By R. Cort Kirkwood (The New American)
Former U.S. counterterrorism chief Joe Kent is warning about the danger of an Israel-first provision in the 2027 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that would permanently entangle the U.S. and Israeli militaries, making them almost one.
Introduced as free-standing legislation, Section 224 of the NDAA, the United States-Israel Defense Technology Cooperation Initiative, Kent argues at Responsible Statecraft, will provide Israel access to “critical defense production technologies.”
The upshot is, Congress wants to permit wide-ranging access to military, intelligence, and technological secrets by a nation that has proven it will steal those secrets and share them with America’s enemies. That’s what Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard — an American traitor — did in the mid-1980s.
The initiative will “expand and accelerate bilateral defense technology research, development, testing, evaluation, integration, and industrial cooperation,” the measure says, by a number of means, including:
• identifying jointly developed or Israeli-origin technologies with operational utility for potential integration into United States systems and programs … ;
• ensuring collaborative research initiatives involving government, private sector, and academic institutions in the United States and Israel, … in a manner that protects sensitive technology and information and the national security interests of the United States and Israel; …
• establishing frameworks for joint ventures, licensing agreements, and United States-based co-production or manufacturing partnerships with Israeli industry. …
The two militaries would cooperate on “missile and air defense technologies” as well as cyber-defense, electronic warfare, and artificial intelligence.
There’s more, but the plan is this: Israel gets access to everything.
The measure “would fuse the U.S. and Israeli defense sectors in multiple areas vital to the battlefields of the future, like autonomous systems and cyber,” Ben Freeman wrote for Responsible Statecraft:
It would also bring extraordinary Israeli influence to the U.S. beyond what it already has through the Israel lobby and its robust network of social media influencers. It would give the Israeli government the opportunity to greatly expand one of the most powerful levers of influence in U.S. politics: jobs in the U.S. By expanding or starting new co-production facilities like it already has in Mississippi and Arkansas, the Israeli government could boast of providing jobs on U.S. soil, thereby securing allies among members of Congress who represent the districts where those jobs lie.
The result could well be a U.S. political system even more susceptible to the whims of an Israeli government that seemingly has no qualms about drawing the U.S. into military conflicts in the Middle East.
Kent explained that public support for Israel is disappearing among Americans rapidly, which jeopardizes the billions in annual aid the nation receives from cash-strapped American taxpayers.
“To get ahead of the changing sentiments, Israel and their American allies, like U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, are attempting to rebrand the aid we give to Israel each year,” Kent wrote:
Rather than the annual Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) outlays, anything we give Tel Aviv will be “based on trade,” according to Huckabee. The goal of this shift is to undermine the notion that Israel is dependent on American hand-outs and that the U.S. taxpayer is footing the bill for the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza and Lebanon. There is, of course, a major catch.
That catch is, Kent wrote, the measure to merge the Israeli and American militaries, which will “give Israel unprecedented access to U.S. technology development and ‘data fusion.’”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports it, of course, because the measure moves “Israel from a top U.S. aid recipient to a full member of the U.S. defense and intelligence apparatus.”…
Read the rest here: https://thenewamerican.com/us/politics/foreign-policy/kent-integrating-u-s-israeli-militaries-will-give-israel-imprudent-access-to-u-s-military-secrets/
