraction


With the start of the new year, Klein is back at it -- still hiding the extremist history of his subjects. A Jan. 6 article on an effort to create an "autonomous Jewish entity" separate from Israel in what Klein insists on calling Judea and Samaria (better known to the rest of the world as the West Bank) featured the leader of the effort, Yekutel Ben Yaacov, whom Klein described only as a "northern Samaria resident."
He's a lot more than that. As blogger Richard Bartholomew reported, Ben Yaccov is also known as Mike Guzovsky, a one-time leader of the now-outlawed Kahane Khai movement in Israel. The Anti-Defamation League has described how, under Guzovsky/Ben Yaccov's leadership, Kahane Chai signaled its support of 1994 incidents in which bombs were placed outside the New York offices of two American Jewish groups that supported the Middle East peace process. Guzovsky/Ben Yaacov also expressed his support for Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred approximately 30 Arabs at Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs; Goldstein "did what he did out of a love for the Jewish people ... We don't condemn anybody who is targeting the enemies of the Jewish people," the ADL quotes Ben Yaacov as saying.

Klein featured a "Mike Guzofsky" (spelling is a bit fungible in Israel, apparently) in an August 2004 article that attempted to show that people like Guzofsky whom Israeli officials were portraying as "dangerous Jewish extremists" were just regular Joes and not prone to violence, and that "Jewish terrorism ... is considered extremely rare." Klein makes no attempt to explain that Guzofsky and Ben Yaacov are one in the same or why he changed his name.

Ben Yaacov also figures in the story of Eden Natan Zada, the AWOL Israeli soldier's massacre: In an Aug. 4, 2005, article on the massacre, Klein described him as "friends with Zada" and quoted him portraying the soldier as not a cold-blooded murderer but "the first casualty" of the Israeli disengagement from Gaza: "Had he not been enlisted, had they not forced him to be scheduled to uproot Jews, there wouldn't be any deaths." (This article also alludes to the Goldstein massacre, stating only that he carried "a shooting attack against Arabs" and failing to note the body count.)

Klein followed up his article on the separatist movement the next day with a claim that Ben Yaacov's offices were raided by "hundreds of security officials." While Klein made sure to describe the alleged show of force -- "a joint taskforce consisting of 200-300 officers from the Israeli Police Authority and Shin Bet security services" -- Ben Yaacov is again described as a "northern Samaria resident." There is no mention of his history of endorsing violence or his association with the perpetrator of a massacre -- factors that would explain the show of force.

Klein does, however, include the following:

Ben Yaacov's Judea Initiative is not the first major push for Jews to secede from Israel. In 1989, the late author and Knesset member Rabbi Meir Kahane, a mentor of Ben Yaacov, attempted to found the State of Judea, a Jewish state in Judea and Samaria. That effort eventually fell through.
That's all Klein says about Kahane; again, he fails to detail the violent history of Kahane and his followers (such as Baruch Goldstein), let alone connect the dots from Ben Yaacov's Kahane mentorship to the alleged show of government force.

A Jan. 12 article by Klein duplicates the Kahane statement, again without detailing his violent history.

Such reluctance to tell the truth prompts one to ask: What is Aaron Klein trying to hide? Like fellow WND contributor Anthony LoBaido, Klein appears to sympathize with the violent right-wingers he associates with, painting them in his articles in the best possible light, to the extent of obscuring anything negative about them.

Conversely, Klein is determined to paint Palestinians in the most negative light possible. An example is a Jan. 12 article in which "A Palestinian official who publicly claims to support Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives" purportedly "praised suicide bombers" and "blasted 'filthy [Israeli] occupation.'" But such bias came back to bite Klein last June, when WND was forced to retract a Klein-penned article that smeared a Muslim charity as a terrorist-linked organization making fraudulent appeals for money to save nonexistent orphans. WND has never made public what reprimand, if any, Klein faced for his false story.

Since we've documented Klein as whitewashing Israelis, we can assume that he is doing the opposite to Palestinians.

Strangely, though, Klein has been reluctant to pile on Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon following his massive stroke, though Klein has frequently reported criticism of Sharon's Gaza disengagement plan, particularly from Ben Yaacov, whom Klein has featured in articles (such as a June 2005 article in which his name gets a new spelling, Yekutiel Ben Yaacov) on demonstrations protesting the disengagement. Klein even described a ceremony to place a "death curse" upon Sharon in a July 2005 article, though Klein took great pains to describe the ceremony's participants as "fringe" and insisted that they "are not mainstream leaders in the anti-[Gaza] withdrawal campaign." Klein has not done a follow-up on this, even though one man he quoted at the ceremony, Baruch Ben-Yosef, has since been claiming full credit for inducing Sharon's stroke.

(WND columnist Hal Lindsey has also been less squeamish than Klein about claiming divine retribution, claiming in a Jan. 6 column that the prayers of Jews "have been dramatically answered" with Sharon's stroke, which "will facilitate [right-winger Benjamin] Netanyahu replacing him in the next election.")
http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2006/wndklein.html
When he was hired as Jerusalem bureau chief, Klein vowed to "report in an unbiased manner" on the Middle East. Klein and his boss, WND editor Joseph Farah, need to come clean with their readers by explaining their biases and why they are serving as public-relations agents for Israeli extremists. WorldNetDaily's readers deserve to know why Klein is not living up to the "unbiased" promise he made to them -- and just what Klein is trying to hide besides the violent pasts of his buddies.

More on right wing news media • Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2006 at 3:39 PM

http://conwebwatch.tripod.com/stories/2006/kleinterrorist.html

Aaron Klein's Terrorist Buddies
Another election, another excuse for WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem reporter to try to link Democrats to terrorists. Do the terrorists Klein quotes know he's using them, or are they a party to his game?

By Terry Krepel
Posted 11/6/2006

Is WorldNetDaily Jerusalem reporter Aaron Klein cooperating with terrorists? He certainly seems to be quite cozy with them.

A Nov. 2 WorldNetDaily article by Aaron Klein purported to quote "senior terrorist leaders" who "say they hope Americans sweep the Democrats into power because of the party's position on withdrawing from Iraq." But the terrorists Klein quotes -- only three, hardly representative of all terrorists' views on the issue --- they have a history of popping up in his articles to reinforce his conservative talking points.

For instance, Jihad Jaara, who Klein describes as "a senior member of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades" living in exile in Ireland -- Klein doesn't explain how Jaara can be an active "senior terrorist leader" and live nowhere near the Middle East -- is quoted here as saying, "Of course Americans should vote Democrat," But Jarra did a cozy sit-down interview with Klein and radio host Rusty Humphries that aired in January; Klein did a separate interview with Jarra in which he asked if the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades "used pages of the Bible as toilet paper" during a 2002 siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

(Humphries is a player in the synergistic relationship between WND and radio mogul and alleged cult leader Roy Masters. Humphries' radio show is syndicated by Masters' Talk Radio Network; Klein regularly appears on it -- in fact, he appeared on Humphries' Nov. 2 show to plug his terrorists-endorse-Democrats article -- and in May, WND gave Humphries a weekly column.)

Related articles on ConWebWatch:
Where the Killer Is a Victim

Another WND Retraction

Something to Hide

Swift-Boating Goes to the Promised Land

WorldNetDaily Undermines Olmert

WorldNetDaily's Digital Cudgel


Abu Ayman, an Islamic Jihad leader in Jenin who Klein quotes as saying that he is "emboldened" by those in America who compare the war in Iraq to Vietnam, is positively chatty with Klein lately. Just three days earlier, Klein quoted Ayman saying that Ramadan prayers "helped the mujahedeen fighters to mark a great victory" over the U.S. in Iraq.
Upon the death of an American teenager, Daniel Wultz, from injuries suffered in a suicide bombing in Israel in May, Klein reported that Ayman "threatened all Americans and Jews worldwide and expressed regret Wultz was not immediately killed in the blast."

Another terrorist confidante of Klein's is Abu Abdullah of Hamas, whom Klein quotes as saying that a U.S. withdrawal from Iraq would "convince those among the Palestinians who still have doubts in the efficiency of the resistance." In an Oct. 14 article, Klein quotes Abdullah as claiming that Hamas is "open" to attacking the U.S. And he quoted Abdullah in a July 7 article as touting the range of Hamas missiles.

WND was more than happy to play partisan with Klein's article. It quickly followed up by reporting the reaction of Republican Rep. Tom Tancredo (failing to disclose that WND published Tancredo's book; lack of disclosure of financial interests in those it writes about is a longtime problem for WND) and trumpeting that Democratic officials wouldn't respond to WND's request for a comment. A Nov. 3 column by Joseph Farah used the article to attack Democrats, claiming that "the terrorists really do want the Democrats to win."

It's interesting that Klein has such cozy contacts with terrorists, given the fact that conservatives normally attack news outlets for having them.

When CNN aired a video of an insurgent sniper in Iraq targeting U.S. soldiers last month, conservatives rushed to attack CNN for it, claiming that it was airing terrorist propaganda. Likewise with, for instance, Dan Rather's interview with Saddam Hussein and Mike Wallace's interview with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Yet Klein's frequent consorting with terrorists gets no notice from these same conservatives, though he is doing the exact same thing -- repeating terrorist propaganda.

Nowhere in Klein's article does he mention that his work may be counterproductive. You may recall that conservatives spun a video released by Osama bin Laden shortly before the 2004 presidential election as evidence that bin Laden supported the election of Democrat John Kerry. In fact, in his book "The One Percent Doctrine," author Ron Suskind reported that CIA analysts agreed that "bin Laden's message was clearly designed to assist the President's reelection."

Presumably, if Klein dug a little harder and ventured out of his terrorist coffee klatch, he could have found terrorists willing to push for continued Republican control of Congress; after all, it's Republicans who have created the current situation in Iraq in which, according to several intelligence agencies, the overall terrorist threat has grown. Why would terrorists want to mess with a good thing?

If Klein's attempt to tie Democrats to terrorists sounds familiar, that's because it is: He himself pulled a similar stunt in an October 2004 article claiming that Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat "is hoping John Kerry wins the presidential election in November."

In fact, Klein's "endorsement" articles are just of several articles he has written designed to attack Democrats through Middle Eastern politics. An August 2004 article claimed that "many Israeli politicians have been voicing concerns that a Kerry presidency could damage the region" -- though no Israeli leader is actually named. Another anonymously sourced Klein article, from July 2004, cited "many in the Israeli government" as "privately voicing concerns that some of Kerry's policies may be harmful to the Jewish state."

Further, as part of Klein's regular attacks on Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, Klein wrote a June 2006 article bashing the American branch of Olmert's Kadima for allegedly lifting parts of policy summaries from the Texas Democratic Party's website. Klein even attacked Kadima's name, suggesting the party stole that from the Democrats too: "Some questions even have been raised as to the originality of the Kadima name. The main logo on the Texas site reads, 'Moving Texas Forward.' Kadima is the Hebrew word for 'Forward.'"

Do the terrorists Klein hangs out with know that he's just using them, promoting their statements to whip up conservative sentiment against them and to smear the political enemies of Klein and his employer? Or do they think that getting their message is so important that it doesn't matter who the messenger is -- even a reporter who has repeatedly demonstrated sympathy with their presumed enemy, right-wing Israeli extremists?

Or are they in on Klein's game? Klein clearly has a relationship with these terrorists; is there a quid pro quo going on that Klein and WND have not informed their readers about? Typically, such access to one's enemy -- and Klein is indeed the terrorists' enemy -- does not come without a price.

There is yet another possibility: The terrorists know Klein's a right-wing shill and are eager to feed him disinformation that he will eat up because they, in fact, want Republicans to stay in power and know Klein and WND will use their claims about Democrats to motivate readers to vote Republican -- as we've noted, the preferred outcome of Osama bin Laden.

All Klein has done is cultivate a few terrorists whom he can count on to spout inflammatory rhetoric that he can then disseminate as red meat to conservatives. He is not telling us the whole story -- namely, what he's doing to maintain that relationship with them.

That would be a much more interesting story to hear about than what terrorist thugs (and exiles) think about American politics.

While everyone is relieved that the two journalists have been freed, the action of Fox, in paying for the release of the hostages, makes every Western journalist a target in Gaza.
Negotiating with terrorists, and giving in to their demands is one way to guarentee their sucess.