Trending Topics:

‘Washington Post’ all but leaves out the fact that scientist caught in ‘Mossad’ sting is Jewish and Zionist

US Politics
on 11 Comments

The Washington Post ran two stories the other day on the sentencing of a space scientist, Stewart Nozette, for espionage for turning over government secrets to someone he thought was working for Mossad. The first one hints at an ideological motivation:

A 54-year-old Maryland scientist said Wednesday that he regretted supplying classified information in exchange for cash to a person he believed was a member of Israeli intelligence but was really an undercover FBI agent.

The story, by Del Quentin Wilber, doesn’t say anything about Nozette’s motivation beyond greed. “Prosecutors say Nozette was motivated to become a traitor by greed.” 

The second story on the Nozette case by Wilber and Kathrine Driessen also harps on the greed angle:

Federal prosecutors said Nozette’s motive was simple: greed. In court Wednesday, prosecutors played a video clip of the last meeting between Nozette and the undercover FBI agent in a Mayflower Hotel suite that they said demonstrated his determination to exchange secrets for cash.

Till this in the penultimate paragraph:

Instead of asking him questions, agents crafted an elaborate sting that also took advantage of Nozette’s sympathy for Israel. Nozette is Jewish and his father “fervently supported” the Jewish state, according to defense lawyers.

It’s the only reference to Jewishness or Zionism in the two stories. Crazy. Dual loyalty in action, and the Post buries it.

I must quote Joan Walsh of Salon, appearing on Hardball a few weeks ago, during the federal funding for abortions flap:

The choice issue is a very tough issue, especially for those of us raised Catholic.

Beautiful. A transparent statement about religious-political adhesions, on the part of an outspoken liberal. Chris Matthews is also transparent about his Catholic struggle re choice.

When can we have anything like this conversation about Jewishness and Zionism?

Thanks to Peter Voskamp.

philweiss
About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.

Other posts by .


Posted In:
American Jewish Community
Israel Lobby
Media
US Politics

11 Responses

  1. Dan Crowther
    Dan Crowther
    March 23, 2012, 9:58 am

    hahaha…. Ok Sean Mcbride, I give up!! haha

    I read about this too, and I have to say, it was an all time white-wash – though he did seem to have significant cash flow problems…..But this part right here just about says it all:

    “Prosecutors say Nozette was motivated to become a traitor by greed and played a video clip in court of the final meeting between Nozette and the undercover agent. “I’ve crossed the Rubicon,” Nozette calmly tells the agent, because he would no longer be able to pass a government polygraph. Nozette adds that his initial price of $50,000 was too low and suggests that the Israeli government pay him at least $2 million.

    “He agreed to be a traitor to the United States with a smile on his face,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Anthony Asuncion told the judge. “

    • dahoit
      dahoit
      March 23, 2012, 10:20 am

      Well,at least the prosecutor nailed him on being a traitor to the US,instead of equivocating as usual.A fracture in the narrative!

  2. DICKERSON3870
    DICKERSON3870
    March 23, 2012, 9:58 am

    RE: “The Washington Post ran two stories the other day on the sentencing of a space scientist, Stewart Nozette, for espionage for turning over government secrets to someone he thought was working for Mossad.” ~ Weiss

    DOES ANYONE REMEMBER NEWS COVERAGE OF THIS BACK IN 2001?
    Israel’s Nuclear Triggers, by Grant Smith, Antiwar.com, 3/20/12

    (excerpt) FBI files detailing Israel’s stealth acquisition of U.S. nuclear triggers were declassified and released on Dec. 28, 2011. The FBI’s secret Portland and Los Angeles inter-office communications were originally scheduled for release in the year 2036. Their availability today reveals how Israel’s elite spy networks acquire U.S. nuclear technologies while evading criminal and diplomatic consequences.
    A kryton is a gas-filled tube used as a high-speed switch. U.S. State Department munitions licenses are needed to export krytons because they can be used as triggers for nuclear weapons. California-based MILCO International Inc. shipped 15 orders totaling 800 krytons through an intermediary to the Israeli Ministry of Defense between 1979 and 1983. MILCO obtained the krytons from EG&G Inc. After the U.S. government rejected several requests for kryton export licenses to Israel, Arnon Milchan’s Heli Trading Company brokered the transactions with MILCO. Milchan is an Israeli movie producer who became successful in Hollywood for such movies as Brazil, JFK, and Pretty Woman.
    The FBI file reveals that after the illicit kryton exports were discovered, a U.S. attorney tried to flip MILCO President Richard Kelly Smyth to implicate Milchan during intense plea bargaining. The gambit failed, and in May 1984 Smyth was indicted on 30 counts of smuggling and making false statements. Smyth and his wife promptly fled to Israel and remained at large until captured in Malaga, Spain, in July 2001 after Richard Smyth applied for Social Security benefits. INTERPOL arrested Smyth and extradited him to the United States, where he pleaded guilty to violating the U.S. Arms Export Control Act. In November 2001, Smyth was sentenced to 40 years in prison and fined $20,000, though he was freed within four years because of his advancing age. . .

    ENTIRE ARTICLE – http://original.antiwar.com/smith-grant/2012/03/21/israels-nuclear-triggers/

  3. upsidedownism
    upsidedownism
    March 23, 2012, 10:56 am

    “Dual loyalty in action, and the Post buries it.”
    ???
    Please explain to which country other than Israel do traitorous spies like Jonathan Pollard and Nozette feel any loyalty?

    One can and only wonder how often the FBI have considered catching other traitors in the same way as Nozette, but dropped the investigations when they realized the traitors in question were senators or representatives?

  4. Stateless American
    Stateless American
    March 23, 2012, 11:07 am

    Both Post stories were in the Metro section, btw–as if it were just a local story. The Post did the same thing with much of it’s coverage of former AIPAC honchos Rosen and Weissman.

    Is Nozette the guy who, when asked about spying for Israel, replied, “I thought I already was”?

  5. Kathleen
    Kathleen
    March 23, 2012, 12:35 pm

    The Post has been doing this for decades. Established.

    “It’s the only reference to Jewishness or Zionism in the two stories. Crazy. Dual loyalty in action, and the Post buries it.”

    Thought Stephen Greens article in Counterpunch years ago explained and gave solid examples of the Dual Loyalty issue as well as how investigations into possible crimes committed accessing and illegally passing on classified US intelligence have been shut down. He in particular mentions and writes about Stephen Bryen, Micheal Ledeen, Perle, Wolfowitz, Feith

    Weekend Edition Feb 28-Mar 01, 2004
    1Serving Two Flags
    Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration
    by STEPHEN GREEN

    Since 9-11, a small group of “neo-conservatives” in the Administration have effectively gutted–they would say reformed–traditional American foreign and security policy. Notable features of the new Bush doctrine include the pre-emptive use of unilateral force, and the undermining of the United Nations and the principle instruments and institutions of international law….all in the cause of fighting terrorism and promoting homeland security.

    Some skeptics, noting the neo-cons’ past academic and professional associations, writings and public utterances, have suggested that their underlying agenda is the alignment of U.S. foreign and security policies with those of Ariel Sharon and the Israeli right wing. The administration’s new hard line on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict certainly suggests that, as perhaps does the destruction, with U.S. soldiers and funds, of the military capacity of Iraq, and the current belligerent neo-con campaign against the other two countries which constitute a remaining counterforce to Israeli military hegemony in the region–Iran and Syria.

    Have the neo-conservatives–many of whom are senior officials in the Defense Department, National Security Council and Office of the Vice President–had dual agendas, while professing to work for the internal security of the United States against its terrorist enemies?

    A review of the internal security backgrounds of some of the best known among them strongly suggests the answer.
    Neo-Cons, Israel and the Bush Administration » Counterpunch: Tells …www.counterpunch.org/…/neo-cons-israel-and-the-bush-administrati…Cached
    You +1’d this publicly. Undo
    Feb 28, 2004 – by STEPHEN GREEN … National Security Council and Office of the Vice President–had dual agendas, … Loyalty, Patriotism and Character

  6. rpickar
    rpickar
    March 23, 2012, 12:42 pm

    Stewart Nozette combines two big interests of mine, space and Israel/Palestine. Nozette was a scientist and project manager associated with the California Space Institute (UC San Diego) in the 1980s, while I was an undergraduate in physics and political science. We attended the space topics luncheon.

    Nozette was not deeply involved with Judaism at all. I didn’t know the his father was passionately Zionist. What I do know is that Nozette was a passion.ate Zionist — except that for him, Zion was the Moon! Specifically, the South Pole-Aitken Basin impact crater, where he helped to discover that there is a great deal of water ice (many billions of tons) in the soil. This water could be used to support a substantial human community. The human colonization is the similarity with Zionism.

    Nozette was a project manager for the DoD’s Clementine spacecraft, which discovered evidence of ice on the lunar poles. A story about him: he had budgetary authority for the procurement contracts in the Clementine program. When the funding was authorized, there was a danger that if the political winds shifted, the money could be rescinded. Therefore, Nozette arranged for most of the funding, many tens of millions of dollars, to be spent on non-reversible contracts in just a few days. There would be no chance for a reversal of the decision to fund Clementine. The probe was very successful, discovering radar evidence of water in both poles.

    Alas, the brilliance also led to hubris and naivete.

  7. Kathleen
    Kathleen
    March 23, 2012, 12:43 pm

    Have read that deep FBI investigations into Feith, Wolfowitz etc alleged passing of highly classified US intelligence to Israeli officials and others have always been closed down. In Stephen Green’s article
    “PAUL WOLFOWITZ : A WELL PLACED FRIEND

    In 1973, in the dying days of the Nixon Administration, Wolfowitz was recruited to work for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA). There was a certain irony in the appointment, for in the late 1960′s, as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Wolfowitz had been a student and protege of Albert Wohlstetter, an influential, vehement opponent of any form of arms control or disarmament, vis a vis the Soviets. Wolfowitz also brought to ACDA a strong attachment to Israel’s security, and a certain confusion about his obligation to U.S. national security.

    In 1978, he was investigated for providing a classified document on the proposed sale of U.S. weapons to an Arab government, to an Israel Government official, through an AIPAC intermediary. An inquiry was launched and dropped, however, and Wolfowitz continued to work at ACDA until 1980.

    In 1990, after a decade of work with the State Department in Washington and abroad, Wolfowitz was brought into DoD as Undersecretary for Policy by then Secretary of Defense Richard Cheney. Two years later, in 1992, the first Bush Administration launched a broad inter-departmental investigation into the export of classified technology to China. O particular concern at the time was the transfer to China by Israel of U.S. Patriot missiles and/or technology. During that investigation, in a situation very reminiscent of the Bryen/Varian Associates/klystrons affair two years earlier, the Pentagon discovered that Wolfowitz’s office was promoting the export to Israel of advanced AIM-9M air-to-air missiles.”
    “

  8. Kathleen
    Kathleen
    March 23, 2012, 12:44 pm

    In Green’s article:
    “Even more revealing perhaps, had the transition team known of it, was Feith’s view of “technology cooperation,” as expressed in a 1992 Commentary article: “It is in the interest of U.S. and Israel to remove needless impediments to technological cooperation between them. Technologies in the hands of responsible, friendly countries facing military threats, countries like Israel, serve to deter aggression, enhance regional stability and promote peace thereby.”

    What Douglas Feith had neglected to say, in this last article, was that he thought that individuals could decide on their own whether the sharing of classified information was “technical cooperation,” an unauthorized disclosure, or a violation of U.S. Code 794c, the “Espionage Act.”

    Ten years prior to writing the Commentary piece, Feith had made such a decision on his own. At the time, March of 1972, Feith was a Middle East analyst in the Near East and South Asian Affairs section of the National Security Council. Two months before, in January, Judge William Clark had replaced Richard Allen as National Security Advisor, with the intention to clean house. A total of nine NSC staff members were fired, including Feith, who’d only been with the NSC for a year. But Feith was fired because he’d been the object of an inquiry into whether he’d provided classified material to an official of the Israeli Embassy in Washington. The FBI had opened the inquiry. And Clark, who had served in U.S. Army counterintelligence in the 1950′s, took such matters very seriously…..more seriously, apparently, than had Richard Allen.

    Feith did not remain unemployed for long, however. Richard Perle, who was in 1982 serving in the Pentagon as Assistant secretary for International Security Policy, hired him on the spot as his “Special Counsel,” and then as his Deputy. Feith worked at ISP until 1986, when he left government service to form a small but influential law firm, then based in Israel.”
    “

  9. Justice Please
    Justice Please
    March 25, 2012, 5:01 pm

    “Dual loyalty in action”

    There’s nothing “dual” about harming the country you live in.

Leave a Reply