14 DAY TRIAL // A new set of documents from the Snowden stash reveal that the United States’ involvement with Israel goes deeper than officials let on.
The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald reports that the files help shed light on how the United States and its partners enable Israel’s military assaults, including the one on Gaza.
It seems that over the past decade, the NSA has started to help out its Israeli partners by providing surveillance information to the Israeli SIGINT National Unit, including data used to monitor and target Palestinians. The GCHQ (UK) and the CSEC (Canada) often joined in on the efforts.
Basically, the US covertly paid large amounts of cash to Israeli operatives until the US government’s involvement in Israel became indispensable, as Greenwald puts it.
While it isn’t exactly a secret that the US keeps pouring money in Israel, it does seem rather inappropriate that the Obama administration tries to pose as a helpless witness to what’s happening in Gaza.
While the US president refers to the civilian deaths in Gaza as if it’s a situation that cannot be stopped, like a natural disaster, the US government provides Israel with weapons, defends it publicly and continues to pour money into the country.
Even so, The Intercept writes that, according to the leaked documents from Edward Snowden, the entire assault on Gaza would be impossible without the protection and support of the US government, which proclaims to be trying to broker peace in the Middle East.
Previous reports based on files from Snowden have revealed that the NSA commonly shares intelligence data with Israel without sifting through the trove. Basically, whatever it collects it delivers to the Israeli intelligence agency as it is. “NSA maintains a far-reaching technical and analytic relationship with the Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU) sharing information on access, intercept, targeting, language, analysis and reporting,” reads a secret file from April 2013 that was published yesterday.
The relationship between the NSA and the Israeli SIGINT goes deeper, as the two worked together on various plans. On the one hand, the two work together to gain access to targets in countries from North Africa, the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, South Asia and the Islamic republics of the former Soviet Union.
In the decades they have worked together, the two countries have collaborated on numerous occasions. “Gladiator,” for instance, is an intelligence-sharing relationship that was expanded between 2003 and 2004, when Israel pushed their US partners to pay hundreds of millions of dollars to fund the country’s activities.
It looks like the British and Canadian partners of the NSA also started providing the Israeli with selected communications data they had collected.
Even as the NSA and its partners support Israel with money and intelligence, it seems that there were many discussions about whether Israelis were more of a menace rather than an ally. Most specifically, the Americans and the British were afraid that Israel was a real threat to the region’s stability, and policy makers were concerned about the threat Israel posed to a peaceful resolution of the Iran problem.