According to an exclusive July 29 story by U.S. investigative journalist Aida Chavez posted on her “Capital & Empire” Substack, a confidential U.S. intelligence assessment circulated in the last week of July in Washington accurately identifies the long-term intent of Sections 219 (House) and 1217 (Senate) of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) promoted by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.
“Israeli officials know they’re losing the American public. Panicked that America’s political consensus on Israel is collapsing, they’re pursuing a long-term strategy to permanently enmesh Israel within America’s military, intelligence, and defense establishment—in ways future administrations would struggle to unwind,” the assessment reportedly states. “Israel is racing to embed itself more deeply in America’s military, intelligence, and national security apparatus in ways designed to outlast future administrations.”
Chavez, no novice to Washington having previously worked for Just Foreign Policy. as The Nation’s Washington correspondent and as a congressional reporter at The Intercept, reports that “several U.S. officials” had described to her he content of the intelligence assessment, reportedly written primarily by the CIA.
The assessment makes clear that U.S. intelligence is well-aware that Israeli officials have been “cultivating” (unnamed) leaders of the American technology sector “to build long-term political and financial support for the strategy;” that Israel aims to expand intelligence cooperation; has raised “the possibility of hosting a permanent U.S. military base on Israeli territory;” and that Israeli officials are out to make “American defense increasingly reliant on Israeli systems.”
On August 6, Military.com featured the Capital & Empire story in its second lengthy article raising an outcry against the NDAA’s Israeli merger clauses. (On July 16, it had reported on the Senate vote stalling approval for the clauses which “some critics call treasonous.”
The veteran-founded site is not associated with the official U.S. military but is read widely in the U.S. military and, in fact, calls itself “the most-read military news and information site globally.” The site noted that while it has not independently confirmed the existence of the reported CIA memo, its content coheres with the evident explosion of political opposition in the U.S. to the Netanyahu government’s criminal actions.
The article goes on to summarize the already-scandalous extent of Israel’s influence campaigns in the U.S.:
Israel has a “privately contracted propaganda infrastructure embedded in American media, technology and political networks…deployed to change who wins an election;”
there are multiple “Israel provisions” now before the U.S. Congress (the article lists six such provisions beyond the infamous 219/1217 clauses); and
the danger to sovereign American defense industry of joint defense production of leaving “American manufacturers dependent on Israeli intellectual property, proprietary components, software access, engineering data and licensing, while Washington pays for and physically possesses technology it may lack full authority to integrate, modify or transfer.”
