Snowden Nomination Comes as Revelations Show NSA Shared Info with Israel – and Israel is Outed for Chemical Weapons Stash
Posted by sage on September 12, 2013 
Edward Snowden (AFP Photo / The Guardian)
sage: “Oh what a tangled web we weave….” Story 1 covers off on Edward Snowden being nominated for a Humans Rights Prize for his whistleblowing revelations of the NSA.
Story 2 shows how his latest leaked document reveals that the NSA routinely shared information with Israel. (Given what we know about Israel and the cabal’s connections, this is not surprising to me>)
Story 3 shows how Israel has now been outed by a newly-discovered CIA document containing evidence the Israelis have a stockpile of chemical weapons – this coming after they condemned Syria for supposedly having and using them!
Story 1 – EU Lawmakers Nominate Snowden for Sakharov Human Rights Prize
Russia Today – September 11, 2013
http://tinyurl.com/qydpwf8
Members of the European Parliament have officially nominated whistleblower and former CIA employee Edward Snowden for the prestigious prize, which celebrates freedom of thought.
Edward Snowden “deserves to be honored for shedding light on the systematic infringements of civil liberties by US and European secret services,” leaders of the parliament’s Greens group Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rebecca Harms said in a statement. “Snowden has risked his freedom to help us protect ours.”
Snowden, a computer specialist and former contractor for the US National Security Agency (NSA), was the focus of an international manhunt during the summer after he leaked classified files of US government and UK surveillance programs, including spying on their closest allies, to the media.
He was granted temporary asylum in Russia in late July despite repeated requests for him to be extradited by Washington.
Snowden was put forward as a candidate by the European United Left/Nordic Green Left faction.
Christian Engstrom from the Swedish Pirate Party, who co-nominated Snowden for the award, said that the whistleblower has paid “a heavy personal price” for his “heroic” actions.
The prize is named after the Soviet dissident scientist Andrey Sakharov and honors people and organizations for their
work in defending human rights and freedom of thought.
The official presentation of all the candidates for the Sakharov Prize will take place on 16 September, next Monday, the winner will be announced in October and the awards ceremony will take place in Strasbourg in December.
Previous laureates of the Sakharov Prize include Nelson Mandela, Chinese dissident Hu Jia and Reporters without Borders, a French based NGO that fights for freedom of the press. The winner receives a prize of 50,000 euros.
Andrey Sakharov was a physicist who designed the Soviet Hydrogen Bomb but soon after began to regret what he had done and became a campaigner for the destruction of all nuclear weapons. He became an advocate of civil liberties and civil reforms in the Soviet Union. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
Story 2 – NSA ‘Routinely’ Shares Americans’ Data With Israel – Snowden Leak
Russia Today – September 11, 2013
http://tinyurl.com/nd9x9v3
The NSA regularly shares raw US intelligence data with Israel without even removing information about American citizens, according to the latest revelation published by the Guardian. The report is based on a document leaked by Edward Snowden.
On Tuesday, September 11, the Guardian published a previously undisclosed document which revealed top-secret policies in place since 2009 that are used to share personal phone and Internet data pertaining to United States citizens with American ally Israel.
The document, a five-page memorandum authorized by the National Security Agency near the beginning of US President Barack Obama’s first administration, outlines a deal between the NSA and Israel’s SIGINT National Unit, or ISNU.
doc1
“This agreement,” the memo begins, “prescribes procedures and responsibilities for ensuring” privacy safeguards are implemented to protect the Fourth Amendment rights of US citizens with regards to the direct sharing of raw intelligence collected by the NSA with its Israeli counterpart.
That data, the document later explains, includes raw traffic picked up by the American spy office such as “unevaluated and unminimized transcripts, gists, facsimiles, telex, voice and Digital Network Intelligence (DNI) metadata and content” which is never necessarily scrutinized by US officials before sent to Israeli agents.
“Seems the only info actually being ‘minimized’ is the info #NSA shares with the American public,” American Civil Liberties Union Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer tweeted following publication of the Guardian piece. “NSA is really good at minimizing that.”
But while the contents of emails and phone calls involving most US persons are fair game to be collected by Israeli intelligence, a select group of Americans are sparred from international surveillance: elected officials. The memo mandates that the Israelis must “destroy upon recognition” any communication “that is either to or from an official of the US government.”
That pool of exempt persons is defined as “officials of the executive branch (including the White House, cabinet departments, and independent agencies), the US House of Representatives and Senate (member and staff) and the US federal court system (including, but not limited to, the Supreme Court).”
The Guardian notes, however, that other leaked documents uncovered as of late indicate that the US intelligence community may have reservations nonetheless with sharing info with even an ally as tried and true as Israel.
“On the one hand, the Israelis are extraordinarily good Sigint partners for us, but on the other, they target us to learn our positions on Middle East problems,” a senior NSA official says in a 2008 NSA document seen by the Guardian but not published in Wednesday’s piece. “A NIE [National Intelligence Estimate] ranked them as the third most aggressive intelligence service against the US.”
One of NSA’s biggest threats is actually from friendly intelligence services, like Israel. There are parameters on what NSA shares with them, but the exchange is so robust, we sometimes share more than we intended,” the Guardian quotes from the ’08 document.
According to Guardian journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, a NSA spokesperson pressed for comment wouldn’t deny the validity of the leaked document’s contents, but assured the British newspaper that “Any US person information that is acquired as a result of NSA’s surveillance activities is handled under procedures that are designed to protect privacy rights.”
The latest leak comes on the 12-year anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that many high-ranking US officials have used to justify the surveillance measures enacted in the decade-plus since. It also marks just more than three months since the Guardian first began published leaked NSA documents attributed to Snowden, a 30-year-old former intelligence contractor who has since relocated to Russia where he was granted asylum while avoiding espionage charges in the US.
Israeli nuclear and chemical weapons manufacturing facility at Dimona (image by sodahead.com)
Story 3 – CIA Documents Reveal Israeli Stockpile of Chemical Weapons
Saed Bannoura via International Middle East Media Center – IMEMC, nsnbc News – September 11, 2013
http://tinyurl.com/pnbuc8b
A newly-discovered document of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency revealed Monday by Foreign Policy magazine shows that the U.S. agency had decisive evidence dating back to at least the 1980s that Israel had a stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
The revelation comes in the midst of reports about the alleged use of chemical weapons by the Syrian government on August 21st, although there is still no clarity as to whether the regime or the rebels carried out the attack, or whether it was an accident.
While U.S. President Barack Obama threatened to go to war with Syria over the attack, the Syrian government has denied responsibility, and has agreed to a proposal by the Russian government to open its stores of chemical weapons to international inspection and destruction.
The document revealed by Foreign Policy magazine on Monday shows that, in addition to building up a nuclear stockpile of an estimated three hundred nuclear weapons during the 1960s and 70s, the Israeli military also developed an extensive stockpile of chemical and biological weapons.
The 1983 document stated that U.S. spy satellites had identified “a probable CW [chemical weapon] nerve agent production facility and a storage facility… at the Dimona Sensitive Storage Area in the Negev Desert. Other CW production is believed to exist within a well-developed Israeli chemical industry.”
“While we cannot confirm whether the Israelis possess lethal chemical agents,” the document adds, “several indicators lead us to believe that they have available to them at least persistent and nonpersistent nerve agents, a mustard agent, and several riot-control agents, marched with suitable delivery systems.”
The single page of a larger CIA report was discovered at the Ronald Reagan Library in California in its unredacted form – the report had been released several years ago to the National Archives, but was heavily censored.
According to the Foreign Policy report, “Israeli historian Avner Cohen, in his 1988 book Israel and the Bomb, wrote that Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion secretly ordered that a stockpile of chemical weapons be built at about the time of the 1956 war between Israel and Egypt. The CIA, on the other hand, believed that Israel did not begin work on chemical weapons until either the late 1960s or the early 1970s.
The article included the following assessment from the 1983 CIA report: “Israel, finding itself surrounded by frontline Arab states with budding CW [chemical weapons] capabilities, became increasingly conscious of its vulnerability to chemical attack.
Its sensitivities were galvanized by the capture of large quantities of Soviet CW-related equipment during both the 1967 Arab-Israeli and the 1973 Yom Kippur wars. As a result, Israel undertook a program of chemical warfare preparations in both offensive and protective areas.”
The Israeli government has harshly criticized the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons three weeks ago, and has encouraged President Obama’s pledge to respond militarily.
Israel did sign the Convention to Ban Chemical Weapons, but the Israeli Knesset (Parliament) never ratified the treaty. Israel has never opened its nuclear facility or its chemical weapons stockpile to international inspections.