America supplies Israel with NSA signals intelligence

Israel, currently engaged in bloody, unjustified onslaught on the Lebanese and the Palestinian territories, is receiving intelligence from the US's National Security Agency, a report by columnist Sidney Blumenthal on Salon revealed.

Blumenthal, a former assistant and senior adviser to President Clinton, asserted that he’s in touch with "a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation" to provide the Israelis with signals intelligence from American assets to help them monitor what he described as transfer of weapons from Syria and Iran to the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah.

Providing Israel with intelligence to stop weapons from reaching Hezbollah is said to be approved by the American President George W. Bush.

The Bush administration is under the direct control of and influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney's staff and Elliot Abrams, senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, which according to Blumenthal, author of The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), and The Permanent Campaign and The Rise of the Counter-Establishment, and columnist for the Guardian, Salon.com, and OpenDemocracy.net , and a former staff writer for the Washington Post, the New Yorker and the New Republic, further stated that President Bush, seeks initiating 'four front war' by giving Israel the pretext to attack Iran and Syria.

The restricted-access article stated that” The National Security Agency is providing signal intelligence to Israel to monitor whether Syria and Iran are supplying new armaments to Hezbollah as it fires hundreds of missiles into northern Israel, according to a national security official with direct knowledge of the operation. President Bush has approved the secret program,” according to Raw Story.

“Inside the administration, neoconservatives on Vice President Dick Cheney's national security staff and Elliott Abrams, the neoconservative senior director for the Near East on the National Security Council, are prime movers behind sharing NSA intelligence with Israel, and they have discussed Syrian and Iranian supply activities as a potential pretext for Israeli bombing of both countries, the source privy to conversations about the program says. (Intelligence, including that gathered by the NSA, has been provided to Israel in the past for various purposes.) The neoconservatives are described as enthusiastic about the possibility of using NSA intelligence as a lever to widen the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah and Israel and Hamas into a four-front war.”


“Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is said to have been "briefed" and to be "on board," but she is not a central actor in pushing the covert neoconservative scenario. Her "briefing" appears to be an aspect of an internal struggle to intimidate and marginalize her.

Recently she has come under fire from prominent neoconservatives who oppose her support for diplomatic negotiations with Iran to prevent its development of nuclear weaponry.”

Quoting informed sources in both the U.S. and Israel, Asharq al-Awsat newspaper reported earlier that Washington was planning to deliver 100 "bunker buster" bombs to Israel to kill Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah, and destroy the group trenches.

A New York Times report, citing U.S. officials, further stated that the bombs were part of a sales deal approved by the Pentagon last year.

Source: www.aljazeera.com