I also remember the media constantly repeating that "middle eastern men" had been caught cheering.
The first impression i got is what i think most would have got - Arabs - but this word play masked the fact that they were the zionist type of israeli.
Heres a little excerpt of an interview you can google:
Later in the day, they were picked up. Two other men apparently joined them in a van. They were —- the case was immediately handed over to FBI counterintelligence. The men were held for 71 days. They were repeatedly interrogated. They repeatedly failed lie detector tests. And then, after those 71 days was up, they were sent home, apparently under pressure or because of pressure brought by the Israeli government and by certain players in the US government. And the story sort of disappeared from there. I mean, 20/20 covered this -—
AMY GOODMAN: Just one thing, Chris Ketcham, you say — you quote the officer who arrested them, named DeCarlo. You say, according to DeCarlo’s report, this officer was told without question by the driver of the moving van, Sivan Kurzberg, "We are Israeli. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are the problem."
CHRISTOPHER KETCHAM: Right. Well, what’s interesting there is that, you recall after the first plane hit, no one really thought that this was a terrorist attack. I mean, most people thought — and I was there, you know, on the Brooklyn waterfront watching this whole thing. Everyone thought it was an accident. These guys, when they were interrogated by FBI, told them that — essentially said that they immediately knew it was a terrorist attack. And they actually told the FBI that the reason they were celebrating was because the attacks would be beneficial to Israel, that it was, quote, "a good thing for Israel" — that’s according to the FBI spokesman who spoke on the record about this — and that it would bring sympathy for Israel’s political agenda in the Middle East.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And if I could interrupt, I’d like to bring in Marc Perelman to the conversation. Marc, it was your newspaper, The Forward, that first broke the story that the FBI thought that at least a couple of these people were Mossad agents. Could you talk about that and how you uncovered that information?
MARC PERELMAN: Yes, we ended up writing a story in March of 2002, after several months of reporting, because when this incident happened, obviously, a lot of people were intrigued, including journalists. And so, everybody was trying to find more information about this. And I’ve been talking to sources and trying to find out a little bit more, and after a while, I was able to confirm that, according to the FBI, two of those movers were identified as Mossad agents. And they were interrogated about it.
Obviously, the circumstances around the interrogation, there was a lot of panic after 9/11. People were looking for suspects everywhere. So the reports about exactly how they were behaving and what they said — I mean, we should be a little bit careful about this, because —- and so, what I tried to do is go beyond the reports about them smiling and high-fiving, and so on, because I had my doubts about this. I still have them, by the way. And so, what I did was try to back up the information I had, that they were indeed recognized as Mossad agents who were essentially tracking a Muslim activist in the New York/New Jersey area, which was known to be active since the mid—’90s, and so we eventually were able to piece the story together and go with it.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And what eventually happened to the five men?
MARC PERELMAN: They were sent home to Israel in, I think, November, if I remember, allegedly for immigration violations, and they’re home.