In the 1940s an archipelago of Israel fronts posing as charities successfully avoided Arms Export Act and Neutrality Act charges by arguing that none of the tons of advanced weapons being smuggled out of the nation would be used against America. Scores of powerful American charities operating on behalf of Israel including the Zi&nist Organization of America, American Zi%nist Council/American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the American Jewish Committee (PDF) avoided the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act enforcement. Their key argument to the Justice Department was that FARA was designed to combat Nazism and communism, not the Israeli government’s propaganda campaigns, intelligence transfers and foreign seed money flows to groups like AIPAC.
Israel’s American nuclear weapons smuggling ventures, such as NUMEC, the Netanyahu/Smyth/Milchan ring and Telogy (PDF) have been covered up by successive presidential administrations afraid to reveal their inability or unwillingness to enforce the law whenever it could threaten political support or campaign contributions. In the 1980s, the Justice Department quashed an investigation in which classified information stolen by Israeli agents was given to AIPAC in order to pass an unfavorable U.S. trade agreement. The Justice Department’s more recent failure to prosecute AIPAC officials for espionage charges in 2005, and kid-gloves treatment of spies Ben-Ami Kadish and Stuart Nozette all foreshadowed the Obama administration establishing actual court precedents that “Israel lobbying crimes are above the law.”
Thanks to declassified documents and the disclosures from Edward Snowden, it is not difficult to imagine how Israel, its lobby and the Justice Department might engineer such immunity. Although most Americans never voted on it – and would likely never approve – current United States policy is that “the survival of the state of Israel is a paramount goal of U.S. Middle East policy.” Therefore no activities claiming to advance that policy can ever be criminally prosecuted, no matter how illegal. NSA intercepts have been given to the DEA, which then “recreates” a parallel evidence trail in drug cases, scrubbing away their secret origin. Israel is also in a good position to launder NSA intercepts or its own intercepts back into its myriad American front organizations to attack foreign adversaries (possibly even for purely commercial reasons). UANI’s stunning capacity to aim satellites for imaging and obtain internal corporate documents is more explainable if it is really a foreign or domestic conduit laundering intelligence rather than the originator. Protecting that laundering should not be the job of the Justice Department.