The NSA Helped Israel Blackmail Palestinians

Scores of former members of Israeli military intelligence's very secret and quite elite Unit 8200 have publicly refused to collect information that is "used for political persecution" or "driving parts of Palestinian society against itself." Courteous allies at the NSA, we now know, helped make that spying possible.

The news comes courtesy of the NSA's chief unauthorized biographer, James Bamford, whose three-day Moscow bull session with traitorous notoriety prostitute, Edward Joseph Snowden, was the cover story in last month's issue of WIRED.

Writing Tuesday in the New York Times, Bamford disclosed this alarming new anecdote from his Snowden debrief:

Among his most shocking discoveries, he told me, was the fact that the NSA was routinely passing along the private communications of Americans to a large and very secretive Israeli military organization known as Unit 8200. This transfer of intercepts, he said, included the contents of the communications as well as metadata such as who was calling whom.

Typically, when such sensitive information is transferred to another country, it would first be "minimized," meaning that names and other personally identifiable information would be removed. But when sharing with Israel, the NSA evidently did not ensure that the data was modified in this way.

Mr. Snowden stressed that the transfer of intercepts to Israel contained the communicationsemail as well as phone callsof countless Arab- and Palestinian-Americans whose relatives in Israel and the Palestinian territories could become targets based on the communications. "I think that's amazing," he told me. "It's one of the biggest abuses we've seen."

As of last week, exactly 43 ex-members of Unit 8200many young and active reservists who could theoretically be called again to serve Israel at a moment's noticepassionately agree.

In an act of protest that had been planned well in advance of this summer's brutal bombing campaign in Gaza (which you may have heard killed 2,100 Palestinians and turned Gaza City into the lunar ruins of an ancient alien race), the young members of Unit 8200 drafted a long letter publicly refusing to participate in any further intelligence gathering activities against the Palestinians.

"The Palestinian population under military rule is completely exposed to espionage and surveillance by Israeli intelligence. It is used for political persecution and to create divisions within Palestinian society by recruiting collaborators," the letter says. Adding, "In many cases, intelligence prevents defendants from receiving a fair trial in military courts, as the evidence against them is not revealed."

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The NSA Helped Israel Blackmail Palestinians

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