From Lebanon's Daily Star, Nov. 3:

Members of Israeli spy ring 'related to 9/11 hijacker'
BEIRUT — Two men arrested for running an Israeli spy ring in the Bekaa Valley are relatives of a suicide hijacker who piloted a plane in the September 11, 2001, attacks, a security source told The Daily Star on Sunday. The Lebanese Army announced on Saturday that it had arrested two people suspected of involvement with a spy network that gathered information for Israel's intelligence services.

The army said the men had admitted "gathering information on political party offices and monitoring the movements of party figures for the enemy."

The statement added that the men had been found with "communications devices and other sophisticated equipment," which they used to gather information and transmit it to Mossad agents.

Speaking on the condition of anonymity, the source said the men are relatives of Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese who helped commandeer United Airlines Flight 93 before it crashed into a Pennsylvania field on September 11, 2001, killing everyone on board. Jarrah's family is from the town of Al-Marej in the Bekaa Valley, where the arrests took place.

The Jarrah family have repeatedly denied that Ziad was part of the September 11 plot, claiming he was instead a innocent passenger on the plane, but an official investigation concluded that he was a senior member of the hijacking team who had undergone flight training in order to carry out the attacks.

Expect the conspiranoia set to jump all over this, if they haven't already. Of course, in their habitual dishonesty, they will take it for granted that the charge is true—even as they dismiss the overwhelming majority of media accounts on anything related to 9-11 as disinformation. These guys could have been set up as Israeli spies over a bad drug deal, family fued or sexual jealousies for all we know. If there's any country on earth that's a labyrinth of intrigue, its Lebanon.

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