Mordechai Vanunu - the original whistleblower

[TonyGosling]

Gives the subject a good airing
A gentle one in the eye for the Zionists
And an admirable article

The Middle East has had a secretive nuclear power in its midst for years

When will the US and the UK tell the truth about Israeli weapons? Iran isn't starting an atomic arms race, it's joining one


George Monbiot
Tuesday November 20, 2007
The Guardian

George Bush and Gordon Brown are right: there should be no nuclear weapons in the Middle East. The risk of a nuclear conflagration could be greater there than anywhere else. Any nation developing them should expect a firm diplomatic response. So when will they impose sanctions on Israel?

Like them, I believe that Iran is trying to acquire the bomb. I also believe it should be discouraged, by a combination of economic pressure and bribery, from doing so (a military response would, of course, be disastrous). I believe that Bush and Brown - who maintain their nuclear arsenals in defiance of the non-proliferation treaty - are in no position to lecture anyone else. But if, as Bush claims, the proliferation of such weapons "would be a dangerous threat to world peace", why does neither man mention the fact that Israel, according to a secret briefing by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, possesses between 60 and 80 of them?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2213810,00.html


Officially, the Israeli government maintains a position of "nuclear ambiguity": neither confirming nor denying its possession of nuclear weapons. But everyone who has studied the issue knows that this is a formula with a simple purpose: to give the United States an excuse to keep breaking its own laws, which forbid it to grant aid to a country with unauthorised weapons of mass destruction. The fiction of ambiguity is fiercely guarded. In 1986, when the nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu handed photographs of Israel's bomb factory to the Sunday Times, he was lured from Britain to Rome, drugged and kidnapped by Mossad agents, tried in secret, and sentenced to 18 years in prison. He served 12 of them in solitary confinement and was banged up again - for six months - soon after he was released.

However, in December last year, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, accidentally let slip that Israel, like "America, France and Russia", had nuclear weapons. Opposition politicians were furious. They attacked Olmert for "a lack of caution bordering on irresponsibility". But US aid continues to flow without impediment.

As the fascinating papers released last year by the National Security Archive show, the US government was aware in 1968 that Israel was developing a nuclear device (what it didn't know is that the first one had already been built by then). The contrast to the efforts now being made to prevent Iran from acquiring the bomb could scarcely be starker.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/world/israel/ik-020126-dimona-2m-sim e2.htm


At first, US diplomats urged Washington to make its sale of 50 F4 Phantom jets conditional on Israel's abandonment of its nuclear programme. As a note sent from the Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs to the secretary of state in October 1968 reveals, the order would make the US "the principal supplier of Israel's military needs" for the first time. In return, it should require "commitments that would make it more difficult for Israel to take the critical decision to go nuclear". Such pressure, the memo suggested, was urgently required: France had just delivered the first of a consignment of medium range missiles, and Israel intended to equip them with nuclear warheads.

Twenty days later, on November 4 1968, when the assistant defence secretary met Yitzhak Rabin (then the Israeli ambassador to Washington), Rabin "did not dispute in any way our information on Israel's nuclear or missile capability". He simply refused to discuss it. Four days after that, Rabin announced that the proposal was "completely unacceptable to us". On November 27, Lyndon Johnson's administration accepted Israel's assurance that "it will not be the first power in the Middle East to introduce nuclear weapons".

As the memos show, US officials knew that this assurance had been broken even before it was made. A record of a phone conversation between Henry Kissinger and another official in July 1969 reveals that Richard Nixon was "very leery of cutting off the Phantoms", despite Israel's blatant disregard of the agreement. The deal went ahead, and from then on the US administration sought to bamboozle its own officials in order to defend Israel's lie. In August 1969, US officials were sent to "inspect" Israel's Dimona nuclear plant. But a memo from the state department reveals that "the US government is not prepared to support a 'real' inspection effort in which the team members can feel authorised to ask directly pertinent questions and/or insist on being allowed to look at records, logs, materials and the like. The team has in many subtle ways been cautioned to avoid controversy, 'be gentlemen' and not take issue with the obvious will of the hosts".

Nixon refused to pass the minutes of the conversation he'd had with the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir, to the US ambassador to Israel, Wally Barbour. Meir and Nixon appear to have agreed that the Israeli programme could go ahead, as long as it was kept secret.

The US government has continued to protect it. Every six months, the intelligence agencies provide Congress with a report on technology acquired by foreign states that's "useful for the development or production of weapons of mass destruction". These reports discuss the programmes in India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran and other nations, but not in Israel. Whenever other states have tried to press Israel to join the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, the US and European governments have blocked them. Israel has also exempted itself from the biological and chemical weapons conventions.

By refusing to sign these treaties, Israel ensures it needs never be inspected. While the International Atomic Energy Agency's inspectors crawl round Iran's factories, put seals on its uranium tanks and blow the whistle when it fails to cooperate, they have no legal authority to inspect facilities in Israel. So when the Israeli government complains, as it did last week, that the head of the IAEA is "sticking his head in the sand over Iran's nuclear programme", you can only gape at its chutzpah. Israel is constantly racking up the pressure for action against Iran, aware that no powerful state will press for action against Israel.

Yes, Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. The president is a Holocaust denier opposed to the existence of Israel. During the Iran-Iraq war, Iran responded to Saddam Hussein's toxic bombardments with chemical weapons of its own. But Israel under Olmert is also a dangerous and unpredictable state involved in acts of terror abroad. Two months ago it bombed a site in Syria (whose function is fiercely disputed). Last year, it launched a war of aggression against Lebanon. It remains in occupation of Palestinian lands. In February 2001, according to the BBC, it used chemical weapons in Gaza: 180 people were admitted to hospital with severe convulsions. Nuclear weapons in Israel's hands are surely just as dangerous as nuclear weapons in Iran's.

So when will our governments speak up? When will they acknowledge that there is already a nuclear power in the Middle East, and that it presents an existential threat to its neighbours? When will they admit that Iran is not starting a nuclear arms race, but joining one? When will they demand that the rules they impose on Iran should also apply to Israel?

monbiot.com

[karlos]

Thought you may like to read this recent memo sent by Mandela to Thomas Freidman, foreign affairs columnist on the New York Times.

From: mordechai vanunu [mailto:vanunuvmjc@hotmail.com]
Sent: 12 February 2008 20:10
Subject: MEMO From: Nelson Mandela (former President South Africa)

MEMO

To: Thomas L. Friedman (columnist New York Times)
From: Nelson Mandela (former President South Africa)

Dear Thomas,
I know that you and I long for peace in the Middle East , but before you continue to talk about necessary conditions from an Israeli perspective, you need to know what's on my mind. Where to begin? How about 1964.
Let me quote my own words during my trial. They are true today as they were then: "I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
Today the world, black and white, recognize that Apartheid has no future. In South Africa it has been ended by our own decisive mass action in order to build peace! and security. That mass campaign of defiance and other actions could only culminate in the establishment of Democracy.
Perhaps it is strange for you to observe the situation in Palestine or more specifically, the structure of political and cultural relationships between Palestinians and Israelis, as an Apartheid system. This is because you incorrectly think that the problem of Palestine began in 1967. This was demonstrated in your recent column "Bush's First Memo" in the New York Times on March 27, 2001. You seem to be surprised to hear that there are still problems of 1948 to be solved, the most important component of which is the right to return of Palestinian refugees.
The Palestinian- Israeli conflict is not just an issue of military occupation and Israel is not a country that was established "normally" and happened to occupy another country in 1967. Palestinians are not struggling for a "state" but for freedom, liberation and equality, just like we were struggling for freedom in South Africa .
In the last few years, and especially during the reign of the Labour Party, Israel showed that it was not even willing to return what it occupied in 1967; that Settlements remain, Jerusalem would be under exclusive Israeli sovereignty, and Palestinians would not have an independent state, but would be under Israeli economic domination with Israeli control of borders, land, air, water and sea. Israel was not thinking of a "state" but of "separation" . The value of separation is measured in terms of the ability of Israel to keep the Jewish state Jewish, and not to have a Palestinian minority that could have the opportunity to become a majority at some time in the future. If this takes place, it would force Israel to either become a secular democratic or bi-national state, or to turn into a state of Apartheid not only de facto, but also de jure. Thomas, if you follow the polls in Israel for the last 30 or 40 years, you clearly find a vulgar racism that i! ncludes a third of the population who openly declare themselves to be racist. This racism is of the nature of "I hate Arabs" and "I wish Arabs would be dead".
If you also follow the judicial system in Israel you will see there is discrimination against Palestinians, and if you further consider the 1967 Occupied Territories you will find there are already two judicial systems in operation that represent two different approaches to human life: one for Palestinian life and the other for Jewish life. Additionally there are two different approaches to property and to land. Palestinian property is not recognized as private property because it can be confiscated.
As to the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza , there is an
additional factor. The so-called "Palestinian autonomous areas" are Bantustans . These are restricted entities within the power structure of the Israeli Apartheid system. The Palestinian state cannot be the by-product of the Jewish state, just in order to keep the Jewish purity of Israel . Israel 's racial discrimination is daily life of most Palestinians. Since Israel is a Jewish state, Israeli Jews are able to accrue special rights which non-Jews cannot do. Palestinian Arabs have no place in a "Jewish" state.
Apartheid is a crime against humanity. Israel has deprived millions of Palestinians of their liberty and property. It has perpetuated a system of gross racial discrimination and inequality. It has systematically incarcerated and tortured thousands of Palestinians, contrary to the rules of international law. It has, in particular, waged a war against a civilian population, in particular children.
The responses made by South Africa to human rights abuses emanating
from the removal policies and Apartheid policies respectively, shed light on what Israeli society must necessarily go through before one can speak of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East and an end to its Apartheid policies.
Thomas, I'm not abandoning Mideast diplomacy. But I'm not going to indulge you the way your supporters do. If you want peace and
democracy, I will support you. If you want formal Apartheid, we will not support you. If you want to support racial discrimination and ethnic cleansing, we will oppose you.
When you figure out what you're about, give me a call.


VANUNU MORDECHAI J C.
KIDNAPPED IN ROME SEP' 30 TH'-1986. AFTER 18 YEARS IN ISRAELI PRISON. Converted to become a Christian. Waiting In East Jerusalem to be allowed to leave.

P.O.Box 20102 . Salah Adin St '.
post office. East Jerusalem . 91384..
Mobile ( 972 ) 0523744569
http:/www.vanunu.com

Feel free to send him messages of support.
Once he is allowed to leave Israel it would be great to have him here in the UK on a lecture tour.

[Mark Gobell]

Israeli nuclear whistleblower under house arrest

Mordechai Vanunu breaches terms of 2004 jail release by meeting 'a number of foreigners', says Israeli police

guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 December 2009 17.22 GMT




Israeli nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu arrives at a Jerusalem court.

Mordechai Vanunu, who served 18 years in prison after he revealed Israel's secret nuclear programme, has been placed under house arrest pending criminal charges for allegedly breaching the terms of his 2004 release, which includes a ban on contacts with foreigners.

A police spokesman, Micky Rosenfeld, said Vanunu was accused of meeting with "a number of foreigners". The spokesman, however, did not specify who the foreigners were or where they came from.

Vanunu's lawyer, Avigdor Feldman, said his client had been arrested because his romantic attachment to an unnamed Norwegian woman had come to the attention of the authorities.

"Vanunu was arrested [for] a relationship between a man and a woman, with a Norwegian citizen," he told Reuters. "He is not being accused of giving any secrets. She is not interested in nuclear business – she's interested in Mordechai Vanunu [and he] is probably interested in her."

The woman has reportedly been interrogated by police but has not been charged with any offence.

Vanunu has fallen foul of the no-foreigners rule before. In 2007, he was sentenced to six months in jail for talking to non-Israelis.

Vanunu, a former technician at Israel's Dimona nuclear plant, was first jailed in 1986 after he passed on information about Israel's nuclear programme to the Sunday Times. The Israeli authorities argue that he may have kept back some information which could still be of use to a hostile foreign power.

His dilemma is compounded by the fact that most Israelis do not approve of his actions and want no contact with him. Vanunu says the feeling is mutual and he would prefer to live abroad, but is banned from doing so.

Israel's supreme court has upheld the restrictions on his freedom of association and movement despite criticism by international human rights groups.

Speaking in court today, Vanunu – who refuses to speak Hebrew publicly in protest at his treatment – said: "This Jewish state has 200 atomic ... hydrogen bombs, atomic weapons, neutron bomb. They are not able to say they have the bomb, they are not able to destroy anyone ... instead they arrest Vanunu."

After talking to the Sunday Times, Vanunu was tracked down in Rome where he was kidnapped by Israeli intelligence agents and brought back to Israel to stand trial.

Israel has never publicly acknowledged its nuclear weapons arsenal.

Guardian

[Moon-in-Taurus]

[Mark Gobell]

Vanunu: our duty to speak up

The absurd persecution of nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu did not relent on his release

Duncan Campbell
The Guardian, Saturday 2 January 2010

More than five years ago, Mordechai Vanunu, a former technician at the Israeli nuclear facility in Dimona, was released from prison after serving 18 years for revealing Israel's nuclear weapons secrets. This week he was arrested again in Jerusalem, accused of talking to foreigners, in breach of conditions imposed on his release.

It was in 1986 that Vanunu told his story to the Sunday Times and was lured to Italy by a Mossad agent, where he was drugged and sent back to Israel, charged with treason and espionage. He emerged from prison in 2004 believing even more passionately in a nuclear-free world, and non-violence as a solution to the problems in the Middle East. His defiance has taken the form of talking to whoever will listen, and for this he continues to be prevented from joining his adoptive parents in the US or supporters who have offered him a home elsewhere. His latest arrest stems from a relationship with a Norwegian woman. As his lawyer said this week: "He is not accused of divulging any information. She is not interested in nuclear matters – she is interested in Mordechai Vanunu, who seems to be interested in her."

The absurd rationale for the restrictions is that he could still pass on damaging secrets to foreign powers. If that were the real reason, why was he initially told that he could leave the country if he just behaved for six months and did not talk to foreigners? Moreover, the idea that – a quarter of a century after holding a junior technician's post at Dimona, he has something dangerous to pass on is not remotely credible.

The real reason for harassing Vanunu is a vindictiveness towards a man who has been impertinent enough to come out of jail unbowed. Of course, if Vanunu had been allowed to leave the country, he would have drifted out of public consciousness. Now, every time he is arrested the world is reminded that Israel has a nuclear weapons facility, a fact used by its enemies to justify their own weapons programmes.

A terrific new documentary, The Most Dangerous Man in America – which will be seen in Britain soon – tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who in 1971 leaked the Pentagon papers about the conduct of the war in Vietnam, and faced the possibility of a 25-year jail term. Like Vanunu, Ellsberg had come across the secrets of what his government was doing and believed he had a duty to share it with the world. Like Vanunu, Ellsberg was vilified by his government; but the crude attempts to blacken his name backfired and Ellsberg was dramatically cleared. From his home in California, Ellsberg – now one of Vanunu's most consistent supporters – said yesterday: "I correspond to the American Vanunu, though Nixon didn't succeed in giving me the 115-year sentence he indicted me for." Without such whistleblowers prepared to risk their freedom, we would live in greater ignorance of what governments plan.

What happens to Vanunu is important for Britain and the British press. It was to London and the Sunday Times that he came with his story. It was from London that the first stage of his illegal kidnapping took place. The foreign secretary has this week rightly protested on behalf of Akmal Shaikh, executed for drugs smuggling in China. There is a similar duty to speak up on behalf of a man who trusted that Britain was a place where he could safely tell the world about the proliferation of nuclear weapons. As Yossi Melman wrote in Haaretz at the time of Vanunu's last arrest: "In a proud country that purports to observe the judicial and moral norms of the enlightened world, one might have expected it to take courage and allow Mordechai Vanunu to be free once and for all."

The Guardian

[TonyGosling]

Europe's Five "Undeclared Nuclear Weapons States"
Are Turkey, Germany, Belgium, The Netherlands and Italy Nuclear Powers?
http://globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17550

[TonyGosling]

Revealed: The Secrets Of Israel's Nuclear Arsenal
5th October 1986



Thanks for this Cem
For the record folks!

[TonyGosling]

Why does US send $10M *DAILY* to Israel who refuses to sign non proliferation treaty and refuses IAEA international nuclear inspection?
#InspectDimona Campaign via @EmpyreNews

https://www.thunderclap.it/projects/30836-inspectdimona-campaign