By William A. Cook
May 12, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because Geography books no longer exist, not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either … There is not one single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.” (Moshe Dayan, Address to the Technion, Haifa, as quoted in Haaretz, 4-4-1969)
Thus began in November of 1947 what is euphemistically called the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by the combined forces of the Jewish armies, the Haganah, the Stern, and the Irgun as they drove more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs from their homes leaving them destitute, homeless and abandoned without a country in what is now the largest refugee Diaspora in the world.
More truthfully, the plight of the Palestinians that began so ruthlessly in 1947, and is now called the Nakba, was an intentional, calculated campaign to force the Palestinian Arabs out of Palestine, a systematic genocide of a people as defined by the United Nations in its adoption of Genocide Convention, Article II.
The United Kingdom had mandatory authority from the League of Nations to govern the Palestine area with the establishment of the Palestine Mandate in 1922. Prior to the official implementation of the Mandate in 1922, the British Government had enunciated a “declaration” concerning the desirability of His Majesty’s Government in the “establishment of a national home for the Jewish people,” called the Balfour Declaration. Command Paper 1922 from the Avalon Project at Yale Law School underlines this intent: “His Majesty’s Government therefore now declare unequivocally that it is no part of their policy that Palestine should become a Jewish State.”
The View from Inside the Mandate
One of the curious ambiguities that surrounds the decade that preceded the declaration by the Jewish leaders in Palestine of the state of Israel is the dearth of information and perspective from the British Mandate forces governing Palestine between 1940 and May 15, 1948, the date of implementation of the partition resolution. Fortunately, Sir Richard C. Catling has left us a file that provides insight into conditions that prevailed in Jerusalem while he was Deputy Head of the Special Branch of the Criminal Investigation Division in Jerusalem in 1944 and a year later Assistant Inspector General. Catling’s “TOP SECRET” file has lain untouched in the Rhodes House archives of the Bodleian Libraries of Oxford University until two years ago.
Two documents dominate the file with 62 appendices of evidence totaling close to 500 pages of materials. The first is a dispatch sent to the Secretary of State, dated 16th of October, 1941, by the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, labeled “Most Secret”; the second, a Top Secret “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence,” prepared by the Criminal Investigation Department headquarters, The Palestine Police, Jerusalem, dated July 31st, 1947. [Sir Richard C. Catling, #145, Mss.Med. S20] 1
What should be obvious now, with the materials preserved by Sir Richard C. Catling, is the truth about the creation of the state of Israel: acceptance of UN Resolution 181 by the Jewish Agency Provisional Government as the designated Jewish state was not done with intent to abide by the goal of the UN General Assembly, to provide a state for two peoples in the land of Palestine, but rather to use it as a means to gain eventual control of all the land and cleanse that land of its indigenous people to whatever extent possible. Put bluntly, as the chapters in Macmillan’s new book, The Plight of the Palestinians attests (to be released in June), the current government in Israel continues the practices of past Israeli governments: cleanse the land of its rightful inhabitants to make that land part of the Jewish state. This is what is termed in numerous chapters in this volume, “slow motion genocide.”
Jump Starting the State
Consider the events of April 9-11, 1948, the eradication of the citizens of the town of Deir Yassin, a month before the Agency declared the existence of the Israeli state and the implementation of the UN Resolution to partition. This massacre became then and remains the signature example of the intent of the Zionist Consultancy and its agents to ethnically cleanse Palestine of its non-Jewish inhabitants. 2
During the six months between the adoption of UN Resolution 181 and in subsequent months, the new state of Israel launched a massive military incursion into territory designated by that same Resolution for the Palestinian people, creating in its wake “three quarters of a million Palestinian refugees,” the destruction of “hundreds of entire villages … not only depopulated but obliterated …and houses blown up or bulldozed.” Walid Khalidi’s massive study focuses on 418 villages, once the homes of Palestinians, 292 completely destroyed, 90 others “largely destroyed,” the remainder replaced by Jews called Israeli settlers. 3
Perceiving the Reality
The “despatch” sent by MacMichael to the Secretary of State resulted from an investigation into the funding practices and use of those funds by various Jewish organizations.
The memorandum illustrates … the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it has ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods of repression which have been employed against Arabs. In the first place, the Jews … have the moral and political support … of considerable sections of public opinion both in the United Kingdom and the United States of America. … all the influence and political ability of the Zionists would be brought to bear to show that the Jews in Palestine were the victims of aggression, and that a substantial body of opinion abroad would be persuaded of the truth of the contention. 4
Quite obviously, MacMichael understands that the Mandatory has little power at home over the zealous actions of the Zionists as they manipulate public and political opinion even as they expand their terrorism against the British Mandate government in Palestine. This is an untenable position to be in, responsible for government control and security of those under its authority, i.e. Palestinians as well as Jews, knowing that the Jews are set on driving the British out of Palestine, and knowing that the home government can offer little help.
To bolster his points, MacMichael offers the following:
… the Jews in Palestine are by no means untrained in the use of arms … large numbers have received training in the Palestine Police… or in His Majesty’s Forces. At the present time, in addition to approximately 10,000 Jews in His Majesty’s Forces, there are 5,800 in various units of the police force and 15,400 special policemen (31,000) … When to those men … are added the illicit ‘defence’ organizations of the Jews (Haganah alone had an estimated 60-70,000 men by 1945, see Mss, Med. S20 Appendix XXI), it will be evident that the Jewish people in arms would numerically and in calibre be a very formidable adversary. 5
This is in 1941before the full deployment of Jewish terrorism against the legitimate Palestine government got under way.
MacMichael and Catling found themselves missing one of Catling’s primary supports for the waging of “irregular warfare” drawn from his image of the 3-legged stool that required the support of the people, the commander and his army and the government, an image, no doubt, from his childhood in Suffolk where his family were butchers and farmers. But the situation only got worse as the end of WWII loomed. The Haganah carried out anti-British military operations, including the kidnapping, killing and booby trapping of soldiers’ bodies, conducted against the Mandate Government while the home government remained silent under the pall of Israeli Zionist propaganda. 6
But recording the acts of terrorism does not do justice to the conditions the Mandate government faced. MacMichael describes the reality of the forces aligned against the police in Palestine.
A second matter which deeply impressed me is the almost Nazi control exercised by the official Jewish organizations over the Jewish community, willy nilly, through the administration of funds from abroad, the issue of labor certificates in connection with the immigration quota…. The Royal Commission were, in my view, fundamentally at error in describing the Jewish community in Palestine as “intensely democratic”. … The Zionist organization, the whole social structure which it has created in Palestine, has the trappings but none of the essentials of democracy. The community is under the closed oligarchy of the Jewish official organizations which control Zionist policy and circumscribe the lives of the Jewish community in all directions…. The reality of power is in the Agency, with the Haganah, the illegal military organization, always in the background. 7
And so the authorities in Palestine, the legal authorities, have no power to enforce measures that would curtail terrorism against their own police. “The use of force cannot be contemplated at present as any such action would have to be on a very large scale.” MacMichael understands that he can get no help from the Jewish community, even from those who find themselves at odds with the Agency’s methods or morality. The consequences to the individual Jew for disobedience is horrendous as the second document seized from the Zionists in 1947 attests.
Between Two Worlds
Nothing makes more obvious the meaning of the “Zionist Juggernaut” than Catling’s TOP SECRET “Memorandum of the Criminal Investigation Department” of July 31, 1947.
The purpose of this memorandum is to furnish documentary evidence of the extent to which the supreme Jewish national institutions in Palestine and their principal officials have been parties to acts of sedition, violence, incitement and other offences against the laws of Palestine….The bulk of the memorandum concerns the war and post war years… the memorandum will therefore concern itself solely with an attempt to establish the links between the supreme Jewish bodies and illegal activity... 8
Catling’s memorandum begins with an understanding of the “intricate Jewish political, social and economic structure in Palestine.” A series of appendices chart these structures marking in passing that “…the Palestine Royal Commission Report of 1937 understood ‘The Agency is obviously not a ‘governing body’; it can only advise and cooperate in a certain wide field.’ But allied as it is with the Vaad Leumi, and commanding the allegiance of the great majority of Jews in Palestine, it unquestionably exercises, both in Jerusalem and in London, a considerable influence on the conduct of government” [emphasis mine]. Catling’s frustration with the actual control of the Jews over British policy in Palestine glares through this document. “This powerful and efficient organization amounts, in fact, to a government existing side by side with the Mandatory Government…” (2-3) [emphasis mine]. 9
What Catling doesn’t state in that sentence, but what he demonstrates in the memorandum, is that the Jewish Agency and its affiliated organizations are at war with the UN authority in Palestine, the British Mandate Palestine Government. The appendices include detailed information on the personnel in interlocking Jewish organizations and the function of each. The memorandum goes further. It notes that the activities of the Jewish Agency through its controlled organizations send emissaries and instructors abroad “to stir up Zionist sentiments among the Jewish communities and displaced persons, to bring pressure to bear upon the Palestine problem, to organize illegal immigration and engage in espionage.” As a result of its investigations, the Department itemizes six areas of subversive activities undertaken by the Jewish Agency against the British Mandate Government:
1. Maintenance of a secret army and espionage system;
2. Smuggling, theft and manufacture of arms;
3. Illegal immigration;
4. Violence and civil disobedience;
5. Seditious and hostile propaganda;
6. Encroachment upon the civil rights of Jewish citizens. 10
In short, the Zionist controlled Jewish Agency, the Yishuv, actively undermined the legal authority in Palestine even as it operated to undermine support for that government in Britain, placing UK forces in harms way as they attempted to fulfill their authorized responsibilities in Palestine. It also demonstrates the determination of the Agency’s leadership in undermining the very nation that gave it a means of establishing a “homeland” in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration. Needless to say, Catling and his CID forces recognized the impossible position this defiance placed them in and understood the deception and violent means used by the Zionists to ensure that their will and theirs alone would be fulfilled at any cost.
However, the real power behind their efforts, what effectively held together the multiple strands of the web, was the use of extortion on all the Jewish people in Palestine, “…the extortion of money for unauthorized funds and self imposed taxes to further the illicit political ends of the national institutions” (42). Catling’s Memorandum provides evidence of how effective this consolidation of the web’s network operated including the systematic compilation of all wage earners, measures to be adopted in event of refusal to pay, publishing of names of those who failed to contribute, deductions from salary, sanctions on businesses, compulsory assessment, withholding of immigrants certificates, and Jewish Agency officials assessments.
There follows the measures to be taken against shirkers including actions to be taken against anyone aiding a shirker. There is no need to go into the details of these imposed actions; the consequences amount to total ostracism of an individual from his/her community to kidnapping and disappearance.
For those entering the military forces of the Jewish Agency, the Hagana, there is the Hagana Oath (XVI A 157).
I hereby declare that of my own free will and in free recognition I enter the Jewish defence organization of the Land of Israel, (Irgun Haganana Haivri Be’Eretz Israel).
I hearby swear to remain loyal all the days of my life to the defense organization, its laws and its tasks as defined in its basic regulations by the High Command.
I hearby swear to remain at the disposal of the defense organization all my life, to accept its discipline unconditionally and without limit, and at its call to enlist for active service at any time and in any place, to obey all its orders and to fulfill all its instructions.
I hearby swear to devote all my strength, and even to sacrifice my life, to defense and battle for my people and my Homeland, for the freedom of Israel and for the redemption of Zion. 11
In one sense, these two methodologies of control, one imposed by fear, the second by moral obligation, make comprehensible the complete control the Zionists were able to achieve over a protracted period of time toward their distant goals. The fear imposed by extortion rests on its use in providing access to jobs, the protection offered by the “gangs” and Haganah forces, and the enforcement of the rules and regulations as itemized above.
The Haganah Oath goes deeper than fear. In effect, it declares that an individual has turned his/her conscience over to the High Command thus accepting what is right and what is wrong as determined by that authority regardless of local, state or international law, indeed, regardless of the morals, values and traditions of Judaism. This commitment is forever, to death. It is bolstered by a document issued to the Commander and Troops of the Haganah labeled “Security Instructions” that notes at the outset, “Remember, you are a member of an illegal military organization according to the Laws of the government, its existence, activity and membership of it is forbidden” The remainder of the document obligates the recruit to unconditional obedience, absolute silence, and the pragmatic and utilitarian virtues of deceit and lying. 12
Selling the Soul
From the moment an individual takes the oath, they are committed to a life of secrecy and hence of disloyalty and betrayal to those they are most intimate with in their day to day life. Neither their actions nor their true identity is discernible to those with whom they interact regularly. This is a life that encapsulates the necessity of lies, deceit, coercion, extortion, and obedience to a group that dictates the actions one must pursue; freedom no longer exists, self-direction no longer exists, loyalty to others no longer exists, indeed, friendship with others is compromised or impossible, one becomes the subject of that group, a veritable slave to their desires and wills. The mindset that promotes such control allows for spying, for deception of friends, for ostracism in one’s own community for thinking differently, for imprisonment without due process, for torture, even for extrajudicial executions. It is a total commitment to a cause that supersedes all others determined and dictated by an oligarchy in silence and subject to no legitimate institution and to no one.
Notes
1- Catling, Sir Richard C. Personal Classified “Top Secret” files. Rhodes House Library Archives. #145. Mss. Medit. S 20 (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) Appendices circa 475 pages of seized documents. Oxford: Bodleian Libraries.
2- Morris, Benny. (1999). Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001. Knopf. 208.
3- Khalidi, Walid. (1992). All That Remains. Institute for Palestinian Studies: Washington, D.C. xv.
4- MacMichael, Harold. (1947). “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” The Palestine Police, Jerusalem, 7-31-1947 in Catling file.
5- MacMichael. “dispatch.” 1.
6- Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.
7- Ibid., “Despatch.” 2.
8- Catling. “Memorandum.” 1-2.
9- Ibid., “Memorandum.” 2-3.
10- Ibid. “Memorandum.” 5.
11- Ibid., Appendix, XVIA, 157.
12- Ibid., Appendix, XXVIII, 219.
Showing posts with label Haganah. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Haganah. Show all posts
Friday, May 14, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
America’s Loose Nukes in Israel
By Grant Smith
April 14, 2010 "Antiwar" -- Israel decided this week to send Minister for Intelligence Affairs Dan Meridor to the Nuclear Security summit. This U.S. bid to secure vulnerable nuclear stockpiles against non-state actors is both closely watched and furiously spun. Israel avoided exposing Prime Minister Netanyahu to embarrassing scrutiny of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons arsenal. For this reason, trumpets the New York Times, Israel sent a lower-level delegation. But Israel has long responded defiantly to threats of robust U.S. oversight. A long-running investigation into how weapons-grade uranium went missing from Pennsylvania illustrates why America has been incapable of securing its own nuclear materials and know-how from insider threats. The future of that uranium may determine the success or failure of the Obama administration’s non-proliferation effort.
Steve Levin was a member of the underground Haganah – a precursor to the Israel Defense Forces – and fought during Israel’s 1948 war under Meir Amit, who later became head of Israeli intelligence. Levin was a close friend of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. In the mid-1940s while leading the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion launched a massive clandestine conventional arms financing, theft, and smuggling network [.pdf] in the United States diverting to Palestine small arms, heavy machine guns, munitions-making equipment, aircraft, ships, and tanks destined for American scrap yards after World War II.
On the nuclear front, Levin financed the purchase of the Apollo Steel Company facility in Pennsylvania for $450,000. Founder and President Dr. Zalman M. Shapiro, a genius inventor and head of a local Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) chapter, incorporated the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) at Apollo in 1956. Levin capitalized NUMEC through a stock offering in 1957 and business took off – propelled by the critical knowledge of highly talented scientists. NUMEC co-founder Dr. Leonard P. Pepkowitz previously worked on the clandestine Manhattan Project in 1944 producing America’s first atomic bombs. Pepkowitz later led analytical chemistry research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. NUMEC regularly received large quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from industry giants Westinghouse and the U.S. Navy for reprocessing into nuclear submarine fuel and other specialty uses. Shapiro was meticulous in his stewardship of the company’s financial resources, carefully shopping around for banks willing to accommodate the complex demands of the fast growing NUMEC.
In the early 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began documenting suspicious lapses in NUMEC’s security, inexplicably lax record-keeping, and the ongoing presence of large numbers of Israelis at the plant. In 1962 the AEC considered suspending "classified weapons work" at NUMEC. In 1965 an AEC audit found that NUMEC could no longer account for 220 pounds of highly enriched uranium. In 1966 the FBI opened an investigation – code-named Project DIVERT – and began monitoring NUMEC’s management and Israeli visitors. On Sept. 10, 1968, four Israelis visited NUMEC to "discuss thermoelectric devices with Shapiro," according to correspondence seeking official AEC consent for the visit from NUMEC’s security manager. Among the approved visitors was Rafi Eitan. After Eitan’s visit, 587 pounds of highly enriched uranium was classified as missing.
Former Deputy of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology Carl Duckett said the agency came to the conclusion by 1968 that “NUMEC material had been diverted by the Israelis and used in fabricating weapons.” An eyewitness gave testimony to the FBI about one late evening in 1965 when he encountered several NUMEC employees loading a flatbed truck with nuclear materials. It was unusual that material was shipping so late at night. Moreover, these particular employees (names were censored from the 2,654 pages of FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act) "never loaded trucks themselves." The eyewitness was "sure this was high-enriched uranium products due to size and shape of the container and the labeling." An armed guard ordered the witness away; he was later threatened to never reveal what he had seen on the loading dock.
The FBI, CIA, Congress, the GAO, and the AEC spent fruitless decades investigating the diversion. The FBI insisted on nuclear forensics to determine whether radioactivity in soil samples collected outside Dimona in Israel had any telltale NUMEC signature. But not until U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested spying for Israel in 1985 was Rafi Eitan’s importance fully understood. In 1986 investigators discovered the Eitan who entered NUMEC in 1968 had the same birth date – 11/23/1926 – as the spy handling Pollard. According to Anthony Cordesman, “There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.” Eitan has since been forced out of the cold as one of Israel’s top economic espionage agents for Israel’s secretive LAKAM, involved in multiple operations against U.S. targets. The Israel lobby’s role, never deeply explored by the Pollard investigators, was perceptible in the background. An operative of a U.S.-Israel business foundation provided the Washington, D.C., safe house where documents stolen by Pollard were duplicated and secreted away to Israel.
But Pollard’s subsequent life sentence in prison is the exception to the rule – crimes for Israel (even nuclear diversion) aren’t punished by America. In a now familiar pattern, the investigation of NUMEC uranium diversion waxed and waned into the 1990s. DIVERT was soon transformed into a futile investigation into whether Zalman Shapiro had foreknowledge or personal involvement in the caper and ways officials in agencies from the State Department to the AEC thwarted warranted law enforcement and accountability for Israel. To date, all of the uranium-diversion masterminds, financiers, and beneficiaries have escaped criminal prosecution, even as U.S. taxpayers fund a nuclear waste cleanup at the (now defunct) NUMEC Apollo facility.
That the U.S. is a sieve for Israeli nuclear espionage is well documented. In 1988 the GAO determined that Department of Energy nuclear laboratories were far too open to foreign visits from "countries identified as sensitive by DOE because they are a security and/or proliferation risk, such as Pakistan and Israel." The lessons of Eitan went unheeded. The report found that "Of 637 visitors from countries such as India, Israel, and Pakistan, the DOE required background checks for only 77." In addition to amassing critical knowledge, other nuclear technologies known to have been diverted from the U.S. to Israel include dual-use triggering technologies, klystrons, and krytons.
It never had to be this way. In the early 1960s, just as the problems at NUMEC began, President John F. Kennedy unleashed a robust non-proliferation and law enforcement pincer maneuver. He demanded U.S. inspections of Israel’s Dimona weapons plant in order to prevent Israel from going nuclear. Kennedy simultaneously ordered Israel’s American lobby to register as foreign agents to bring their undeclared activities out into the open. But Israel and its U.S. lobby ultimately prevailed on both counts.
In formally pressing Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while pushing for a settlement freeze and peace negotiations, the Obama administration is retracing JFK’s final footsteps. (Editor's emphasis) Israel’s lobby still has its own sovereign policy priorities. As Zalman Shapiro and lobby elites such as neoconservative gadfly Frank Gaffney gathered at ZOA events on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, pivoting the U.S. military from Iraq toward Syria and Iran was a top priority. The lobby also worked day and night to keep America’s front (and back) doors open for massive aid transfers and trade preferences, buffing up its own image by plucking operatives from the harsh clutches of law enforcement – even winning presidential pardons to erase or exalt other unfortunate historic events that called into question the U.S.-Israel "special relationship." Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) entire executive committee (the Conference of Presidents) favors releasing Jonathan Pollard on the grounds that "his crimes did not amount to high treason against the United States, because Israel was then and remains a close ally." These unspoken, forced policies directly pit Israeli prerogatives against American national security, governance, and rule of law – they are often only won only through illegal means. As Israel ratchets up its own "project divert" effort to compel others to confront NPT signatory Iran (while derailing meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations), the rest of the world showed true commitment to non-proliferation by sending top diplomats to America’s summit.
Israel simply sent in another spy.
This is why the U.S. must demand more than Israel’s entry into the NPT. Only by recovering all purloined nuclear materials can Obama win confidence in America’s own commitment to controlling loose nukes.
April 14, 2010 "Antiwar" -- Israel decided this week to send Minister for Intelligence Affairs Dan Meridor to the Nuclear Security summit. This U.S. bid to secure vulnerable nuclear stockpiles against non-state actors is both closely watched and furiously spun. Israel avoided exposing Prime Minister Netanyahu to embarrassing scrutiny of Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons arsenal. For this reason, trumpets the New York Times, Israel sent a lower-level delegation. But Israel has long responded defiantly to threats of robust U.S. oversight. A long-running investigation into how weapons-grade uranium went missing from Pennsylvania illustrates why America has been incapable of securing its own nuclear materials and know-how from insider threats. The future of that uranium may determine the success or failure of the Obama administration’s non-proliferation effort.
Steve Levin was a member of the underground Haganah – a precursor to the Israel Defense Forces – and fought during Israel’s 1948 war under Meir Amit, who later became head of Israeli intelligence. Levin was a close friend of David Ben-Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel. In the mid-1940s while leading the Jewish Agency, Ben-Gurion launched a massive clandestine conventional arms financing, theft, and smuggling network [.pdf] in the United States diverting to Palestine small arms, heavy machine guns, munitions-making equipment, aircraft, ships, and tanks destined for American scrap yards after World War II.
On the nuclear front, Levin financed the purchase of the Apollo Steel Company facility in Pennsylvania for $450,000. Founder and President Dr. Zalman M. Shapiro, a genius inventor and head of a local Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) chapter, incorporated the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (NUMEC) at Apollo in 1956. Levin capitalized NUMEC through a stock offering in 1957 and business took off – propelled by the critical knowledge of highly talented scientists. NUMEC co-founder Dr. Leonard P. Pepkowitz previously worked on the clandestine Manhattan Project in 1944 producing America’s first atomic bombs. Pepkowitz later led analytical chemistry research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. NUMEC regularly received large quantities of highly enriched uranium and plutonium from industry giants Westinghouse and the U.S. Navy for reprocessing into nuclear submarine fuel and other specialty uses. Shapiro was meticulous in his stewardship of the company’s financial resources, carefully shopping around for banks willing to accommodate the complex demands of the fast growing NUMEC.
In the early 1960s, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) began documenting suspicious lapses in NUMEC’s security, inexplicably lax record-keeping, and the ongoing presence of large numbers of Israelis at the plant. In 1962 the AEC considered suspending "classified weapons work" at NUMEC. In 1965 an AEC audit found that NUMEC could no longer account for 220 pounds of highly enriched uranium. In 1966 the FBI opened an investigation – code-named Project DIVERT – and began monitoring NUMEC’s management and Israeli visitors. On Sept. 10, 1968, four Israelis visited NUMEC to "discuss thermoelectric devices with Shapiro," according to correspondence seeking official AEC consent for the visit from NUMEC’s security manager. Among the approved visitors was Rafi Eitan. After Eitan’s visit, 587 pounds of highly enriched uranium was classified as missing.
Former Deputy of the CIA’s Directorate of Science and Technology Carl Duckett said the agency came to the conclusion by 1968 that “NUMEC material had been diverted by the Israelis and used in fabricating weapons.” An eyewitness gave testimony to the FBI about one late evening in 1965 when he encountered several NUMEC employees loading a flatbed truck with nuclear materials. It was unusual that material was shipping so late at night. Moreover, these particular employees (names were censored from the 2,654 pages of FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act) "never loaded trucks themselves." The eyewitness was "sure this was high-enriched uranium products due to size and shape of the container and the labeling." An armed guard ordered the witness away; he was later threatened to never reveal what he had seen on the loading dock.
The FBI, CIA, Congress, the GAO, and the AEC spent fruitless decades investigating the diversion. The FBI insisted on nuclear forensics to determine whether radioactivity in soil samples collected outside Dimona in Israel had any telltale NUMEC signature. But not until U.S. Navy analyst Jonathan Pollard was arrested spying for Israel in 1985 was Rafi Eitan’s importance fully understood. In 1986 investigators discovered the Eitan who entered NUMEC in 1968 had the same birth date – 11/23/1926 – as the spy handling Pollard. According to Anthony Cordesman, “There is no conceivable reason for Eitan to have gone [to the Apollo plant] but for the nuclear material.” Eitan has since been forced out of the cold as one of Israel’s top economic espionage agents for Israel’s secretive LAKAM, involved in multiple operations against U.S. targets. The Israel lobby’s role, never deeply explored by the Pollard investigators, was perceptible in the background. An operative of a U.S.-Israel business foundation provided the Washington, D.C., safe house where documents stolen by Pollard were duplicated and secreted away to Israel.
But Pollard’s subsequent life sentence in prison is the exception to the rule – crimes for Israel (even nuclear diversion) aren’t punished by America. In a now familiar pattern, the investigation of NUMEC uranium diversion waxed and waned into the 1990s. DIVERT was soon transformed into a futile investigation into whether Zalman Shapiro had foreknowledge or personal involvement in the caper and ways officials in agencies from the State Department to the AEC thwarted warranted law enforcement and accountability for Israel. To date, all of the uranium-diversion masterminds, financiers, and beneficiaries have escaped criminal prosecution, even as U.S. taxpayers fund a nuclear waste cleanup at the (now defunct) NUMEC Apollo facility.
That the U.S. is a sieve for Israeli nuclear espionage is well documented. In 1988 the GAO determined that Department of Energy nuclear laboratories were far too open to foreign visits from "countries identified as sensitive by DOE because they are a security and/or proliferation risk, such as Pakistan and Israel." The lessons of Eitan went unheeded. The report found that "Of 637 visitors from countries such as India, Israel, and Pakistan, the DOE required background checks for only 77." In addition to amassing critical knowledge, other nuclear technologies known to have been diverted from the U.S. to Israel include dual-use triggering technologies, klystrons, and krytons.
It never had to be this way. In the early 1960s, just as the problems at NUMEC began, President John F. Kennedy unleashed a robust non-proliferation and law enforcement pincer maneuver. He demanded U.S. inspections of Israel’s Dimona weapons plant in order to prevent Israel from going nuclear. Kennedy simultaneously ordered Israel’s American lobby to register as foreign agents to bring their undeclared activities out into the open. But Israel and its U.S. lobby ultimately prevailed on both counts.
In formally pressing Israel to join the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty while pushing for a settlement freeze and peace negotiations, the Obama administration is retracing JFK’s final footsteps. (Editor's emphasis) Israel’s lobby still has its own sovereign policy priorities. As Zalman Shapiro and lobby elites such as neoconservative gadfly Frank Gaffney gathered at ZOA events on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, pivoting the U.S. military from Iraq toward Syria and Iran was a top priority. The lobby also worked day and night to keep America’s front (and back) doors open for massive aid transfers and trade preferences, buffing up its own image by plucking operatives from the harsh clutches of law enforcement – even winning presidential pardons to erase or exalt other unfortunate historic events that called into question the U.S.-Israel "special relationship." Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh noted that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) entire executive committee (the Conference of Presidents) favors releasing Jonathan Pollard on the grounds that "his crimes did not amount to high treason against the United States, because Israel was then and remains a close ally." These unspoken, forced policies directly pit Israeli prerogatives against American national security, governance, and rule of law – they are often only won only through illegal means. As Israel ratchets up its own "project divert" effort to compel others to confront NPT signatory Iran (while derailing meaningful Israeli-Palestinian negotiations), the rest of the world showed true commitment to non-proliferation by sending top diplomats to America’s summit.
Israel simply sent in another spy.
This is why the U.S. must demand more than Israel’s entry into the NPT. Only by recovering all purloined nuclear materials can Obama win confidence in America’s own commitment to controlling loose nukes.
Friday, January 25, 2008
One and Two State Solutions:The Myth of International Consensus
By Kathleen Christison
24/01/08 Counterpunch
...The humanitarian disaster that is Gaza is entirely the result of the international community's supine refusal to stand up to Israel and the U.S. and its active support for an embargo on Gaza that is imprisoning and starving 1.5 million inhabitants and devastating the Gazan economy...
...Invocation of the international consensus to induce Palestinians to stop advocating true equality in a single state in all of Palestine comes out of a kind of denial, a refusal to acknowledge that the international consensus is so oblivious to the injustice being perpetrated against the Palestinians that it has not noticed and does not care that the possibility of establishing two states died quite some years ago. A real two-state solution...is now a forlorn dream from which the international consensus has yet to awaken.
MORE...
NOTE:
This piece by Kathleen Christison is simply excellent. Tragically it provides an accurate depiction of the so-called "facts on the ground" in Palestine/Israel. What is transpiring among the poor people of Gaza is reprehensible. The US and Israel bare prime responsibility for what has become a true humanitarian crisis. It is not factually incorrect to label it a kind of "passive transfer" reminiscent of the Nakba ["the catastrophe"; the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes] over a half century ago under the Hagana (pre-Israeli Defense Force).
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
24/01/08 Counterpunch
...The humanitarian disaster that is Gaza is entirely the result of the international community's supine refusal to stand up to Israel and the U.S. and its active support for an embargo on Gaza that is imprisoning and starving 1.5 million inhabitants and devastating the Gazan economy...
...Invocation of the international consensus to induce Palestinians to stop advocating true equality in a single state in all of Palestine comes out of a kind of denial, a refusal to acknowledge that the international consensus is so oblivious to the injustice being perpetrated against the Palestinians that it has not noticed and does not care that the possibility of establishing two states died quite some years ago. A real two-state solution...is now a forlorn dream from which the international consensus has yet to awaken.
MORE...
NOTE:
This piece by Kathleen Christison is simply excellent. Tragically it provides an accurate depiction of the so-called "facts on the ground" in Palestine/Israel. What is transpiring among the poor people of Gaza is reprehensible. The US and Israel bare prime responsibility for what has become a true humanitarian crisis. It is not factually incorrect to label it a kind of "passive transfer" reminiscent of the Nakba ["the catastrophe"; the expulsion and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes] over a half century ago under the Hagana (pre-Israeli Defense Force).
--Dr. J. P. Hubert
Monday, December 17, 2007
US Must Reevaluate Its Relationship With Israel
by Scott Ritter, Dec. 17, 2007 Antiwar.com
see original HERE
...As a firsthand witness to the remarkable vigor of the Israeli state and its people, and as someone who considers himself to be their friend, it saddens me to see just how poorly the current Israeli government returns this friendship, not to me personally, but to my country, the United States of America. The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has embarked on policies that are questionable at best when one examines them from a purely Israeli standpoint; they are nothing less than a betrayal of the United States when examined from a broader perspective.
The insidious manner in which the current Israeli government has manipulated the domestic political machinery of the United States to produce support for its policies constitutes nothing less than direct interference in the governance of a sovereign state. The degree to which the current Israeli government has succeeded in this regard can be tracked not only by the words and actions of the administration of President George W. Bush and the American Congress, but also by the extent to which a pro-Israel lexicon has taken hold within the mainstream media of the United States. Witness the pro-Israel bias displayed when discussing the situation in southern Lebanon, the air strike in Syria, or the Iranian situation, and the retarding of any effort toward a responsible discussion of anything dealing with Israel becomes apparent.
One would expect such efforts to shape the domestic public opinion of a state deemed hostile, but when the target of these Israeli actions is its ostensible best friend, one must begin to question whether or not the friendship is a one-way street. And if this is indeed the case, then perhaps it is time for the United States to reconsider its decades-old policy of strategic partnership with Israel.
It must be understood that the government of Ehud Olmert is acting in a post-9/11 environment, with considerable facilitators in the administration of President Bush, including the vice president. These two factors combine to create a cycle of enablement that allows a purely Israeli point of view to dominate American policy. If the Israeli point of view were built on logic, compassion, and the rule of law, then this tilt would not constitute a problem. But the Israeli point of view is increasingly constructed on a foundation of intolerance and irresponsible unilateralism that divorces the country from global norms. In this day and age of nuclear nonproliferation, the undeclared nuclear arsenal of Israel stands as perhaps the most egregious example of how an Israel-only standard destabilizes the Middle East. It is the Israeli nuclear weapons program, including its strategic delivery systems, that is the core of instability for this very volatile region (emphasis mine).
The statements by Israeli officials concerning the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran and its nuclear program are perhaps the best manifestation of this reality. Avi Dichter, Israel's public security minister, has condemned the NIE as a flawed document, and in terms that link the American analysis to a cause-and-effect cycle that could lead the Middle East down the path of regional war. Like many Israelis, including the prime minister, Dichter disagrees with the American NIE on Iran, in particular the finding that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The Israelis hold that this program is still active, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reached a conclusion similar to the NIE's based upon its own exhaustive inspection activities inside Iran over the past five years.
In threatening the world with war because America opted for once to embrace fact instead of fiction, Israel, sadly, has become like a cornered beast, lashing out at any and all it perceives to threaten its security interests. The current Israeli definition of what constitutes its security interests is so broad as to preclude any difference of opinion. Israel's shameless invocations of the Holocaust to defend its actions not only shames the memory of those murdered over 60 years ago, but ironically dilutes the impact of that memory by linking it with current policies that are cruel and intolerant. The message of Holocaust remembrance should be "never again," not just in terms of the persecution of Jews, but in terms of man's inhumanity to man. The birth of the Israeli state, as imperfect and controversial as it was,* served as a foundation for the pursuit of tolerance. However, Israel's current policies, rooted in ethnic and religious hatred, are the antithesis of tolerance.
Israel at present can have no friends, because Israel does not know how to be a friend. Driven by xenophobic paranoia and historical grievances, Israel is embarked on a path that can only lead to death and destruction. This is a path the United States should not tread. I have always taken the position that Israel is a friend of the United States, and that friends should always stand up for one another, even in difficult times. I have also noted that, to quote a phrase well known in America, friends don't let friends drive drunk, and that for some time now Israel has been drunk on arrogance and power. As a friend, I have believed the best course of action for the United States to take would be that which helped remove the keys from the ignition of the policy vehicle Israel is steering toward the edge of the abyss. Now it seems our old friend is holding a pistol to our head, demanding that we stop interfering with the vehicle's operation and preventing us from getting out of the car. This is not the action of a friend, and it can no longer be tolerated.
It is time for what those who are familiar with dependency issues would term an intervention. Like a child too long spoiled by an inattentive parent, Israel has grown accustomed to American largess, to the point that it is addicted to an American aid package that is largely responsible for keeping the Israeli economy afloat. This aid must be reconsidered in its entirety. The day of the free ride must come to an end. The United States must redefine its national security priorities in the Middle East and position Israel accordingly. At the very least, American aid must be linked to Israeli behavior modification. The standards America applies to other nations around the world when it comes to receiving aid must likewise apply to Israel.
Let there be no doubt: Israel and its considerable lobby of supporters here in America will scream bloody murder if their aid is trimmed in any fashion. But in the greater interest of what will best benefit the security interests of the United States, and indeed the Middle East and the entire world, the grip Israel has on American policymaking must come to an end. It is up to the American people to make this change, first and foremost by recognizing that a real problem exists in American-Israeli relations, then by electing officials to Congress who will deal responsibly with these problems based not on the behind-the-scenes lobbying of Israel and its proxies, but rather the legitimate interests of the United States.
If Israel decides it wants to be our friend, then it will change its behavior accordingly. Absent this, America has no choice but to declare its independence from a relationship that has destroyed our credibility around the world and drags us dangerously down the path toward another irresponsible military misadventure in the Middle East. If, in the future, Israel desires to reestablish a relationship with the United States built upon the principles of mutual trust and benefit, then so be it. Such a relationship is something I could embrace without hesitation. But one thing is certain: no such friendship can truly exist under the conditions and terms that are in place today, and for that reason the entirety of the American-Israeli relationship must be reexamined.
*Editor's NOTE:
I have written elsewhere that the way in which the state of Israel was formed was immoral as it expropriated land from Arab Palestinian inhabitants without their consent and without making proper remuneration. In addition the NAKBA (deportation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians including genocide) carried out by the Haganah (pre-Israeli Defense Force) was a crime against humanity. These crimes are no justification for the killing of innocent Israeli's in retaliation which has transpired since however. No intentional killing of the innocent can ever be morally justified.
see original HERE
...As a firsthand witness to the remarkable vigor of the Israeli state and its people, and as someone who considers himself to be their friend, it saddens me to see just how poorly the current Israeli government returns this friendship, not to me personally, but to my country, the United States of America. The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has embarked on policies that are questionable at best when one examines them from a purely Israeli standpoint; they are nothing less than a betrayal of the United States when examined from a broader perspective.
The insidious manner in which the current Israeli government has manipulated the domestic political machinery of the United States to produce support for its policies constitutes nothing less than direct interference in the governance of a sovereign state. The degree to which the current Israeli government has succeeded in this regard can be tracked not only by the words and actions of the administration of President George W. Bush and the American Congress, but also by the extent to which a pro-Israel lexicon has taken hold within the mainstream media of the United States. Witness the pro-Israel bias displayed when discussing the situation in southern Lebanon, the air strike in Syria, or the Iranian situation, and the retarding of any effort toward a responsible discussion of anything dealing with Israel becomes apparent.
One would expect such efforts to shape the domestic public opinion of a state deemed hostile, but when the target of these Israeli actions is its ostensible best friend, one must begin to question whether or not the friendship is a one-way street. And if this is indeed the case, then perhaps it is time for the United States to reconsider its decades-old policy of strategic partnership with Israel.
It must be understood that the government of Ehud Olmert is acting in a post-9/11 environment, with considerable facilitators in the administration of President Bush, including the vice president. These two factors combine to create a cycle of enablement that allows a purely Israeli point of view to dominate American policy. If the Israeli point of view were built on logic, compassion, and the rule of law, then this tilt would not constitute a problem. But the Israeli point of view is increasingly constructed on a foundation of intolerance and irresponsible unilateralism that divorces the country from global norms. In this day and age of nuclear nonproliferation, the undeclared nuclear arsenal of Israel stands as perhaps the most egregious example of how an Israel-only standard destabilizes the Middle East. It is the Israeli nuclear weapons program, including its strategic delivery systems, that is the core of instability for this very volatile region (emphasis mine).
The statements by Israeli officials concerning the recent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran and its nuclear program are perhaps the best manifestation of this reality. Avi Dichter, Israel's public security minister, has condemned the NIE as a flawed document, and in terms that link the American analysis to a cause-and-effect cycle that could lead the Middle East down the path of regional war. Like many Israelis, including the prime minister, Dichter disagrees with the American NIE on Iran, in particular the finding that Iran ceased its nuclear weapons program in 2003. The Israelis hold that this program is still active, despite the fact that the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reached a conclusion similar to the NIE's based upon its own exhaustive inspection activities inside Iran over the past five years.
In threatening the world with war because America opted for once to embrace fact instead of fiction, Israel, sadly, has become like a cornered beast, lashing out at any and all it perceives to threaten its security interests. The current Israeli definition of what constitutes its security interests is so broad as to preclude any difference of opinion. Israel's shameless invocations of the Holocaust to defend its actions not only shames the memory of those murdered over 60 years ago, but ironically dilutes the impact of that memory by linking it with current policies that are cruel and intolerant. The message of Holocaust remembrance should be "never again," not just in terms of the persecution of Jews, but in terms of man's inhumanity to man. The birth of the Israeli state, as imperfect and controversial as it was,* served as a foundation for the pursuit of tolerance. However, Israel's current policies, rooted in ethnic and religious hatred, are the antithesis of tolerance.
Israel at present can have no friends, because Israel does not know how to be a friend. Driven by xenophobic paranoia and historical grievances, Israel is embarked on a path that can only lead to death and destruction. This is a path the United States should not tread. I have always taken the position that Israel is a friend of the United States, and that friends should always stand up for one another, even in difficult times. I have also noted that, to quote a phrase well known in America, friends don't let friends drive drunk, and that for some time now Israel has been drunk on arrogance and power. As a friend, I have believed the best course of action for the United States to take would be that which helped remove the keys from the ignition of the policy vehicle Israel is steering toward the edge of the abyss. Now it seems our old friend is holding a pistol to our head, demanding that we stop interfering with the vehicle's operation and preventing us from getting out of the car. This is not the action of a friend, and it can no longer be tolerated.
It is time for what those who are familiar with dependency issues would term an intervention. Like a child too long spoiled by an inattentive parent, Israel has grown accustomed to American largess, to the point that it is addicted to an American aid package that is largely responsible for keeping the Israeli economy afloat. This aid must be reconsidered in its entirety. The day of the free ride must come to an end. The United States must redefine its national security priorities in the Middle East and position Israel accordingly. At the very least, American aid must be linked to Israeli behavior modification. The standards America applies to other nations around the world when it comes to receiving aid must likewise apply to Israel.
Let there be no doubt: Israel and its considerable lobby of supporters here in America will scream bloody murder if their aid is trimmed in any fashion. But in the greater interest of what will best benefit the security interests of the United States, and indeed the Middle East and the entire world, the grip Israel has on American policymaking must come to an end. It is up to the American people to make this change, first and foremost by recognizing that a real problem exists in American-Israeli relations, then by electing officials to Congress who will deal responsibly with these problems based not on the behind-the-scenes lobbying of Israel and its proxies, but rather the legitimate interests of the United States.
If Israel decides it wants to be our friend, then it will change its behavior accordingly. Absent this, America has no choice but to declare its independence from a relationship that has destroyed our credibility around the world and drags us dangerously down the path toward another irresponsible military misadventure in the Middle East. If, in the future, Israel desires to reestablish a relationship with the United States built upon the principles of mutual trust and benefit, then so be it. Such a relationship is something I could embrace without hesitation. But one thing is certain: no such friendship can truly exist under the conditions and terms that are in place today, and for that reason the entirety of the American-Israeli relationship must be reexamined.
*Editor's NOTE:
I have written elsewhere that the way in which the state of Israel was formed was immoral as it expropriated land from Arab Palestinian inhabitants without their consent and without making proper remuneration. In addition the NAKBA (deportation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians including genocide) carried out by the Haganah (pre-Israeli Defense Force) was a crime against humanity. These crimes are no justification for the killing of innocent Israeli's in retaliation which has transpired since however. No intentional killing of the innocent can ever be morally justified.
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