WASHINGTON, 28 December — What’s going on? The usually pro-Israeli Fox News Channel reported, in a series of news broadcasts, that Israeli operatives had prior knowledge of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and did not warn US officials. An Israeli Embassy spokesman and several Jewish groups have called the claim "baseless".

The report, ignored by mainstream American media, has put Fox News in the unusual situation of having to defend itself against charges of anti-Israeli bias. The irony here is that Fox News, owned by conservative media mogul Rupert Murdoch, is viewed as pro-Israeli by many pro-Israel activists.

The "Special Report with Brit Hume" were a series of four reports aired from Dec. 11 to 14, where Fox News correspondent Carl Cameron, citing unnamed sources and classified documents, said more than 60 Israelis had been detained since Sept. 11 and that a "handful" of them were "active Israeli military."

Cameron also reported that some 140 Israelis has been detained before the attacks due to an in-depth US investigation into an "organized intelligence" gathering operation. He said an interagency "working group" has been compiling evidence of Israeli spying in the US since the mid-1990s.

During one broadcast segment, Hume asked Cameron: "What about this question of advance knowledge of what was going to happen on 9-11? How clear are investigators that some Israeli agents may have known something?"

"It’s very explosive information," said Cameron. "And there’s a great deal of evidence that they say they (the FBI) have collected. None of it is necessarily conclusive. It’s more when they put it all together. A bigger question, they say, is ‘How could they not have known?’"

Fox said the Israeli Embassy in Washington put forth "categorical denials," but indicated that it had learned that "one group of Israelis spotted in North Carolina recently is suspected of keeping an apartment in California to spy on a group of Arabs who the US authorities are investigating for links to terrorism."

In the days that followed the Sept. 11 bombings, Arab News reported the FBI had arrested three groups of Israeli Jews — allegedly employees of several moving companies in the New York area, suspected by the FBI of working for the Mossad — who were seen "acting suspiciously" and videotaping the World Trade Center disaster from varying angles.

One day after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Washington Times reported that high-ranking US officers believed that the Mossad "has the capability to target US forces and make it look like a Palestinian/Arab act."