Who said the Administration is charging anyone of a crime here? Or perhaps I should have used Glenn Greenwald as the example - He’s not guilty of a crime, but yet has earned the ire (and many would say rightly) of the Government.
That’s an interesting twisty view of things. If you spy on secret talks, you are spying on all parties involved in those talks at the same time. That’s just obviously apparent.
No, it isn’t. See my Snowden/Russian files example. And it is especially not apparent if the information was freely given to Israel by one of the parties.
Was Glenn Greenwald spying on the US?
We only have second-hand information saying that the intelligence even exists, let alone who was responsible for obtaining it. Given that the White House is claiming the information was shared with the US Congress, it could literally just be some senator telling the White House what the Israelis told them, but if their claim of intercepted Israeli communications is true it was probably the NSA.
“The pot calling the kettle black” means accusing somebody of doing something when you are both equally guilty. But the Israelis aren’t guilty here - the Iranian government and their nuclear program is a legitimate target for Israeli espionage. If you talk to the Iranian government about their nuclear program you should already know their enemies might find out what you said.
Yes. When they turn an American traitor, like Pollard, and take away his honor and his life, and then refuse to apologize to the American people, and his family, and then act like we are bad guys for imposing punishment on him the same as any other traitor, it matters.
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If you want to know which U.S. intelligence agency was involved, you’ll have to ask the WSJ reporter, or the un-named Obama senior administration official who leaked the story, or maybe Valerie Jarrett. It’s usually best to go the source.
The leaked story doesn’t identify the agency.
And while you’re at it, maybe you could discover if there is any truth to this Obama senior administration official’s leaked story. He/she is the only one claiming this happened. Emphasis on the word - claiming.
*According to the Journal, Israel began eavesdropping on the talks last year and also acquired information from confidential briefings with US officials and diplomatic contacts in Europe.
The White House uncovered the operation, the report said, when US intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted messages among officials that could only have come from closed-door talks.
But it was Israel’s sharing of inside information with US lawmakers and others that particularly angered the White House, the report quoted an official as saying.
“It is one thing for the US and Israel to spy on each other. It is another thing for Israel to steal US secrets and play them back to US legislators to undermine US diplomacy,” the unnamed official said*.
The story says the information could only have come from the closed-door talks which the White House assumes must indicate Israelis spying. If Israel has such information, and that has not been proven, it could have come from any of the participating nations friendly to Israel, or from any participating nations hoping to embareass this White House. So many choices, so few facts.
The White House uncovered the operation, the report said, when US intelligence agencies spying on Israel intercepted messages among officials that could only have come from closed-door talks.
Where is the proof? Does anyone expect the media to verify their stories before they run with them? Or before they cut-and-paste unverified stories?
An unnamed Obama senior administration official admits that the Obama White House is spying on Israel.
An unnamed Obama senior administration official claims that internal Israelis government conversations prove (aka must have) access to the behind-closed-doors conversations.
An unnamed Obama senior administration official claims that Congress has recieved Iranian nuke-talks info from Israel.
OK, I’ll play along. Where’s the verification?
France, U.K., Germany, Russia, and China, are also involved in the Iranian nuke talks. Any one of them could have fed information to Israel for their own political gains. Or the Israelis could have made a very educated guess. If it even happened.
Who in Congress recieved this information? Several members of Congress have stated that they have no idea what the WSJ, or the unnamed Obama official, is talking about.
Or maybe everyone except the unnamed Obama official is lying?
I find it amazing to see the extent to which Republican sympathizers here are skating around known facts and building strawmen to defend their political allies – strawmen like whether Israel got its information by spying on the US, or whether such revelations are technically illegal if they came from a third party. None of that is the central question here. The central question is whether Israel conspired with Congressional Republicans to undermine the administration’s nuclear talks with Iran by giving them cherry-picked secret details, which would at the very least be recklessly improper and potentially very damaging to the negotiations. Did they? The WSJ claims they did. Here’s what we know for sure:
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It’s a fact that Netanyahu strongly opposes the talks and wants to see them fail,
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It’s a fact that Congressional Republicans are solidly allied with Netanyahu on this position,
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It’s a fact that Netanyahu came to Washington to give a speech to Congressional Republicans condemning the talks – a visit that occurred with their active support, and in which Netanyahu delighted said Republicans by pointedly snubbing the White House in an almost unprecedented act of diplomatic hostility. It’s also a fact that the visit was arranged primarily between Ron Dermer and John Boehner; Dermer is Israel’s American-born ambassador to the US and is a former US Republican operative who worked closely with Newt Gingrich,
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It’s a fact that said Congressional Republicans wrote the now-famous letter to Iran urging them not to make a deal – a deal that the duly authorized administration was pursuing – and threatening that any such deal would be overturned, an act of astounding arrogance that seems nothing short of treachery,
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It’s a fact that Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the US, briefed Congressional Republicans about the ongoing Iran negotiations. What’s in dispute here is exactly what he told them.
Now add to this mix the fact that Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman said last Tuesday that “Obviously Israel has security interests to defend and we have our own intelligence. But we do not spy on the United States. There are enough participants in these negotiations, including Iranians. We got our intelligence from other sources, not from the United States.”
Which seems to confirm that Dermer was sharing secret information with Obama’s Republican enemies in Congress to try to torpedo the nuclear talks. It doesn’t absolutely prove it, but it sure seems to support it. It’s also consistent with other allegations about Dermer, who is both an adviser and close personal friend of Netanyahu and a former Republican himself who remains a staunch Republican ally in Washington. And the question of Israel “spying on the US” has nothing to do with it. Secret information is secret for a reason, and disclosing it – especially to parties who are working against you – does the same damage regardless of where it came from. This appears to be the point the WH is making. Israel’s claim that they “didn’t spy on the US” seems entirely disingenuous.
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Did they indeed? The WSJ claims an unnamed Obama senior administration official claims they did.
How does the Obama administration know that Congress received Iranian nuke discussion info from Israel? Did the Obama administration spy on Israel? (Or did they spy on Congress? :eek: ) How dare Israel spy on us while we’re spying on them!
Or did an unnamed Obama senior administration official feed the WSJ reporter a load of unverified horsepoop that serves to undermine both of Obama’s enemies, Congress and Israel? Does the Gruberization of the American public continue?
Time for this unnamed Obama senior administration official to come forward and answer a few questions.
Maybe instead of repeating yourself you should read those five key facts that I posted, none of which you mention, plus Lieberman’s statement, plus the astounding background of Ron Dermer, aka “Bibi’s Brains”. Long before the WSJ article and the WH statement, Republicans were being fed negative talking points about the Iran negotiations – the only question was, were they coming from Dermer, as was widely believed, or somebody else?
If you can manage to remove those partisan blinders, the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming even without the WSJ article.
Which of your five key facts vetted the WSJ article? Is there any truth to the unnamed Obama senior administration official’s story? Maybe the unnamed Obama senior administration official could come forward and clear up any unanswered questions?
Can you define how you use the word “secret” here? Does “secret” mean “something Obama doesn’t want Congress to know”?
What absolute total partisan rubbish. Are the details of sensitive international negotiations not usually secret? Is Congress supposed to be involved in the day-to-day negotiations? Is that their job? Is there maybe a reason that there’s such a thing as an “executive branch” of the federal government?
Here’s the real issue. Netanyahu is a militant warmongering right-wing hawk and his objectives are almost diametrically opposed to the best interests of the US that are being pursued by the Obama administration, which is seeking a peaceful settlement with Iran. Netanyahu, and his equally militant operatives like Ron Dermer (aka “Bibi’s Brains”), are using Congressional Republicans as hapless stooges to try to undermine US administration policy. It’s just that simple. Netanyahu and his operatives are playing them for the fools that they are, always anxious to meddle and obstruct as long as it undercuts Obama. Nothing else matters to them.
Again, define “secret” in this context. Lots of people, from lots of different countries, know the details of these sensitive international negotiations. Can these people share what they know with those they deem trustworthy or does the United States have the authority to forbid that?
What Israel did was probably not “illegal” unless they were directly spying on the US which, as already acknowledged, they probably were not, though they have in the past – so they aren’t above doing so when it suits them. What Israel did was, however, unethical, counterproductive, and damaging to US interests. They did it because Netanyahu’s foreign policy toward Iran is one of aggressive belligerence.
Now you need to ask yourself why Congressional Republicans went along with them, even to the point of writing that spectacularly ill-conceived letter to a hostile foreign government, repudiating their own President and their own administration. It amuses me to think of how the ever fair-minded Republicans would react if a letter like that turned up in Hillary’s email server, written by Hillary to the government of a hostile power!
That’s your opinion. That’s not a fact. I think it is highly ethical to try to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and trying to prevent a bad deal being signed is part of it. And it is in US interests, too. Not in Obama’s interests, though, apparently.
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What absolute total partisan rubbish. Are the details of sensitive international negotiations not usually secret? Is Congress supposed to be involved in the day-to-day negotiations? Is that their job? Is there maybe a reason that there’s such a thing as an “executive branch” of the federal government?
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I’ve only vaguely been following along with this whole back and forth (did we establish that in fact Israel passed along secret info to Congressional Republicans or are we still just taking The Guardians word for that?), but let me ask you something here. Let’s say that Congressional Democrats got information from Israel in the run up to the invasion of Iraq that there were no WMD…that Bush et al had cherry picked the data to make it appear that there were, but really there was not only no evidence there were any but proof that there were none. Should the Congressional Democrats have gone along anyway and not raised a fuss because ‘there’s such a thing as an “executive branch” of the federal government’ and it wasn’t there job? Do you really think it wouldn’t be there job? Leave aside, if you can, THIS issue, and think about what you are saying in terms of a generic situation that you don’t have partisan feelings about. The Congress is SUPPOSED to be a check on the Executive branch, just like the Executive branch is a check on the Legislative and Judicial (and vice versa and all that). And if Congressional Democrats had such evidence prior to the invasion of Iraq they would have been derelict in their duty to NOT bring it up and try and stop us from going to war, even though Republicans and Republican supporters would have said pretty much what you are saying here about them and wouldn’t agree that Congress should do such things.
Anyway, just wanted to ask you that…feel free to go back to fussing at Terr and vice versa. 
I pretty much laid out my position in #50, which is: the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming that Israel did – Israel’s foreign minister pretty much came right out and said so – most probably in the person of Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador to the US and Netanhahu’s fiercely loyal and equally hawkish right-hand man, and a former American Republican operative himself, who knows his way around Washington like a dog knows its food dish.
There are three problems with your analogy.
Let’s start with the first, and let me turn that around and ask you a question. Suppose the entity we’re talking about isn’t Congress but a private individual, and suppose the information he releases to the public media is about what he believes to be secret government abuses. Let’s say his name is Edward Snowden. Quick – would such a person be a traitorous villain or a public hero?
I think the impartial, logical answer is “it depends”. It depends on whether the information was, first of all, accurate, and secondly, described such grievous abuses that it justified the breaking of law and breach of trust to disclose it, and that ultimately the good that it did outweighed the harm of confidential disclosure. Did the Israeli revelations come anywhere even close to meeting that standard? Or were they nothing but self-interested talking points of dubious veracity?
Secondly, your analogy involves objective facts about conditions on the ground, things that are manifestly either true or false. Can the Israeli partial cherry-picked revelations about certain details of a dynamic, ongoing back-and-forth negotiation possibly be viewed in even remotely the same light?
Thirdly, this is a situation in which Israel in general and Netanyahu specifically has a very strong vested interest in seeing the negotiations fail, and stands ready to do anything and everything possible to see that they do. Especially given the first two points above, can anything they say on the subject be trusted? It’s like Congress getting a tip from the famous Baghdad Bob that “no, there are no WMDs in Iraq”!
As for Congress being a check on the executive branch, yes, but in Constitutionally defined roles. Beyond that, they have a duty like any citizen would to bring important actionable information to the attention of the appropriate executive authorities. When I said that meddling in the Iran negotiations is “not their job” I was responding to posters who seemed to think that just because they had been elected, Republican Congressmen could suddenly declare that it ***was ***their job to interfere in the negotiations just because they hate Obama and they want to. It isn’t. And it sure as hell is not their job to send letters to hostile foreign governments denouncing their own President and their own nation’s administration!