Mossad Hunts Reporter in Hiding, Has 'Taken off Gloves' in Israel’s Pentagon Papers Case

Israel is hunting down a journalist who exposed its human rights violations in the 2008 Israeli massacre in Gaza in which 1,400 Gazans were killed.

Uri Blau, a reporter with the Haaretz newspaper, has gone underground in London and is threatened with espionage by the notorious Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police.

First Israel went after innocent Palestinians, then they came for human rights activists, then they came for journalists. Who is next? Ask Mordechai Vanunu, who 24 years ago blew the whistle on Israel's nuclear weapons of mass destruction what awaits Blau.

We hope that Uri Blau, a hero for truth and justice in the tradition of Daniel Ellsberg, will seek and be granted asylum from Israel's oppressive state police.

From Jonathan Cook in CounterPunch:

An Israeli journalist who went into hiding after writing a series of reports showing lawbreaking approved by Israeli army commanders faces a lengthy jail term for espionage if caught, as Israeli security services warned at the weekend they would ‘remove the gloves’ to track him down.

The Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, said it was treating Uri Blau, a reporter with the liberal Haaretz daily newspaper who has gone underground in London, as a ‘fugitive felon’ and that a warrant for his arrest had been issued.

Options being considered are an extradition request to the British authorities or, if that fails, a secret operation by Mossad, Israel’s spy agency, to smuggle him back, according to Maariv, a right-wing newspaper.

It was revealed yesterday that Mr Blau’s informant, Anat Kamm, 23, a former conscript soldier who copied hundreds of classified documents during her military service, had confessed shortly after her arrest in December to doing so to expose ‘war crimes’.

The Shin Bet claims that Mr Blau is holding hundreds of classified documents, including some reported to relate to Operation Cast Lead, Israel’s attack on Gaza in winter 2008 in which the army is widely believed to have violated the rules of war.

Other documents, the basis of a Haaretz investigation published in 2008, concern a meeting between the head of the army, Gabi Ashkenazi, and the Shin Bet in which it was agreed to ignore a court ruling and continue carrying out executions of Palestinian leaders in the occupied territories.

Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet, who has said his organisation was previously ‘too sensitive with the investigation’, is now demanding that Mr Blau reveal his entire document archive and take a lie-detector test on his return to identify his sources, according to Haaretz. The newspaper and its lawyers have recommended that he remain in hiding to protect his informants.

Haaretz has also revealed that, in a highly unusual move shortly before Israel’s attack on Gaza, it agreed to pull a printed edition after the army demanded at the last minute that one of Mr Blau’s stories not be published. His report had already passed the military censor, which checks that articles do not endanger national security.

Lawyers and human rights groups fear that the army and Shin Bet are trying to silence investigative journalists and send a warning to other correspondents not to follow in Mr Blau’s path.

‘We have a dangerous precedent here, whereby the handing over of material to an Israeli newspaper … is seen by the prosecutor’s office as equivalent to contact with a foreign agent,’ said Eitan Lehman, Ms Kamm’s lawyer. ‘The very notion of presenting information to the Israeli public alone is taken as an intention to hurt national security.’

The Shin Bet’s determination to arrest Mr Blau was revealed after a blanket gag order was lifted late last week on Ms Kamm’s case. She has been under house arrest since December. She has admitted copying hundreds of classified documents while serving in the office of Brig Gen Yair Naveh, in charge of operations in the West Bank, between 2005 and 2007.

Under an agreement with the Shin Bet last year, Haaretz and Mr Blau handed over 50 documents and agreed to the destruction of Mr Blau’s computer.

Both sides accuse the other of subsequently reneging on the deal: the Shin Bet says Mr Blau secretly kept other documents copied by Ms Kamm that could be useful to Israel’s enemies; while Mr Blau says the Shin Bet used the returned documents to track down Ms Kamm, his source, after assurances that they would not do so.

Haaretz said Mr Blau fears that they will try to identify his other informants if he hands over his archive.

Mr Blau learnt of his predicament in December, while out of the country on holiday. He said a friend called to warn that the Shin Bet had broken into his home and ransacked it. He later learnt they had been monitoring his telephone, e-mail and computer for many months.

In a move that has baffled many observers, the Shin Bet revealed last week that Mr Blau was hiding in London, despite the threat that it would make him an easier target for other countries’ intelligence agencies.

Amir Mizroch, an analyst with the right-wing Jerusalem Post newspaper, noted that it was as if Israel’s security services were ‘saying to Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, Hizbullah and Iranian intelligence agents in London: ‘Yalla, be our guests, go get Uri Blau’.’ He added that the real goal might be to flush out Mr Blau so that he would seek sanctuary at the Israeli embassy.

Ms Kamm is charged with espionage with intent to harm national security, the harshest indictment possible and one that could land in her jail for 25 years. Yesterday another of her lawyers, Avigdor Feldman, appealed to Mr Blau to return to Israel and give back the documents to help ‘minimise the affair’.

‘The real question is whether this exceptionally heavy-handed approach is designed only to get back Kamm’s documents or go after Blau and his other sources,’ said Jeff Halper, an Israeli analyst. ‘It may be that Kamm is the excuse the security services need to identify Blau’s circle of informants.’

Mr Blau has already published several stories, apparently based on Ms Kamm’s documents, showing that the army command approved policies that not only broke international law but also violated the rulings of Israel’s courts.

His reports have included revelations that senior commanders approved extra-judicial assassinations in the occupied territories that were almost certain to kill Palestinian bystanders; that, in violation of a commitment to the high court, the army issued orders to execute wanted Palestinians even if they could be safely captured; and that the defence ministry compiled a secret report showing that the great majority of settlements in the West Bank were illegal even under Israeli law.

Although the original stories date to 2008, the army issued a statement belatedly this week that Mr Blau’s reports were ‘outrageous and misleading’. No senior commanders have been charged over the army’s lawbreaking activities.

B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said its research had shown that ‘in many cases soldiers have been conducting themselves in the territories as if they were on a hit mission, as opposed to arrest operations’.

It added that the authorities had ‘rushed to investigate the leak and chose to ignore the severe suspicions of blatant wrongdoings depicted in those documents’.

A group of senior journalists established a petition this week calling for Mr Blau to be spared a trial: ‘So far, the authorities have not prosecuted journalists for holding secret information, which most of us have had in one form or another. This policy by the prosecution reflects, in our view, an imbalance between journalistic freedom, the freedom of expression and the need for security.’

However, media coverage of the case in Israel has been largely hostile. Yuval Elbashan, a lawyer, wrote in Haaretz yesterday that Mr Blau’s fellow military reporters and analysts had in the past few days abandoned their colleague and proven ‘their loyalty to the [security] system as the lowliest of its servants’.

One, Yossi Yehoshua, a military correspondent with the country’s largest-circulation newspaper, Yedioth Aharonoth, who is said to have been approached by Ms Kamm before she turned to Mr Blau, is due to testify against her in her trial due next month.

Chat forums and talkback columns also suggest little sympathy among the Israeli public for either Ms Kamm or Mr Blau. Several Hebrew websites show pictures of Ms Kamm behind bars or next to a hangman’s noose.

A report on Israel National News, a news service for settlers, alleged that Ms Kamm had been under the influence of ‘rabidly left-wing’ professors at Tel Aviv University when she handed over the documents to the Haaretz reporter.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are ‘Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East’ (Pluto Press) and ‘Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair‘ (Zed Books). His website is http://www.jkcook.net/.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National (http://www.thenational.ae/), published in Abu Dhabi.

Israel Arrests Nuke Whistleblower ... Again

Won't Israel ever get tired of being anti-liberty, anti-peace, and anti-justice? Israel ought to just join the many Arab autocracies in the region, they have much in common. Israel has arrested Mordechai Vanunu yet again. [I would toss in a place to writer letters of support for the man, but Israel won't allow Vanunu to receive them.]

His crime: "Suspicion" of "meeting with foreigners." Vanunu is not allowed to leave Israel or meet with "foreigners", decades after alerting the world that Israel developed nuclear weapons of mass destruction.
*******
by Daniel Ellsberg

Mordechai Vanunu — my friend, my hero, my brother — has again been arrested in Israel on "suspicion" of the "crime" of "meeting with foreigners." I myself have been complicit in this offense, traveling twice to Israel for the express purpose of meeting with him, openly, and expressing support for the actions for which he was imprisoned for over eighteen years. His offense has been to defy openly and repeatedly ,conditions put on his freedom of movement and associations and speech after he had served his full sentence, restrictions on his human rights which were a direct carry-over from the British Mandate, colonial regulations in clear violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such restrictions have no place in a nation evincing respect for a rule of law and fundamental human rights. His arrest and confinement are outrages and should be ended immediately.

My perspective on Mordechai and his behavior was expressed as well as I could do it today in the following op-ed published in 2004 on the day of his release from prison. I can only say that I would be proud to be known as the American Vanunu: though my own possible sentence of 115 years for revealing state secrets was averted by disclosure of government misconduct against me which pales next to the Israeli misconduct in assaulting, drugging and kidnapping Vanunu in the process of bringing him to trial, let alone the eleven years of solitary confinement he was forced to endure.

*** [Published 4/21/04 in the Los Angeles Times]
Mordechai Vanunu is the preeminent hero of the nuclear era. He consciously risked all he had in life to warn his own country and the world of the true extent of the nuclear danger facing us. And he paid the full price, a burden in many ways worse than death, for his heroic act — for doing exactly what he should have done and what others should be doing.

Vanunu's "crime" was committed in 1986, when he gave the London Sunday Times a series of photos he had taken within the Israeli nuclear weapons facility at Dimona, where he had worked as a technician.

For that act — revealing that his country's program and stockpile were much larger than the CIA or others had estimated — Vanunu was kidnapped from the Rome airport by agents of the Israeli Mossad and secretly transported back for a closed trial in which he was sentenced to 18 years in prison.

He spent the first 11 1/2 years in solitary confinement in a 6-by-9-foot cell, an unprecedented term of solitary under conditions that Amnesty International called "cruel, inhuman and degrading."

Now, after serving his full term, he is due to be released today. But his "unfreedom" is to be continued by restrictions on his movements and his contacts: He cannot leave Israel, he will be confined to a single town, he cannot communicate with foreigners face to face or by phone, fax or e-mail (purely punitive conditions because any classified information that he may have possessed is by now nearly two decades old).

The irony of all this is that no country in the world has a stronger stake than Israel in preventing nuclear proliferation, above all in the Middle East. Yet Israel's secret nuclear policies — to this day it does not acknowledge that it possesses such weapons — are shortsighted and self-destructive. They promote rather than block proliferation by encouraging the country's neighbors to develop their own, comparable weapons.

This will not change without public mobilization and democratic pressure, which in turn demand public awareness and discussion. It was precisely this that Vanunu sought to stimulate.

Not in Israel or in any other case — not that of the U.S., Russia, England, France, China, India or Pakistan — has the decision to become a nuclear weapons state ever been made democratically or even with the knowledge of the full Cabinet. It is likely that in an open discussion not one of these states could convince its own people or the rest of the world that it had a legitimate reason for possessing as many warheads as the several hundred that Israel allegedly has (far beyond any plausible requirement for deterrence).

More Vanunus are urgently needed. That is true not only in Israel but in every nuclear weapons state, declared and undeclared. Can anyone fail to recognize the value to world security of a heroic Pakistani, Indian, Iraqi, Iranian or North Korean Vanunu making comparable revelations?

And the world's need for such secret-telling is not limited to citizens of what nuclear weapons states presumptuously call rogue nations. Every nuclear weapons state has secret policies, aims, programs and plans that contradict its obligations under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and the 1995 Declaration of Principles agreed to at the NPT Renewal Conference. Every official with knowledge of these violations could and should consider doing what Vanunu did.

That is what I should have done in the early '60s based on what I knew about the secret nuclear planning and practices of the United States when I consulted at the Defense Department, on loan from the Rand Corp., on problems of nuclear command and control. I drafted the Secretary of Defense Guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the general nuclear war plans, and the extreme dangers of our practices and plan were apparent to me.

I now feel derelict for wrongfully keeping secret the documents in my safe revealing this catastrophically reckless posture. But I did not then have Vanunu's example to guide me.
When I finally did have an example in front of me — that of young Americans who were choosing to go to prison rather than participate in what I too knew was a hopeless, immoral war — I was inspired in 1971 to turn over a top-secret history of presidential lies about the war in Vietnam to 19 newspapers. I regret only that I didn't do it earlier, before the bombs started falling.

Vanunu should long since have been released from solitary and from prison, not because he has "suffered enough" but because what he did was the correct and courageous thing to do in the face of the foreseeable efforts to silence and punish him.

The outrageous and illegal restrictions proposed to be inflicted on him when he finally steps out of prison after 18 years should be widely protested and rejected, not only because they violate his fundamental human rights but because the world needs to hear this man's voice.

The cult and culture of secrecy in every nuclear weapons state have endangered humanity and continues to threaten its survival. Vanunu's challenge to that wrongful and dangerous secrecy must be joined worldwide.

Copyright 2004 Los Angeles Times

--Daniel Ellsberg, a former State Department and Defense Department official, released the 'Pentagon Papers' to the press in 1971.

Israel Losing Its Soul

Israel won't let nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu leave Israel or talk to the press, because he is a perceived threat to national security, who would criticize Israel in the world press.

Now, Israel won't let American anti-militarist critic, Norman Finkelstein, into Israel because he is a perceived threat to national security, who would criticize Israel in the Israeli and Palestinian press.

As Israel continues its obscene violence in Gaza that has killed, wounded and starved 10,000s of innocents, the world watches a country relying on militarism and collective punishment lose its soul.

Mordechai Vanunu: Nuclear Whistle Blower, Under House Arrest in Israel, Because Israel Still Refuses His Freedom to Speak to Foreign Journalists

A man blows the whistle on WMDs in the Middle East, and is kidnapped and jailed 18 years, over 11 years in solitary confinement. Iraq under Saddam. No. Israel which has disgraced itself.

Mordechai Vanunu has spent 18 years in prison in Israel after being illegally kidnapped in Italy.

Since his release in 2004, Vanunu "was sentenced to six more months in prison for violating terms of his parole. The sentence was considered unusual even by the prosecution who expected a suspended sentence. In response, Amnesty International challenged the detention, issuing a press release on July 2, 2007, stating:

'The organization considers Mordechai Vanunu to be a prisoner of conscience and calls for his immediate and unconditional release. (from Wikipedia)'"

Writes activist Eileen Fleming:

Mordechai Vanunu was informed that the Israeli government has continued his house arrest in Jerusalem and has renewed all the restrictions against him, for the fourth time and third year of captivity in east Jerusalem.

Although 'freed' from 18 years in jail on April 21, 2004 for telling the world Israel had gone nuclear (in the London Sunday Times, October 5, 1986) Vanunu has been forbidden to leave Israel, forbidden to speak to media and to foreigners under the draconian restrictions of the Emergency Defense Regulations (EDR) which were implemented first by Britain against Palestinians and Jews after World War II.

After WWII, a leading Jewish attorney, Yaccov Shapiro, who became Israel's Minister of Justice described the EDR as 'unparalleled in any civilized country: there were no such laws in Nazi Germany.'

Israel's worse nightmare: Enforcement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Nuclear Whistleblower Vanunu Appeals Jail Sentence for Speaking, Free on Appeal

Via Reuters:

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu is contesting a new jail six-month sentence received for maintaining unauthorized ties with foreigners after he completed an 18-year prison term for treason (blowing the whistle on the development of nuclear weapons), his lawyer said on Monday.

The unauthorized ties were specifically speaking with reporters and writing in Internet chatrooms on the topics of human rights, freedom and a nuclear-free world, communications violating the terms of his parole from an Israeli prison.

Most of his prison sentence was spent in solitary confinement, conditions that human rights organisations have condemned on humanitarian grounds.

The government's refusal to let Vanunu leave Israel is not popular with many citizens of Israel. See Haaretz' Let Him Go Already.

Attorney Avigdor Feldman said that Vanunu had filed an appeal on Sunday with the district court in Jerusalem, where a lower court sentenced him to six months behind bars in July.

"The immediate significance is that my client will not be going back to jail any time soon," Feldman told Reuters, adding that he expected a decision on the appeal within three months.

Vanunu was first imprisoned in 1986 after giving a tell-all interview to a British newspaper about his work as a mid-level technician at Israel's main atomic reactor outside the southern desert town of Dimona. The disclosures all but blew away the iron-clad secrecy around Israel's assumed atomic arsenal.

Vanunu was freed in 2004 but barred indefinitely from leaving Israel by order of defense officials who argued that he had more state secrets to spill. Vanunu, 52, has denied that.

Under the terms of his release, Vanunu was also required to seek official permission for contacts with foreigners. Several unauthorized interviews he gave to international media about Israel's nuclear program landed him back in court.

Israel neither confirms nor denies having the Middle East's only atomic weapons under a policy of "strategic ambiguity" billed as warding off enemies while avoiding arms races.

Should the Jerusalem District Court rule against Vanunu's appeal, he could turn to the Supreme Court, Feldman said. However, the Supreme Court has already rejected a petition by Vanunu to overturn the travel ban imposed on him by the state.

A Jewish convert to Christianity, Vanunu argues that by refusing international inspections at the Dimona reactor Israel inflames regional tensions and risks a "second Holocaust".

Jerusalem District Court had held off implementing July's sentence pending a decision by Vanunu on whether to appeal.

###

Israel Refuses to Let Mordechai Vanunu Leave Country

Nice. After spending 18 years in an Israeli prison for blowing the whistle on Israel's secret program to develop atomic bombs, Israel, taking its cues from the Soviet Union and the United States, refuses to let this man leave the hell that is Israel.

[27 April 2006: from Haaretz: Let Him Go Already]

Vanunu's 18 years in an Israeli prison, most of it spent in solitary confinement in a small, windowless cell, came to a temporary end when he was released in April 2004.

Now he is appealing a further six-month sentence handed down on his new charges. As Jerry Levin writes:

Specifically he is charged with:
1) maintaining contacts or exchanging information with foreign citizens especially journalists, and
2) coming within 500 meters of places from which it is possible to leave Israel, including the West Bank.
The charges detail 21 interviews with "foreign journalists" and "chat room" conversations and with trying to go to Bethlehem on Christmas Eve 2004.

What the hell is Israel trying to do?

Letters and cash can be sent to:

-Mordechai Vanunu
Waiting In East Jerusalem
To Be Free, To Leave
P.O. Box 20102
Salah Adin St' - post office
East Jerusalem 91384

Writes Vanunu:

I WANT TO BE FREE.
I WANT TO LEAVE THIS COUNTRY.
21 YEARS IN ISRAEL PRISON IS ENOUGH.

Mordechai Vanunu's site is at: http://www.serve.com/vanunu/ .

###

Nuclear Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu Free on Appeal, Faces Prison Again

Nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu (pictured at right) spent 18 years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement, for telling a British newspaper in 1986 about Israel's surreptitiously developed nuclear weapons program.

A Jerusalem court convicted Vanunu last week of violating parole restrictions by talking to the media and other human beings outside his native country, Israel.

The case is under appeal and Vanunu is free on appeal, but could face an additional six months in prison.

An AP report reads that emerging from an Israeli courtroom, Vanunu said the verdict proves "that Israel is not a democracy," and asked to be allowed to leave the country.

"I want to leave this country," he said. "I want to be free."

Vanunu is working for a non-nuclear world, non-violence, democracy and civil liberties, as Israel remains adamant in its position that Vanunu not be allowed to leave the country for his crime of alerting the world of Israel's development of nuclear weapons.

###

Israel and U.S. Heading the Catastrophic Way

The Jerusalem Post reports July 7 that our intrepid Secretary of State will begin a five-day visit to Israel on July 16.

The Post, under the ominous banner, The Iranian Threat, writes:

Iran is becoming increasingly dangerous, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

The secretary of state added that while US President George W. Bush was still committed to finding a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear crisis, Iran should know that US policy included 'coercive elements,' as well.

Still committed to finding a diplomatic solution? Very funny. I wonder what the real agenda of Rice could be.

Meanwhile, the man who blew the whistle on the introduction of nuclear weapons into the Middle East by the region's most militant, aggressor nation that has killed 1,000s of innocents in the last 25 years has been imprisoned again for the crime of talking to the media and other human beings outside his native country—Mordechai Vanunu.

Vanunu's imprisonment occurred as the neocon American-Israeli war hawk, Lewis Libby, had his own imprisonment commuted by the corrupt American militarist, George W. Bush.

From CounterPunch:

When the Crimes of the White House are Unpunishable
Scooter Libby and Mordechai Vanunu

By DANIEL ELLSBERG

On the day that Scooter Libby's prison sentence was lifted by President Bush, Mordechai Vanunu was sentenced to prison, again, in Israel. In both cases, the underlying offense was the same: speaking to journalists. In each case, the nominal charges were otherwise. For Libby, lying under oath about the circumstances, thereby obstructing justice. For Vanunu, it was breaking a restriction laid upon him when he emerged from prison three years ago, after serving an earlier full sentence of eighteen years, also for speaking to journalists: he was ordered not to speak, at all, to journalists or foreigners. Like a free man, he did both, openly and repeatedly.

But whereas Libby had passed classified information, and Vanunu had served his earlier sentence for doing the same, in this instance Vanunu was not charged with revealing any secrets. The transcripts or published accounts of his conversations being available, it was open knowledge that what he had mainly talked about was the truth of his personal convictions about nuclear weapons: that they should universally be abolished, Israel's among them.

Perjury, with the intent and effect of obstructing justice (successfully, as it happens, in Libby's case) is an ancient, established crime under virtually any system of justice. Vanunu's act of speaking his mind freely is not, under existing international human rights law. Nor is it a domestic crime in other democratic societies. These were not conditions of parole, as frequently misstated. Vanunu was not paroled from prison for his earlier conviction, but served his full sentence of eighteen years, eleven and a half of them in solitary confinement. Therefore, under most systems of criminal justice, he should have been subject to no further restrictions or requirements.

What, then, was the legal status of the restrictions which he has now been sentenced for violating? The answer is that the Israeli law under which his speech and movement are restricted is an unmodified relic of the British Mandate period in Palestine, i.e. a colonial regulation. Nothing like it exists in any other democracy in the world. It is as if the young United States had reenacted the British oppressions and restrictions that lead to the revolution, and that were condemned in the Declaration of Independence and banned in the Bill of Rights. Vanunu mordantly reflected on hearing his new sentence that perhaps his appeal should be to the Queen of England.

There are other differences between the two cases. The clear purpose of Lewis Libby's conversations with journalists was to discredit someone, Joseph Wilson, who had publicly told truth that contradicted Administration lies. Some of the classified information he had revealed-at the direction of his boss, Vice President Richard Cheney-was itself deliberately misleading about the basis on which the country had been led to war in Iraq. The passage he revealed from a secret National Intelligence Estimate was selectively lifted from a context that included warnings that the estimate in it was uncertain and controversial within the intelligence community. It was, in fact, mistaken. And by the time Libby was authorized to release it by the Vice President (whose authority to do so is very much in question), both Cheney and Libby knew this, that the estimate being shown was false.

The other piece of classified information Libby revealed was the name and job of Joseph Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, a clandestine CIA operative whose work was to discover patterns of nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. Full disclosure: I do not consider all classified information sacrosanct or properly kept secret, and I myself was put on trial for deliberately copying and revealing classified information, the Pentagon Papers. But I would not have revealed Valerie Plame's name or clandestine status. She was doing work that unquestionably served the national security interests of the United States and for her to do it obviously required and deserved secrecy.

Moreover, that particular secret (unlike anything in the Pentagon Papers) was protected by a law passed by Congress, the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, criminalizing knowing revelation of the identities of covert operatives. (Whether Libby knew her clandestine status remains unknown and unproveable, thanks to his lapses of memory, or perhaps, lies). I don't object to that narrowly-defined act, whereas I would oppose strongly a general Official Secrets Act such as Britain's, criminalizing any and all revelations of classified information, which has so far been precluded from passage by our First Amendment.
There is no question that the information Vanunu revealed to the press in 1986-primarily, that Israel, which has never signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty nor opened its nuclear operations to any international inspection, had been for some time a nuclear weapons state, with an arsenal larger than that of Britain and perhaps larger than France-was regarded as secret in Israel and his revelation as illegal. On the other hand, no other nuclear weapons state had kept this status secret from its own people and the world: again, with the exception of South Africa, which revealed its earlier secret arsenal at the same time as disbanding it along with apartheid. Moreover, by 1986 this program (aside from the scale Vanunu revealed, which was a surprise even to CIA) was a secret almost exclusively from those Israelis and others (including, officially, the American Government) that chose to believe Israel's ambiguous and deliberately deceptive denials.

In any case, it was information that Vanunu's fellow citizens deserved urgently to have had long before, in time to reach an informed, democratic judgment and influence on their country's policy. In my opinion, Mordechai Vanunu did what he should have with the information he acquired. I hope that I would have done the same in his position. His readiness to accept the personal risk that his truth-telling actually entailed--that he would suffer a long prison sentence (and the longest time in solitary confinement known to Amnesty International, which defined it as a human rights violation)--is deserving of worldwide admiration, and, I hope, emulation. His continued restriction and persecution after serving his sentence, his new return to prison for six months on a pretence of preserving twenty-five-year-old secrets that he has yet to reveal (and which the restrictions do not protect), are illegal and outrageous.

As for Libby, I have no strong opinion on whether his sentence of thirty months in prison was, as President Bush judged in commuting it, excessive. As Bush undoubtedly knows in more detail than we do, Libby was only carrying out, routinely, the wishes and orders-manifestly illegal as they were-of his bosses. If this were confirmed by the Congressional investigation that should be forthcoming on the deceptions and violations of law and the Constitution that led us into war (and may do so again in Iran), it should lead to impeachment and then to criminal prosecution of Richard Cheney and/or George Bush. But a damper on such an effort is the now-certainty that conviction of either Cheney or his superior would be nullified by presidential pardon. It may not be true, as Richard Nixon declared, that "If the president does it, it is not illegal." But whatever "it" is, if done or ordered by the president or vice president, it appears to be unpunishable. As in Israel, rules suited to an older imperial system, not a republic, are in force.

Daniel Ellsberg made history when as a top Pentagon official, he released the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the Vietnam War, which exposed government lies going back 20 years. His act of resistance helped galvanize opposition to the war and triggered the events leading to Watergate and the downfall of Richard Nixon.

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