Israelis helping North Korea violate (food export) sanctions By The Wayne Madsen Report

 Israelis helping North Korea violate (food export) sanctions

By The Wayne Madsen Report

As Donald Trump harangued North Korea, Iran, and Venezuela during his September 19 neocon-drafted speech to the United Nations, one leader in the audience was beaming and applauding with almost every Trump syllable. Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara, both facing prison terms in their country for corruption, was encouraged by Trump's tough stand against "rogue regimes."

Trump lambasted the P5+1 nuclear accord with Iran, a move that played right into Netanyahu's hands. Barack Obama and the five members of the UN Security Council plus Germany hammered out an agreement with Iran that saw the Iranians give up any nuclear weapons development in return for the curbing of international sanctions. Israel was never happy with the deal and it used its foreign lobbies, albeit unsuccessfully, to sink the deal.

Netanyahu cheered on Trump's verbal attack on North Korea -- one that saw the president call North Korean leader Kim Jong Un "rocket man" and threatening to "destroy" North Korea. Although the UN has imposed severe sanctions on North Korea, Israelis have been in the process of breaking it through its international Chabad network of Hasidic criminal syndicates. Ironically, one of the methods by which Israeli criminals are helping North Korea to evade sanctions is the sale of North Korean-caught Pacific Ocean crabs in cans that label their country-of-origin as either Russia or China.

Kosher dietary laws strictly ban the consumption of shell fish like crabs, lobsters, and scallops. When it comes to making money illicitly, however, the Chabadniks are more than willing to discard their religious tenets. North Korea is well-known for producing and marketing counterfeit goods, including U.S. brand cigarettes and other consumer items. Chabad, which also excels at counterfeiting, has found a natural business partner in North Korea, particularly in Asia, where the Hebrew- and Yiddish-speaking Hasidics are at a disadvantage.

The "Crab Mafia," as it is known in northeast Asia, procures seafood, often poached from restricted Sea of Japan or Bering Sea waters by often unflagged North Korean fishing trawlers, and cans it in China or Russia with Chinese or Russian country-of-origin labeling (COOL). The North Koreans receive hard currency, which is now severely restricted by international sanctions, in return for their catch. Pirated seafood sold under false labels constitute a huge business. In 2013, false country-of-origin crab sold in the United States amounted to some $600 million. Much of that money ended up in the hands of the Crab Mafia and North Korea.

The Chabadniks, who constitute an unofficial virtual arm of the Israeli Mossad, have extended their operations in the Russian Far Eastern city of Vladivostok and the Joseph Stalin-created Jewish Autonomous Republic, which sits along the Trans-Siberian railway on the border with China. Once referred to as the "Soviet Zion," Stalin saw the Far Eastern region as the future homeland of the Jewish people.

  
Netanyahu's Chabadniks helping North Korea re-label Crab Mafia catches as "Chinese" and "Russian" to avoid sanctions. Shellfish is strictly non-Kosher

The Jewish Autonomous Republic and Israel are the world's only two official Jewish state entities. However, Jews only represent 0.2 percent of the Jewish Autonomous Republic's population. Israel and Chabad are trying to change that by urging Israeli and other Jews to take up dual residency in the Jewish republic, something that has been encouraged by Russian President Vladimir Putin. Yiddish is currently taught in Birobidzhan schools and there is a Yiddish newspaper and radio station, as well as a Kosher market. Travel between the Jewish Autonomous Republic and Israel is increasing and a large number of Chabadniks from Israel have taken up part-time residence in the autonomous republic.


One of many unflagged North Korean fishing boats that ply the Sea of Japan and poach in restricted waters and sell their catch to sanction-busting Jewish criminals operating from Vladivostok and Birobidzhan
Dealing with the northeast Asian Crab Mafia has been lucrative for the Chabad smugglers and counterfeiters of Birobidzhan. Canneries in adjacent Khabarovsk and Primorsky, the latter the location of Vladivostok, are plentiful. Trump, of course, had no idea that his threats against North Korea are meaningless as long as Israel tolerates Israeli nationals working to circumvent UN economic sanctions against North Korea. Nor does it help that Trump's key confidantes, son-in-law Jared Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump, are active supporters of Chabad.

The re-establishment of Jewish control over Birobidzhan is financed by a foundation called Bereshit. The first word in the Torah is bereshit, which is translated as "in the beginning." Some of the financing network for the Bereshit Foundation comes from Mikhail Fridman, German Khan, and Pyotr Aven, all of whom are linked to Russia's Alfa Bank, Jared Kushner, and the financing of the Trump presidential campaign, and the Wexner Foundation of Les Wexner, the billionaire mentor of Trump friend and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. When Trump threatened to "destroy" North Korea with Netanyahu nodding his head approvingly, little did anyone else inside the General Assembly realize that the wealthy allies of Trump and Netanyahu have been helping North Korea to evade economic sanctions from far-flung Chabad outposts in Siberia.

U.S. tries to drive wedge between Putin and Assad by Wayne Madsen

U.S. tries to drive wedge between Putin and Assad by Wayne Madsen
President Obama's policy of initiating "constructive engagement" with Russian President Vladimir Putin was prompted by advice given to the American president by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan. Obama has relied on the two for most of his guidance on Middle Eastern affairs. However, both Erdogan and Brennan are fierce critics of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Assad's government is highly skeptical of the actual reasons behind the Obama-Putin rapprochement, fearing that it is a ploy to convince Moscow to abandon its long time ally in Damascus.

Last November, Putin was virtually isolated at the G20 Summit in Brisbane and attendees lined up, one after another, to lambaste Putin over the retro-cession of Crimea back to Russia from Ukraine and Putin's support for eastern Ukrainian Russian-speaking rebels. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott even threatened to "shirt front" Putin, which is an Australian football term meaning chest bump, at the summit. One iconic photo from the summit showed Putin eating lunch alone at a table. Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said he told Putin, "l'll shake your hand, but I only have one thing to say to you: Get out of Ukraine!" Putin, disgusted with the childish behavior from the G20 leaders, including Obama, left Australia early to return home to Moscow.

However, at this year's G20 summit in Antalya, in Islamic State-friendly Turkey and not far from Syria, G20 leaders could not wait to sidle up to Putin. Gone were Abbott, who was ousted in an political party back benchers' coup by Malcolm Turnbull, and Harper, who was roundly defeated by Liberal leader Justin Trudeau. Turnbull and Trudeau are friendlier to Russia than their predecessors.


Putin dining alone at the G20 Summit in Brisbane in November 2014.

Putin in negotiations with Obama at G20 in Antalya, Turkey. Obama national security adviser Susan Rice [back turned toward camera] and interpreter join discussion. Assad fears that Obama is trying to convince Putin to abandon Assad in favor of Turkish- and Saudi-controlled opposition forces.
There is solid evidence that there is a propaganda campaign designed to split Moscow from Damascus. Although it has been proven by Syrian Catholic Mother Superior Agnes Mariam and others that the CIA- and Saudi-backed Free Syrian Army launched the sarin gas attack against civilians in Ghouta in a "false flag" operation designed to pin blame on Assad, the same neoconservative and Israel Lobby meme of Assad "gassing his own people" is making its rounds again on the Zionist-controlled MSNBC and The Daily Beast. In addition, the neocons, upset with the G20's decision to work with Putin and Assad, has put forward a conspiracy theory making its rounds in the Zionist-owned media that Putin and Assad jointly created the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL).

Consequently, as a result of the negotiations between Putin and Obama, as well as Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's recent Oval Office talks in Washington with Obama, Syria's government is concerned that there is a plan afoot by Washington, Moscow, and Jerusalem to divide the Middle East into spheres of influence, with Moscow being guaranteed port and pipeline access in Syria, Iraq, and a planned independent Kurdistan comprising Kurdish areas in Iraq and Syria. Syria has activated its public relations resources in Europe, particularly in France and Germany, to advance the story that Putin has opted to work with Obama, Erdogan, and Netanyahu to redraw the borders of the Middle East, with Assad being the chief casualty.

Damascus is playing a trick of its own in putting forth the Russ-American secret "new Middle East" plan. Syria's interpretation of the plans for the redrawing of the Middle East map includes having Saudi Arabia split into three different nations: a Shi'a-dominated oil-rich Nejd in the east, an insulated Saudi rump state around Riyadh, and a Turkish-influenced Hejaz in the west, which would include the two Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina. The Syrian interpretation has resulted in the Saudis becoming alarmed at being shut out entirely from the Syrian and Kurdish negotiations and the specter of thousands of jihadis it has supported in Syria and Iraq heading to Saudi Arabia looking for revenge after their defeat on the Syrian and Iraqi battlefields.

Assad and his government, however, should rest a bit easier, according to WMR's sources in Europe. Putin has no plans to abandon Assad, even though Moscow supports the plan for United Nations-brokered peace talks between Assad and the Syrian rebels, not including the Islamic State and its allies.

Russia remains suspicious of Obama's and CIA director Brennan's lack of enthusiasm for combating ISIL. The day before the Friday 13th ISIL attacks in Paris, Obama said that he favored merely "containing" ISIL in Syria and Iraq, not wiping it out. It is known that ISIL has received recruiting, financial, military, and intelligence support from Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Qatar. In addition, the CIA, Mossad, the Israel Defense Force, and Turkish MIT intelligence has provided ISIL and its allies with weapons, ammunition, and logistics support in Syria and Iraq. Only after the Paris terrorist attacks did the U.S., belatedly, order its A10 attack planes to strike a convoy of 116 ISIL oil tanker trucks smuggling oil out of Syria. The U.S. had previously chose not to attack ISIL oil trucks. ISIL received much of its financial support from the sale of smuggled oil on the world's petroleum spot market.

Putin is acutely aware that Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and his government is quietly assuring, through Ukrainian nationalist leaders like Dmitry Korchinsky, that top ISIL commanders will be given asylum in Ukraine as long as they carry their war on against Russia in the Donbas region and Chechnya. Korchinsky, the leader of the neo-Nazi Ukrainian "Brotherhood," actively participated in the Maidan Square uprising against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych Korchinsky and his nationalist activists received support from the George Soros network, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland and U.S. ambassador to Kiev Geoffrey Pyatt (both of whom are Jewish), the CIA, and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). Obama and the other members of the "Quint," Britain, the U.S., France, Germany, and Italy, said they had no plans to relax Western sanctions imposed against Russia over Ukraine. As long as Ukraine is prepared to welcome ISIL guerrillas to its soil to fight against Russia, Assad can rest easy that Putin will never sacrifice him in favor of the duplicitous interests of the United States and European Union.

The architect behind the secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli relationship by Wayne Madsen

The architect behind the secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli relationship

The recent internal Saudi palace "coup" that saw King Salman replace his brother Muqrin Bin Abdulaziz as Crown Prince with Salman's nephew, Prince Mohammed bin Nayaf, is an indication that the decades-long but highly secret U.S.-Israeli-Saudi special alliance is undergoing a dramatic transformation.

Since the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia's defense needs has had the quiet support of successive Israeli governments that saw the Saudis as a critical bulwark against Iran and any Shi'a-led revolutions in the Persian Gulf and on the Arabian peninsula. The effective Zaidi Houthi takeover of Yemen has resulted in even closer relations between Riyadh and Jerusalem. The Zaidis, a sect close to the Shi'as, are pro-Iranian. However, the American component of the tripartite alliance is no longer guaranteed as Washington seeks a nuclear deal with Iran and closer relations with Tehran  in other arenas.

Salman also replaced other Cabinet ministers, including the long-serving foreign minister Saud al-Faisal. Saud has been replaced by the long-serving Saudi ambassador to the United States, the non-royal Adel al-Jubeir, a favorite of the Israelis and Central Intelligence Agency director John Brennan, the former CIA station chief in Riyadh and a known Saudophile.

Salman's ambitious son, Mohammed Bin Salman, was named the new deputy Crown Prince. Salman's changes were seen by observers as bolstering the most anti-Iranian members of the Saudi regime, which, of course, is very welcomed by the Israeli government, which, under Binyamin Netanyahu's fourth term as prime minister, is the most right-wing and internationally aggressive in Israel's history.

The intellectual architect of the Riyadh-Jerusalem-Washington alliance was an Egyptian-Jewish Zionist and paid CIA consultant at Harvard University named Nadav Safran. In 1946, Safran, born Nadav Za’farani, moved from Cairo to a kibbutz in Palestine and fought as a commando against the British and Arabs in Israel's independence war, served as the director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Although Safran died in 2003, his work on U.S.-Saudi relations, which on its face seems odd for an Israeli-American, laid the basis for the secret cooperation between the three countries, particularly with regard to Iran. In 1985, Safran published a book, Saudi Arabia: The Ceaseless Quest for Security, which closely examined Saudi security concerns and served as a virtual blueprint for future U.S. military aid to Saudi Arabia. The book was written pursuant to a secret CIA grant to Safran for $107,430. The Boston Globe published a copy of Safran's contract, dated April 13, 1982, with the CIA. Although Harvard University Press published the book, the university claimed it was unaware of the CIA contract with Safran.

In 1986, Safran resigned from the Center for Middle East Studies over his connections with the CIA. Safran's other books that significantly influenced U.S. Middle Eastern policy included, Israel: The Embattled Ally, published in 1978 during the Camp David negotiations, and Egypt in Search of Political Community, published the same year that President Anwar Sadat was assassinated.


The brains behind the not-so-secret U.S.-Saudi-Israeli alliance was Israeli-American Nadav Safran, a CIA-paid academic who likely influenced the thinking of current CIA director John O. Brennan.

Harvard's Center for International Studies had a long association with the CIA. Furthermore, Harvard was well aware that in 1985, Safran received an additional $50,000 from the CIA to organize two seminars, one on Islamic fundamentalism and the other on the Persian Gulf. The CIA laundered much of the money through the RAND Corporation. Safran was a close colleague of another pro-Israeli ex-Harvard academic on the U.S. government's payroll, Richard Pipes, who, in the 1980s, taught at the U.S. Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. Safran remained with Harvard's Department of Government until 1990 where he continued to maintain a relationship with the U.S. government in the months prior to the start of Operation Desert Storm against Iraq.

U.S. policymakers in the Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, Bush 43, and Obama administrations would use Safran's book to shape their own attitudes toward the Saudi regime. However, as the Obama administration seeks a breakthrough on U.S.-Iranian relations, the Safran book has lost much of its importance in the current environment.

Safran also served as a CIA conduit to the press and his conflict-of-interest would serve as a template for future academics and journalists who claimed independence while accepting covert payments from the U.S. intelligence and defense communities. In 1990, Safran penned an op-ed for The New York Times that called on the Bush 41 administration to reject any peace feelers from Saddam Hussein. Safran was pushing the Israeli and Saudi line that Saddam should be dealt with harshly after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.

One of Safran's colleagues at Harvard, Laurie Mylroie, became one of the chief purveyors of the bogus meme that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Mylroie's 2000 book, Study of Revenge; Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, was cited by former CIA director James Woolsey as "brilliant and brave." The book would later be cited as one of the reasons why the U.S. had to invade and occupy Iraq after 9/11.

Israeli links to Al Qaeda/ISIL now reported by corporate media by Wayne Madsen

 Israeli links to Al Qaeda/ISIL now reported by corporate media 

by Wayne Madsen

For well over a decade, WMR's editor has been reporting on the links between Israel and the terrorist group known as "Al Qaeda," particularly in reference to the attacks of 9/11. The Wall Street Journal, which has provided the government of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with editorial support, recently reported that Israel has provided logistical support in Syria to Al Qaeda and its affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra. The paper reported that Al-Nusra "hasn't bothered Israel since seizing the border area last summer" along the Golan Heights. In fact, the core Al Qaeda and its official branches have never "bothered" Israel. Israel has provided medical assistance to some 2000 Syrians, a number of them members of the Nusa Front and Al Qaeda.

Recently, the leader of Lebanon's Druze Progressive Socialist Party, Walid Jumblatt, who has been an erratic on-and-off supporter of Israel, concluded an agreement with the Al Nusra Front and its Syrian Al Qaeda affiliate. Jumblatt concluded the agreement even though his fellow Druze in Idlib, Syria have been given an ultimatum by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to convert to Wahhabi Islam and destroy their shrines and mausoleums to their religious icons or face execution. Jumblatt is reported by the Lebanese press to have arranged for the forced conversions of the Idlib Druze in exchange for their lives using the offices of the United Arab Emirates.

It has also been reported in the Lebanese press that Israel has helped arrange for contacts, using Jordanian intelligence interlocutors, between Al Nusra/Al Qaeda and the Syrian Druze. Israel has offered military and intelligence support to the Syrian Druze if they attack Syrian government forces and their Lebanese Hezbollah allies in Syria.

 
The word is out on ISIL or "Daesh" -- it is made in Israel. Left: Graffiti on wall in Ma'an, Jordan.

Arab media has also reported that Iraqi Hezbollah captured three U.S.-Israeli "advisers," along with their U.S. and Israeli passports, and a fourth Israeli citizen in possession of a passport from an unnamed Persian Gulf country, at an ISIL command center in Mosul province. The ISIL command center was captured by Iraqi special forces troops in "Operation Scorpion Sting" after word reached the authorities in Baghdad that U.S. and Israeli advisers had helped set up a state-of-the-art command center in Tal Abat, in Mosul province. WMR previously reported that Iraqi troops and local Sunni tribes have witnessed Israeli commandos handing over weapons to ISIL guerrillas in Anbar province

Other Israeli fingerprints on ISIL: The Israeli press reported that gardeners in the northern Israeli city of Nazareth Illit discovered a bag containing about 25 new black-and-white ISIL flags. The discovery of the flags further implicates the Israeli government in providing not only military and logistical support to ISIL, but propaganda support, as well. Israeli picnickers on the Golan Heights amused themselves by watching through field glasses and telescopes ISIL/Al Nusra rebels battling Syrian army units from the Golan highlands. Never once were the Israelis Israelis concerned about receiving fire from ISIL/Al Nusra positions. Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu revealed that Turkish authorities arrested a foreign intelligence agent, believed to be an asset of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS), who was charged with helping three British schoolgirls travel from Britain through Turkey and then into Syria to join ISIL. Under the Stephen Harper government, Canadian intelligence has been ordered to assist Mossad in all matters requested by the Israelis. The arrested agent is Mohammed Mehmet Rashid, aka "Doctor Mehmet Rashid," Mohammed al Rashid, and Mohammad Al Rashed, who reported to Bruno Saccomani, the Canadian ambassador to Jordan and Iraq and a former Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officer who was the head of Harper’s personal security detail until he was appointed ambassador to Amman. Saccomani was criticized by other RCMP officers for his "bullying" tactics. The appointment was roundly criticized by the Canadian opposition because Saccomani had no diplomatic experience. Al Rashid met the three British school girls at Gaziantep near the Syrian border and personally delivered them into ISIL hands in Syria. Saccomani served as the RCMP liaison officer at the Canadian embassy in Rome in 1997 where he developed a close working relationship with Israeli intelligence and law enforcement officials. Russian President Vladimir Putin's aide Alexander Prokhanov charged last December that Mossad was training ISIL's leadership. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed that British and U.S. intelligence and Mossad worked together to create ISIL in an operation dubbed "Hornet's Nest." News reports from around the Middle East revealed that Abu Bakr Al Baghdad, the self-proclaimed ISIL "caliph" who was photographed in Syria with visiting U.S. Senator John McCain. received a year oif intensive language and Islamic theology training from Mossad handlers. Adrian Kaba, who represents Sweden's ruling Social Democratic Party on the Malmo City Council and the regional government, wrote in 2014 that Mossad provided training to ISIL. Kaba wrote on his Facebook page that “ISIS is being trained by the Israeli Mossad. Muslims are not waging war, they are being used as pawns by other peoples’ game." Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman suggested ISIL-style beheadings for Israeli Arabs suspected of supporting terrorism.             One would think that committed Islamist jihadis would know in what direction to pray to Mecca for photo ops like those above. These photos are yet another example of the artificial Israeli and Western intelligence construct of ISIL.

Israel, Iran and the Bomb: A Love Story By Jeffrey Cavanaugh

Israel, Iran and the Bomb: A Love Story

Netanyahu wants to talk about Iran’s nuclear ambitions, but why isn’t anybody talking about Israel’s not-so-secret arsenal?

By Jeffrey Cavanaugh

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On Tuesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu went to Washington, D.C., and appeared before a joint session of Congress — not the Knesset — to give a speech on the dangers of Iran’s nuclear weapons program.

Iran’s nuclear program, Netanyahu declared, poses a clear and present danger not just to the Jewish state he heads, but to the entire region, and the United States, too. In stern tones the implied “Senator from Tel Aviv” warned Congress that the nuclear deal being cobbled together by Washington and Tehran in order to ward off war between them was a bad deal that would leave Iran unacceptably close to possessing a bomb.

By his calculations, with the in-place nuclear infrastructure Washington’s deal would likely allow Iran to keep, Netanyahu estimated Iran would be able to build a nuclear weapon in a year or less.

“This is a bad deal — a very bad deal,” intoned Netanyahu. “We’re better off without it.”

It’s not exactly clear who the “we” Netanyahu referred to was – assuming, of course, that one sees some degree of difference between the interests of the U.S. and Israel. Yet the message the prime minister was trying to convey was easy enough to understand: Iran is a cheat and a liar that cannot under any circumstances be trusted.

The 200-kiloton elephant in the room

Israel’s Sorek nuclear reactor center near the central Israeli town of Yavne.

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Left totally unmentioned by Netanyahu and nearly all discussion of the speech in the U.S. media is any note of, no matter how slight, Israel’s own nuclear weapons program. Indeed, although Israel’s nuclear arms are undeclared and the state is not a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, its possession of these weapons has been an open secret since the 1980s, when a low-level Israeli nuclear technician by the name ofMordechai Vanunu leaked details of the program to a British newspaper. Vanunu was arrested, tried in a secret court and convicted. He would ultimately serve 18 years in prison, 11 of them in solitary confinement.

What Vanunu revealed to the public was widely known in official circles for years, and in 1987 the U.S. Defense Department noted that, “as far as nuclear technology is concerned, the Israelis are roughly where the U.S. was in the fission weapon field circa 1955-1960.” The DOD went on to say that U.S. intelligence believed Israel was also well on its way to developing the technology it would need to produce hydrogen bombs, which are also now widely believed to be present in the Israeli arsenal. Although estimates of the size of the Israeli inventory vary, minimum calculations place it at 75 weapons and maximum at 400, with most placing it somewhere between 100-200 warheads.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute provides perhaps the best guess, which is that Israel has 80 intact nuclear weapons, with enough material for many more. Of that 80, it says, 50 are deployed on Jericho II medium-range ballistic missiles and the remaining 30 are aircraft-delivered gravity bombs. There is also speculation that some of Israel’s weapons are based at sea on its new Dolphin submarines, which means that Israel has not only nuclear weapons, but a fully functioning deterrent triad of missiles, bombers and subs. Israel, in other words, not only has a nuclear force as big as or bigger than North Korea’s, Pakistan’s or India’s, but one that possibly approaches the United Kingdom’s in terms of size and sophistication.

The story of the Israeli bomb

While there is debate over the size of Israel’s stockpile, how Israel got the bomb in the first place is far better known. Starting shortly after the birth of the Israeli state itself, David Ben-Gurion gave his country’s scientific establishment the mission of creating what was termed at the time “the bomb in the basement” – a last-resort option that would stave off final defeat by Arab armies, or at least make achieving that hideously costly. Funds gathered from overseas, including Jewish contributions to the State of Israel, were in part funneled to this project, and Israeli scientists and intelligence officials were directed to acquire information from foreign sources on how to build a bomb.

The best efforts to achieve this came in France, where a close relationship between the Israeli and the French defense establishments gave Israeli scientists access to French nuclear research sites. This relationship also eventually led to the purchase of the Dimona reactor complex. Indeed, during the late 1950s over 2,500 French technical experts were present at the reactor site and operated behind a veil of secrecy so thick that the workers were forbidden to write directly to relatives lest they give away their location. When questioned by the British and Americans, Israelis claimed Dimona was a grasslands research institute or a manganese processing plant. After Charles de Gaulle came to power in 1959, however, the Franco-Israeli nuclear alliance chilled — but not before Israel was able to acquire enough material and expertise to begin a full-fledged, independent weapons program of its own.

To succeed, though, Israel would have to overcome what was probably its greatest obstacle to acquiring nuclear weapons: the U.S. It should be remembered that in the early years of the Cold War Israel and the U.S. were not as close as they are today. At best Israel was seen as a nuisance and an electoral prop for Democrats like Harry Truman, and under Dwight D. Eisenhower the U.S. was often actively hostile. Indeed, Eisenhower opposed not just Israeli participation in the Suez Crisis of 1956 but forced Israel as well as Britain and France to retreat from their assault on Egypt with their tails tucked firmly between their legs.

Although not as skeptical of the utility of Israel as an ally as Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy nonetheless put the screws to Israel over its nuclear ambitions due to the experience he gained during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Seeing a need to push back against the threat of nuclear war after the close call over Cuba, Kennedy offered the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to the world and pushed for countries to sign. Among the requirements, of course, were vigorous inspections to ensure that existing nuclear facilities in non-nuclear states would not be used to build weapons.

Although the U.S. was aware of Israel’s Dimona reactor by 1958, when U2 flights and on-the-ground assessments observed what the Israelis were doing, inspections of the type Kennedy was championing would expose just exactly what the Israelis were up to — drawing the wrath of the proliferation-phobic Kennedy and handing a propaganda coup to the Soviets and Moscow’s Arab allies. The Israelis did eventually give in and allow inspectors, but what ensued as U.S. technical experts poked and prodded Dimona was a kabuki-esque affair, wherein the American teams were stymied in almost every way via tactics any contemporary U.N. weapons inspector would recognize as an attempt to obfuscate, distract and cheat.

Acceptance of the Israeli bomb

This song and dance went on for the remainder of the Kennedy administration, only waning under the far more pro-Israel Lyndon Johnson, who, like Truman, used his support of Israel as a political prop. What’s more, as Moscow made inroads in Egypt and Syria and the likelihood of war between Arabs and Israelis increased, the decision was made in the U.S. and other Western countries to look the other way and, in effect, allow the Israelis to build their bomb.  By 1967, on the eve of the Six-Day War, it is believed that this acquiescence allowed the Israelis to secretly accumulate enough fissile material to build a crude nuclear bomb prior to the outbreak of hostilities on June 5 of that year.

Although Israel’s crushing victory in that war assured its bomb would not be used, the frightening encounter between Israel and its enemies led Israel to a crash program geared toward mass-producing nuclear weapons as quickly as possible. As in the 1950s resources were leveraged, the biggest obstacle to physically increasing Israel’s stockpile was overcome in 1968 via an audacious covert operation that stole up to 200 tons of yellowcake uranium from a Belgian mining company that the Mossad, in a complex operation, had shipped from Antwerp to Genoa and thence on to Israel.

Indeed, the Belgians weren’t the only ones who were robbed. In a memo on Israeli nuclear activities prepared for President Richard Nixon by Henry Kissinger himself, Kissinger noted that Israel’s nuclear program “is one where the Israelis have persistently deceived and may even have stolen from us.” Here, this was further implied when in 1976 CIA Deputy Director Carl Duckett informed officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some 200-600 pounds of highly enriched uranium had been stolen by Israel from a processing plant in Pennsylvania owned by the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation. It was, according to one of the officials privy to the secret at the time, one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear materials in history.

Eventually acknowledging their failure, the White House under Johnson and then Nixon created the present regime of official lies about Israeli nuclear capabilities by getting the Israelis to pledge to be the first to “not introduce” nuclear weapons to the Middle East — which the Israelis defined as agreeing to not officially test weapons or state officially that they possessed them. This concordant became a foundation of U.S.-Israeli relations when Nixon met Golda Meier after U.S. intervention in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, which itself may have been forced by Israeli desperation and Israel’s implied threat to use their bombs to stave off imminent battlefield defeat.

A rogue is a rogue is a rogue

In the context of the Cold War, when Israeli actions against a Soviet client could have forced a nuclear response by Moscow — a response which would lead inevitably to an exchange with the U.S. and its other allies — it made eminent sense to protect Israel so it would not be forced to use its weapons and so cause that chain of events to occur, which came close to actually happening in 1973. It may have unfairly privileged Israeli interests over nearly everyone else in the Middle East in official Washington circles, but it nonetheless kept an unstable region and its nuclear powder keg under wraps for the remaining duration of America’s conflict with the Soviet Union.

But does this same logic hold sway today? To be sure, relations between Russia and the U.S. are frosty, but the degree to which American and Russian security interests are tied to the fates of their client states in the Middle East is far less than what it once was. Furthermore, American guarantees of security have profited the U.S. very little. In exchange for providing carte blanche protection for Israel in exchange for its nuclear silence, the U.S. has received little but Israeli intransigence on the issue of Palestine and next to no help on other important regional issues. Indeed, America’s very protection of Israel makes the U.S. widely hated in the region. The U.S. alliance with Israel is thus for the most part a one-way street from which America derives very little benefit.

So when you click on the news and see Netanyahu talk about the dangers of a bad deal and the threat of a rogue nuclear state, understand that he knows what he is talking about. After all, his country is experienced in fooling inspectors and lying to the U.S. about its nuclear intentions. It, too, has stolen nuclear materials and broken numerous international laws to build a secret nuclear weapons lab and stockpile. If the emerging narrative about what actually happened in 1973 is correct, it has even engaged in nuclear blackmail to get its way. Given all this, one wonders if maybe Israel couldn’t teach Iran a lesson or two in this particular area of statecraft.

Netanyahu's Ugly Israel by Stephen Lendman

Netanyahu's Ugly Israel

by Stephen Lendman

Israel is a rogue terror state by any standard. No amount of speechmaking changes reality. Fascist lunatics run things. 

They want supreme hegemonic regional control. They want all potential challengers eliminated. 

They're willing to wage genocidal wars to achieve objectives - including use of nuclear, chemical, biological and other banned weapons.

Their Machiavellian extremism threatens world peace and stability. Netanyahu is the tip of the iceberg. Embedded fascist power runs Israel like America.

Netanyahu came to Washington to convince Congress, the US public and his own population about a nonexistent Iranian threat.

He knows Iran threatens no one. Its nuclear program is peaceful. It has no military component. His own Mossad says so. So does US intelligence annually.

Claiming an existential Iranian threat is a ruse - a Big Lie. None exists. Netanyahu is a serial liar. He wants pro-Western stooge governance replacing Iranian sovereign independence. 

He's willing to massacre millions of Iranians to rule the region unchallenged. His madness could launch nuclear war.

At the same time, his goon squads terrorize Palestinians daily. Media scoundrels ignore his worst crimes.

Every day is Kristallnacht in Palestine. So-called Israeli security forces terrorize Palestinians with impunity. So do radicalized settlers with full state support and encouragement.

Gaza remains lawlessly besieged. An Israeli caused humanitarian disaster worsens daily. 

West Bank and East Jerusalem Palestinian communities are virtual war zones - subjected to daily terrorizing incursions.

Fear is pervasive. Collective punishment is official Israeli policy. So is institutionalized racism worse than anything experienced in apartheid South Africa.

Peaceful public demonstrations are brutally attacked. Free expression and movement are prohibited.

Population centers are isolated. Borders are closed. Militarized occupation prohibits normal daily life.

Palestinians face rascist discrimination, land theft, bulldozed homes, regular terror attacks, targeted killings, mass arrests, wrongful imprisonments, torture, punitive taxes, impoverishment, indentured servitude, ethnic cleansing and slow-motion genocide.

Palestinians wanting to live free on their own land in their own country are called terrorists. Fishermen are attacked at sea.

So are farmers working their land. Their crops, livestock and orchards are lawlessly destroyed. 

Israeli goon squads shoot Palestinian children for target practice. Fundamental civil and human rights are denied.

Few services are provided. Vital ones are lacking or inadequate. Palestinian lawmakers are imprisoned for belonging to the wrong party. 

Israeli democracy is pure fantasy. None whatever exists. When Israelis vote on March 17, embedded power will emerge victorious.

Business as usual will continue. Nothing fundamental will change. Conditions for Palestinians will remain cruel and unjust.

The whole world knows. Western leaders able to change things sit on their hands and do nothing.

Washington funds Israel's killing machine with billions of dollars annually, the latest weapons and technology, and bipartisan endorsement of its worst crimes.

Before Netanyahu left for Washington, Israel cut off power for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians twice in the dead of winter. 

It warned about further outages if PA officials don't pay millions of dollars in outstanding debt. 

Impossible because Israel won't release around $250 million in tax revenues belonging to Palestine - collective punishment for joining the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Israel punitively opened dams near Gaza's border. Flooding caused hundreds of Palestinians to flee water levels more than three meters deep.

Many others were affected - compounding the humanitarian disaster from Israel's summer war. 

Media scoundrels ignore a catastrophe affecting hundreds of thousands of Palestinians on their own with virtually no promised aid delivered.

While Netanyahu ranted to Congress, his goon squads destroyed thousands of acres of wheat, barley and other Bedouin Rakhama village crops.

Tractors protected by killer cops uprooted privately owned Palestinian land. One resident spoke for others saying:

"This is vandalism through which they plan to displace the Bedouins from the Negev so as to create a Jewish state free of Arabs." 

"(M)y message to them is that if you turn over the land a million times, and if you demolish our homes a thousand times we will continue to live on this land and won't allow anybody to take it from us."

Area bedouins were given land to compensate for forced 1954 displacement. Israeli agreements aren't worth the paper they're written on.

Bedouins live in so-called unrecognized villages - without essential services Israel refuses to provide. It wants Arabs displaced for exclusive Jewish development. 

It uses various means to remove them - including declaring privately owned Palestinian land closed military zones.

On Tuesday, radicalized settlers attacked Palestinian MK Hanin Zoabi. She was speaking at Ramat Gan college near Tel Aviv.

Lunatic Israelis attacked her with bottles and milk spilled on her. She sustained moderate injuries.

Reports indicated Israel's extremist right-wing ordered the attack. Without security intervention, she could have been killed.

On March 17, she's running for reelection. On February 18, Israel's High Court overturned a right-wing Knesset ruling disqualifying her from general elections.

She's condemned for participating in the May 2010 Mavi Marmara humanitarian Gaza mission. Israeli fascists call her a traitor for supporting right over wrong.

On March 2, a B'Tselem press release headlined "Incident in which soldiers set dogs on Palestinian youth was part of official policy."

Israeli goon squads routinely use vicious attack dogs against unarmed defenseless Palestinian civilians.

B'Tselem published video evidence "of two soldiers from the IDF dog unit filmed by another soldier after they had set dogs on a Palestinian boy." 

"The footage was first posted on former MK Michael Ben Ari’s Facebook page, but has since been removed from there." 

"The military’s official response read: 'Upon receipt of the footage, the Commander of the Airborne and Special Training Center ordered an immediate internal inquiry into the incident.' " 

" 'Upon completion of this inquiry, conclusions will be drawn and the necessary steps will be taken to prevent such incidents from recurring.' ”

So-called Israeli inquiries are whitewashes by any standard. Expect no change in official Israeli policy.

Superiors up the Israeli chain of command authorize killer attack dog terrorism.

B'Tselem "documented and publicized this incident about two months ago," it said.

Video evidence reveals "standard" IDF practice. Attack dogs are unleashed. They're ordered against Palestinians. They savagely bite into human flesh until handlers order release.

Sometimes dogs maintain killer grips, said B'Tselem. Handlers have to taser them to release victims.

Previous responses to B'Tselem complaints indicate so-called inquiries focus "only on how the dogs were used, and not on whether they should have been used at all," the organization said.

It wants all dog attacks stopped. Its only response gotten in 18 months is that this type unacceptable viciousness "is under review."

Israel continues numerous terror tactics against Palestinians no just society would tolerate. The incident in question occurred on December 23, 2014.

Palestinians threw stones in response to a confrontation Israeli soldiers initiated.

An eyewitness said they unleashed attack dogs on Palestinian youths. One dog savagely bit 16-year-old Hamzeh Abu Hashem.

He required hospitalization. His family said he was arrested, handcuffed, removed from the hospital and taken to Ofer Prison.

B'Tselem said he was sentenced to six months imprisonment. Similar incidents occur often.

Israel uses killer attack dogs as terrorizing weapons against Palestinians for virtually any reason or none at all.

Netanyahu's congressional rant didn't explain. Supportive House and Senate members didn't ask. Or express any outrage against Israeli viciousness.

One rogue state supports another. Millions of innocent victims suffer horrifically. 

Expect the worst ahead as long as criminal gangs run both countries. Their rule by terror threatens everyone.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. 

The coming neo-con troublemaking for U.S. foreign policy by Wayne Madsen (Americans voted for the war party. They will have war.)

Americans voted for the war party. They will have war.

The coming neo-con troublemaking for U.S. foreign policy
Perhaps already anticipating pressure from Senator John McCain and other pro-Israeli Republican neo-cons, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General Martin Dempsey, only days after the Republican electoral victory, told the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs that he thought that "Israel went to extraordinary lengths to limit collateral damage and civilian casualties" in Gaza. Dempsey’s opinion was in marked contrast to previous statements in which he said the U.S. must not fight Assad in Syria while also battling the Islamic State. McCain has called Dempsey’s public affairs spokesman at the Pentagon, Rear Admiral John Kirby, an “idiot.” The former prisoner-of-war in Vietnam, who allegedly gave his North Vietnamese captors six months of future U.S. naval bombardment schedules, has been a vocal critic of Dempsey and his boss, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.

Although Hagel supported McCain’s run for the presidency in 2000 and was his friend, the two Vietnam War veterans have had a bitter falling out. Dempsey’s recent comments about Israel’s attack on Gaza is obviously intended to ingratiate himself with McCain and his "partner," South Carolina’s Senator Lindsey Graham, who is slated to become chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on State and Foreign Operations. Graham will be sure to place procedural roadblocks on any of Obama’s ambassadorial nominations that do not pass muster with the neo-con policy laundries in Washington. These policy “boiler shops” include the American Enterprise Institute, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
  
Senate neocons seek to confront Russia and Iran militarily and they think nothing of playing with nuclear fire.

The first volleys in the upcoming skirmishes by congressional Republicans to push for U.S. military action in the Middle East came after it was revealed that President Obama sent a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in October urging U.S.-Iranian cooperation in battling the forces of the Islamic State. The Obama policy was immediately condemned by congressional Republicans after details of the letter were leaked by an administration source to the neo-con propaganda daily, The Wall Street Journal. While in Tehran in late September, this reporter urged Iranian officials close to Khamenei to respond favorably to White House entreaties over jointly combating the Islamic State. However, any rapprochement between Washington and Tehran is anathema to the Israelis and their neo-con supporters in the United States, as well as to the Saudis, Turks, and Qataris, who, like Israel, support the Islamic State financially, militarily, or logistically.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who publicly supported the Republicans in the election, will use surrogates like McCain, Graham, Illinois Republican Senator Mark Kirk (who attacked this reporter on his Senate website during my visit to Iran), and incoming Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker of Tennessee to ensure that the U.S.-Iranian rapprochement over the Islamic State is dead-on-arrival. The Senate neo-cons, who put Israel's interests ahead of those of the United States, will also do their very best to ensure a complete breakdown of the P5+1 nuclear talks between Iran, the United States, and the European Union. The congressional neo-cons will also push for U.S. military intervention in Ukraine on the side of the Kiev regime and a military showdown with Russia.

Control of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Near East and South and Central Asian Affairs may go to Senator Jim Risch from the extremely conservative state of Idaho. His political campaign coffers can be expected to swell with out-of-state money from Jewish contributors from New York City, Los Angeles, and south Florida. There will be intense jockeying for this chairmanship considering the Jewish donor money that goes along with it.

Americans have voted to install a war party in control of the legislative branch of their government. They will have war unless the generally anti-neocon Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky can prevail on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to reign in the neocons. Paul came to McConnell's assistance during his primary challenge by a Tea Party candidate and McConnell owes Paul a huge political debt. However, as Paul ratchets up his 2016 presidential campaign, there is every likelihood that the junior senator from Kentucky will start to waddle and quack like a "neocon-lite" duck.

In that event, a multi-front war is inevitable.