Delete this from the right wing’s list of Obama outrages: The president did not release Israel’s atomic-bomb secret to the public in a fit of pique over Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s March 3 speech to congressional Republicans.
Obama’s 24/7 vilifiers claimed this to be the case as late as last week. They said he had declassified a 1987 Pentagon report titled, “Critical Technology Assessment in Israel and NATO Nations,” which establishes that Israel has had nukes for decades. They ignored key facts to assure that the story would fit their hypothesis.
The mud-slinging created quite a hullabaloo along Pennsylvania Avenue. As the Washington Examiner reported on March 26, “Three years after a researcher filed a Freedom of Information Act request for a Department of Defense report discussing Israel’s nuclear weapon capabilities, the Obama administration released the document in what has been called an unprecedented acknowledgment of the heretofore secret arsenal protecting the Middle Eastern nation.” The paper added, “The release nearly coincided with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s highly controversial address to Congress earlier this month, raising questions as to why the Pentagon suddenly complied with a 2012 FOIA request that had become the subject of a lawsuit.”
The Weekly Standard wrote on March 26 that the declassification was a “serious breach of decades’ old understandings” and added that Israel never admitted to having nuclear weapons: “To do so might spark a regional nuclear arms race, and eventual nuclear confrontation.”
In The Hill newspaper on Thursday, Herbert London of the London Center for Policy Research wrote, “With Iran’s nuclear talks soon unfolding into an accord, the declassification will prove to be exceedingly awkward for Israel. It may well be that if the monitoring of Iran’s nuclear capability is called for, why not Israel’s program? Is the Obama team trying to establish equivalency between Tehran and Jerusalem?”
ALAS, ALL OF THE SPECULATION is based on falsehoods. Obama had no hand in the release—and the report wasn’t classified. In January, Federal Court Judge Tanya Chutkan in Washington ordered the Defense Department to release the report by Feb. 12, in response to the FOIA suit by Grant Smith, head of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, a small policy-research and education organization highly critical of U.S. policy toward Israel. The timing of the judge’s decision was purely coincidental. NOTE: Much more to read, please click HERE to keep reading
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