Nothing to see here.....
Because the Israeli Military Censor has slapped a National Security blackout on the story.
Quote:Israel's 'Prisoner X' was Australian Mossad agent, documentary claims
Israel has never acknowledged prisoner's existence and has gone to extraordinary lengths to stifle media coverage of case
Peter Beaumont
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 12 February 2013 14.01 GMT
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Ben Zygier
ABC claims 'Prisoner X', who is thought to have taken his own life in Ayalon prison in 2010, was Australian citizen Ben Zygier. Photograph: ABC TV
Like the fictional Man in the Iron Mask, Israel's infamous "Prisoner X" was allegedly held in solitary confinement in conditions of such strict secrecy that even his own jailors were told neither his name nor the crime he had allegedly committed.
The man's identity became the subject of intense speculation when he was reportedly found hanged in his cell in 2010, but the prisoner's existence has never been officially acknowledged by Israel's government which has gone to extraordinary lengths to stifle media coverage of the case.
Now, however, new evidence has been uncovered by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation strongly suggesting that Prisoner X was an Australian citizen and a Mossad agent.
In the immediate aftermath of ABC's claims, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the Israeli prime minister's office had called "an emergency meeting of the Editors Committee … to ask its members to cooperate with the government and withhold publication of information pertaining to an incident that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency".
The meeting was widely believed to be linked to the Prisoner X case.
In a second article referring to the case of a "prisoner's suicide in 2010", the paper linked explicitly to its report on the gagging order.
A new documentary screened earlier this week for the ABC's Foreign Correspondent programme claims Prisoner X was Ben Zygier, who used the name Ben Alon or Ben Allen after moving to Israel. He was secretly imprisoned in Ayalon prison in Ramla in the wing built to accommodate Yigal Amir, the assassin of the Israeli president Yitzhak Rabin, ABC reported.
The 34-year old was married to an Israeli woman and was the father of two young children. He had reportedly spent a number of months in the Prisoner X cell before his death.
The infamous case first came to international attention amid a flurry of stories in 2010. Coverage talked about the existence of an identified man being held in conditions of absolute secrecy for an undisclosed crime which prompted a media guessing game over his identity, with some speculating he was an Iranian Revolutionary Guards general.
According to accounts at the time, even his guards were not aware of the prisoner's identity or the crime he had allegedly committed.
Debate over the existence of Prisoner X was, however, shortlived with the story disappearing from the Haaretz website.
Speculation that the Israeli government had imposed a media blackout prompted Dan Yakir, the chief legal counsel with the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, to write to the country's attorney general and demand that the "blackout be eliminated" on the arrest.
Yesterday Haaretz printed a heavily pixilated image of what it said was the original document enforcing a reporting ban.
The existence of the blackout appeared to be confirmed by the call for a reporting ban in the immediate aftermath of the Australian report.
According to the ABC investigation, circumstantial evidence for its identification of Zygier was provided by the repatriation of his body to Melbourne from Tel Aviv a week after Prisoner X was allegedly found hanged in his cell.
The programme claimed that Zygier had a second passport in the name of Ben Allen at the time of the repatriation of his body.
Commenting on ABC's disclosures, the Australian foreign minister, Bob Carr, said he was concerned by the claims. "Those allegations certainly do trouble me," he said.
"It's never been raised with me. I'm not reluctant to seek an explanation from the Israeli government about what happened to Mr Allen and about what their view of it is. The difficulty is I'm advised we've had no contact with his family [and] there's been no request for consular assistance during the period it's alleged he was in prison.
"Even if Prisoner X has now been identified, his crime, however, remains a mystery although it has been widely speculated that it would have involved treachery to warrant such extreme measures."
A "gag" order on death by hanging is not inappropriate.
They will stop at nothing until they are stopped.
If you are in Australia or can use an Australian proxy IP you can watch this segment from Foreign Correspondent about Israel and Prisoner X.
[URL="http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/program/30989"]http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/program/30989
[/URL]
Transcript here
If the 'only democracy in the Middle East' do this to the child of one of the most prominent Australian Jewish families and dedicated supporters of Israel I dread to imagine how others are treated.
Quote:A MYSTERIOUS prisoner who died in Israel after being held in total isolation in a maximum-security jail has been identified as a 34-year-old Australian.
Ben Zygier, who moved to Israel from Melbourne in 2000, committed suicide in a high-security Israeli jail in 2010 after being held for months in great secrecy, the ABC reported on Tuesday.
The unsourced ABC story said that it "understood" the 34-year-old from Melbourne had been previously recruited by the Israeli spy agency Mossad.
There was no official comment on the story in Israel.
But within hours of the report surfacing, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office summoned Israeli editors to ask them not to publish a story 'that is very embarrassing to a certain government agency', Israel's Haaretz newspaper said.
"The emergency meeting was called following a broadcast outside Israel regarding the incident in question," Haaretz said, giving no further information.
Two Israeli MPs on Tuesday questioned the justice minister over reports about the mysterious 2010 death of the man dubbed "Prisoner X" whose identity was kept top secret.
"This prisoner was detained under a name which was not his own. Do you know about this?" Arab Israeli MP Ahmed Tibi asked during an open question session in the Knesset, or parliament.
"Can you confirm that this Australian committed suicide in prison under a false name so it wouldn't be revealed he was being detained in Israel?" he asked outgoing Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman.
Similar questions were raised by the head of the leftwing Meretz party, Zehava Gal-On who asked Neeman if he considered it "normal that the prime minister's office should summon all the main media to avoid the publication of any information likely to embarrass Israel."
Until now, a complete media blackout has been imposed on the shadowy incident, with the Israeli press prevented from reporting the incident due to a strict gag order.
In response to the parliamentary questions, Neeman said he was not able to answer "because the justice ministry is not responsible for prisons".
"But there is no doubt that if true, the matter must be looked into," he added.
The story of Prisoner X first emerged in May 2010 when Israel's Ynet news website ran a story entitled "Who are you, Mr X?" in which it spoke about a prisoner being held in top secret conditions whose identity and crime was not even known to his jailers.
But the story was quickly taken offline due to a gag order.
The ABC report said the case of Prisoner X had come to be regarded as one of the most sensitive secrets of Israel's intelligence community with a tight gag order imposed on all details of the case.
Zygier had been living in Israel for about 10 years prior to his arrest in early 2010 and was married with two children, according to the channel, which said he had been recruited by Mossad.
It was not clear why he was arrested in "early 2010" but he was taken to Ayalon Prison in Ramle near Tel Aviv and held in the same cell used for the man who shot dead former Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.
There he was held in virtual isolation until his "apparent suicide" in December that year, the channel said.
After the Ynet article was published, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel wrote to complain to Israel's attorney general saying: "It's alarming that there's a prisoner being held incommunicado and we know nothing about him."
In response, the attorney general's office wrote back saying: "The current gag order is vital for preventing a serious breach of the state's security, so we cannot elaborate about this affair."
The ABC report said Zygier's body was found hanged despite "state-of-the-art surveillance systems," adding to the mystery surrounding the affair.
His body was flown to Melbourne where it was buried in a Jewish cemetery on December 22, 2010.
Zygier's relatives and friends declined to comment to ABC.
He was reported to be the son of Geoffrey Zygier, the executive director of the Victoria Jewish Community Council and one of the leaders of the Melbourne Jewish Community.
Ben Zygier was married to an Israeli woman and had two young children. He had reportedly spent a number of months in the Prisoner X cell before he was found hanged. Exactly what he did to end up in prison remains unclear.
The report said that the man attended Jewish schools in Melbourne's south east before studying law. His parents refused to be involved in the investigation.
It said that Zygier's imprisonment was so secret that not even his guards knew his name. However, word got out at the time of a mysterious prisoner and human rights groups wrote to the state to demand more information.
http://www.news.com.au/world/israels-pri...6576643901
Richard's original story, fed to him by an Israeli disinformation agent,
was covered here
Quote:Back in 2010, I reported that Israel had arrested an unidentified individual, and imprisoned him in total secrecy in an Israeli jail. The cell he occupied had once housed Yigal Amir. Even his jailers didn't know who he was. His jailers apparently did a lousy job of monitoring Prisoner X, as he was called and he hung himself from a bar in his cell. In December 2010, Australian Jewish media reported that Ben Zygier had died in Israel and was to be buried in Melbourne's Jewish cemetery. There was little spoken about the cause of death.
Now Australia's ABC network blows open the story (transcript here). Prisoner X was not an Iranian general, as my Israeli source reported to me at that time. He was a Mossad agent named Ben Zygier, age 34 with two small children and an Israeli wife. Yossi Melman, reporting in Walla (the report is displayed here, but has been censored and removed by the military censor) says no one knows why he was imprisoned, but that it must have involved a crime that endangered the existence of the State of Israel. That's a pretty hefty sentence even for security-obsessed Israel. This has to mean he was involved in an act considered treason. It might possibly involve selling secrets to an enemy power. Jonathan Pollard comes to mind in the U.S. context.
![[Image: zygier-cropped.jpg?resize=108%2C455]](http://i0.wp.com/www.richardsilverstein.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/zygier-cropped.jpg?resize=108%2C455)
Ben Zygier, Australian-Israeli Mossad agent disappeared by the security services into an Israeli prison, where he committed suicide.
The ABC report makes clear that Zygier was essentially disappeared by security forces. This is common for Palestinians charged with security offenses, but extraordinary for an Israeli Jew. One of the few previous incidents that is comparable is the disappearance and secret imprisonment of KGB spy, Marcus Klingberg, by Israel for over ten years. Clearly, Zygier did something akin to the "crimes" of which Klingberg was accused.
I will update here if/when I can get my Israeli source to find out more about what Zygier's alleged crime was.
The ABC report says that Zygier also used his Australian passport in the process of his espionage efforts. This report says that he also had an Australian passport in the name of "Ben Allen." As Australian foreign minister Bob Carr noted, this would violate numerous Australian laws. It also brings to mind the Mahmoud al-Mabouh case in which Australian passports of Australian-Israeli citizens were used by the Mossad to create false passports for Israeli agents who assassinated the Hamas weapons merchant. This incident caused an enormous amount of embarrassment for Israel among all the western governments whose citizens were exploited.
Ben Zygier was the son of Geoffrey Zygier, the executive director of the Victoria Jewish Community Council and one of the leaders of the Melbourne Jewish Community. The family and the deceased's friends all refused to cooperate with the ABC broadcast as did Israeli reporters who were approached. Since it specifically mentions Yediot as denying assistance, I'm guessing this means that Ronen Bergman was the culprit.
Since Yossi Melman published his Walla piece just before airtime I'm guessing that Melman participated in reporting of the story in some way and was rewarded with a scoop. Unfortunately, his report ran afoul of the censor and Israeli's can no longer read it there. But they can here.
The case raises extraordinary questions for the Australian government. What did it know about this when it happened? Given that Zygier was likely an undercover spy, it would appear Australia was limited in what it could do. But how often do you have a country's citizen imprisoned in secret in another country only to commit suicide there? This just begs 1,000 questions in terms of what the Kevin Rudd government knew and when it knew it.
The case will also drive further wedges between Australia and Israel in that it will show that the Mossad continues to abuse the passports of its allies. Israel also, according to Australian authorities neglected to notify it that an Australian citizen was jailed and had died in Israeli custody. This is a minimal standard that all nations adhere to in such circumstances.
Indeed, Haaretz's main headline today is:Prime Minister's Office convenes urgent meeting of media editors
Purpose: To request common action in preventing the publication of the embarrssing story
Government source: the invitation arose from exposure of the details this morning abroad
A word now about the error in my own reporting. My source was told by an Israeli intelligence official that the dead man was Ali Reza Asgari. In hindsight, it appears this was a ruse designed to throw the media off the scent of the real story. A similar thing happened recently with the Fordo story, which also turned out to be a diversion to cover up Israel's planned attack against Syria. The Asgari red herring was a particularly dumb diversion since it elicited a furious response from Iran, which threatened to bring the matter before the United Nations. In fact, Yossi Melman was furious with me for my role saying I'd endangered the security of Israel by drumming up needless hostility with Iran. What he didn't know was that it was an Israeli intelligence source who'd done this and was to blame.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/0...en-zygier/
Quote:Dov Hanin (Hadash) noted that the information was available from overseas sources on the Internet in any case, and claimed the aim of the suppression was thus not to protect national security but rather "to prevent open public debate" surrounding the affair.
Precisely.
Quote:Now Australia's ABC network blows open the story (transcript here). Prisoner X was not an Iranian general, as my Israeli source reported to me at that time. He was a Mossad agent named Ben Zygier, age 34 with two small children and an Israeli wife.
"Iranian general", eh?
I wonder what the next lie will be...
Interesting contrast in the way Australian government knowledge of Zygier's death is being covered.
Quote:Mysterious life and death of Australian Mossad agent
DEBKAfileSpecial ReportFebruary 13, 2013, 12:30 PM (GMT+02:00)Tags: Australia ![[Image: tag_arrow.gif]](http://www.debka.com/static/images/tag_arrow.gif)
Ben Zygier-Ben Alon Intelligence Mossad Israel
![[Image: Prisoner_X_Ben-Zygier12.2.13.jpg]](http://www.debka.com/dynmedia/photos/2013/02/13/big/Prisoner_X_Ben-Zygier12.2.13.jpg)
Prisoner X - Ben Zygier
Ben Zygier, Australian citizen and Mossad agent, was not the first Prisoner X to be held secretly in an Israeli jail. Double agents caught after turning traitor or crossing the lines into crime for personal motives are the exception - but not unknown in most spy agencies. In the 1950s, Israeli agent Mordecai (Mottele) Kedar was secretly incarcerated for many years for betraying his mission.
The Australian ABC went to great lengths to uncover the story of the Israeli-Australian double citizen, aka Ben Alon, who committed suicide on Dec. 15, 2010 at the age of 34 in a top-security cell of Ayalon Prison where he was held in solitary confinement. A former inmate of that cell is said to have been Yitzhak Rabin's assassin Yigal Amir.
After a longstanding Israeli gag order, his name was finally released for publication Wednesday, Feb. 13.
According to ABC, after his death, his body was flown to Melbourne, Australia, where his family, active in the local Jewish community, buried him one week later. The headstone on his grave bears his name and the dates of his birth and death. The ABC investigation disclosed that an autopsy was conducted by the Israeli Forensic Institute which issued a death certificate listing the cause of death as asphyxiation by hanging in the name of Ben Alon. Also found was a second Australian passport in the name of Ben Allen.
An Israeli organization called ZAKA, religious volunteers known for recovering the remains of Jewish terrorism victims, arranged for the body to be flown to Melbourne.
ABC reporters left no stone unturned to discover the reason for the extraordinary cover-up by the Israeli government. Was this a matter of national security? And what did the Australian authorities know? When Ben Zygier died in that prison what questions were asked by Australian diplomats and what were they told? And, finally, how did he manage to kill himself in a top-security cell under constant surveillance?
A senior Israeli intelligence official, who remained anonymous, told Australian TV that if what Ben Zygier did and knew were made public, it would pose an immediate threat to Israel as a nation state.
International protocols demand that when a foreign national is jailed or dies, their diplomatic mission must be informed. The Australian new investigators assumed that whatever crime or sin Ben Zygier committed, it must have involved espionage, possibly treachery, and very, very sensitive information endangering Israel.
Still, despite their best professional efforts, ABC's reporters did not find a single lead to the mysterious story of Prisoner X or verify any wild conjectures. One tied him to various episodes in which Israeli Mossad undercover agents were found operating on Australian passports; another, to the Iranian defector, Gen. Ali Ashgari, who disappeared from his hotel in Istanbul with suitcases full of Iranian nuclear secrets.
They were only able to establish that Ben Zygier was a lawyer by profession.
One of the many questions still open is how was he able to commit suicide? Warren Reed, a former Australian secret service agent, disclosed that not only are cameras installed in this type of cell, but sensors which measure the inmate's heart, respiration and perspiration rates. How did his watchers fail to notice that he had stopped breathing and his heart was no longer beating?
One possible answer is that in the Mossad training courses he underwent, he was taught how to take his own life under the noses of his captors, and used this method to kill himself.
Early Wednesday, the Australian Foreign Ministry spokesman said that the minister, Bob Carr, had ordered a new investigation into Canberra's conduct in the affair, after it emerged that Israeli authorities had told a diplomat at the Australian Embassy in Tel Aviv about the arrest of Australian citizen Ben Zygier. But the diplomat never relayed the information to Canberra through the conventional channels, he said.
DEBKAfile: "Conventional channels" is a term used in inter-governmental intelligence relations. Its use may indicate that the Tel Aviv embassy passed the Israeli notice to the Australian spy agency not the "conventional channels" of the foreign ministry.
This comment opens up more suggestive enigmas: Who was Ben Zygier, or Ben Allen, working for? Was it the Israeli Mossad or Australian intelligence - or both?
In any case, the Australian authorities may have had their own reasons for cooperating in the tight information clampdown imposed by Israel on the Ben Zygier affair.
http://www.debka.com/article/22760/Myste...ssad-agent
Quote:Ben Zygier: ASIO suspect who died in Israeli jail
DateFebruary 14, 2013
Ruth Pollard
Middle East Correspondent
WHEN Ben Zygier died alone in a maximum-security prison in Israel he was under investigation by ASIO, which suspected him of using his Australian passport to spy for Israel, Fairfax Media can reveal.
Benji, as he was known in Jerusalem, reacted angrily when Fairfax Media confronted him in early 2010 with allegations that he was working for Israel's security agency, Mossad.
''Who the f--- are you?" an incredulous Mr Zygier asked Fairfax's then Middle East correspondent Jason Koutsoukis. ''What is this total bullshit you are telling me?''
He expressed shock at the suggestion he was under any kind of surveillance and said that he had also changed his name for personal reasons.
''I have never been to any of those countries that you say I have been to,'' Mr Zygier said. ''I am not involved in any kind of spying. That is ridiculous.''
Koutsoukis said: "He was at first angry, then exasperated that I wouldn't accept his denials at what I was putting to him.
''He told me he was like any other Australian who had made aliyah [immigration to Israel] and was trying to make a life in Israel.''
Fairfax Media spoke to Mr Zygier in Israel in early 2010 after learning that ASIO was investigating at least three dual Australian-Israeli citizens who had emigrated to Israel in the past decade. At the time, ASIO would not comment on the case. On Wednesday, the agency again refused to comment.
Each of the men had travelled back to Australia separately to change their names and obtain a new passport, two intelligence sources said at the time in Koutsoukis' story published in The Age.
One man had changed his name three times, and others had changed theirs twice, the source said, from names that identified them as European-Jewish to ones that were Anglo-Australian.
In each case, the men had used the new passports to travel to Iran, Syria and Lebanon - all countries that do not recognise Israel and do not allow Israelis, or anyone with an Israeli stamp in their passport, to enter. Israel also bans its citizens from travelling to these countries for security reasons.
Along with his Ben Zygier identity, he also used Ben Alon, Ben Allen and Benjamin Burrows.
At the time, Fairfax Media was investigating the men's involvement with a European communications company that had a subsidiary in the Middle East. The company's chief executive denied the men were ever employed by the organisation.
It is believed - although Fairfax Media has been unable to confirm - that Mr Zygier travelled back to Australia in 2009 to do an MBA at Monash University.
A source at the time observed him over several days sitting with a group of students from Saudi Arabia and Iran at the university's Caulfield campus.
The source said: ''[Australian Taxation Office] records from 2008 show that he applied for and was approved a HECS loan for postgraduate studies at Monash University where he is currently [November 2009] studying.''
Since 2006, Monash has been involved in education in Middle Eastern countries, and in 2007 it proposed an initiative for higher-degree students from Saudi Arabia.
Apart from his move to Israel and his MBA study, little is known about Mr Zygier's movements over the decade before he died, except that he was working in insurance law at the Australian firm Deacons in 2002.
In Israel Mr Zygier married a local woman with whom he had two children, the ABC reported.
It was well known that Israel approached people who emigrated from other countries to assist it by handing over their passports, an Israeli intelligence expert told Fairfax in 2010.
''Their names are used later but the person providing the passport is not involved,'' the expert said.
It is understood the ASIO investigation into Mr Zygier and the two other men began at least six months before the January 10, 2010, assassination of senior Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, widely believed to have been carried out by Mossad using Australian and European passports.
Three of those suspected of taking part in the assassination were travelling on Australian passports, using the names of dual Australian-Israeli citizens, authorities in Dubai confirmed.
There is no suggestion that the three Australian names linked to Mabhouh's assassination are connected to Mr Zygier or the other men investigated by ASIO.
After initially denying the Australian government had any knowledge that one of its citizens was detained in Israel, Foreign Minister Bob Carr said some officers in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade were aware of his detention.
The revelations raises questions about how much the Australian government knew about the conditions under which Mr Zygier was being held in the maximum security Ayalon Prison.
The ABC's Foreign Correspondent program, which named Mr Zygier as ''Prisoner X'', said he hanged himself in the specially constructed cell that was meant to be suicide proof.
Mr Zygier was held in isolation - and in secret - in Unit 15, a separate wing of Ayalon Prison that contains just a single cell in Israel's most secure prison in Ramla, near Tel Aviv.
The cell is believed to have been built for Yigal Amir, who murdered Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995.
It is described as a cell within a block within a prison. The inmate in Unit 15 was allowed no visitors and even after his death his identity was a state secret, protected by a court-issued gag order despite continuing protests from human rights groups.
''He is simply a person without a name and without an identity who has been placed in total and utter isolation from the outside world,'' a prison official was quoted as saying in the Israeli media in 2010, when news of ''Prisoner X'' first broke, and was then suppressed.
It is unclear what, if anything, Australia was told by the Israeli authorities about the death in custody of one of its citizens, or whether any consular assistance was provided to Mr Zygier during his time in solitary confinement.
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/ben-zy...z2Kol8cz4F
Quote:A senior Israeli intelligence official, who remained anonymous, told Australian TV that if what Ben Zygier did and knew were made public, it would pose an immediate threat to Israel as a nation state.
OK - let's indulge in some speculative thinking.
Q: If Prisoner X was a Mossad assassin, would disclosure of this secret pose an immediate threat to the Israeli state?
A: No. Everyone knows that Mossad whacks people. In fact, "Arab terrorist leader assassinated, Mossad suspected", constitutes a "good news" story planted by Israeli psyops.
Q: If Prisoner X was selling chemical, biological or nuclear technology to an Arab state or "terror organisation", would disclosure of this crime pose an immediate threat to the Israeli state?
A: Yes.
Q:I f Prisoner X was involved in the planning or execution of an Arab terror attack on American, European or Israeli citizens, would disclosure of this false flag atrocity pose an immediate threat to the Israeli state?
A: Yes.
Jan Klimkowski Wrote:Quote:A senior Israeli intelligence official, who remained anonymous, told Australian TV that if what Ben Zygier did and knew were made public, it would pose an immediate threat to Israel as a nation state.
OK - let's indulge in some speculative thinking.
Q: If Prisoner X was a Mossad assassin, would disclosure of this secret pose an immediate threat to the Israeli state?
A: No. Everyone knows that Mossad whacks people. In fact, "Arab terrorist leader assassinated, Mossad suspected", constitutes a "good news" story planted by Israeli psyops.
Q: If Prisoner X was selling chemical, biological or nuclear technology to an Arab state or "terror organisation", would disclosure of this crime pose an immediate threat to the Israeli state?
A: Yes.
Q:I f Prisoner X was involved in the planning or execution of an Arab terror attack on American, European or Israeli citizens, would disclosure of this false flag atrocity pose an immediate threat to the Israeli state?
A: Yes.
Richard Silverstein has been speculating too.
Quote:The Lonesome Death of Mossad Agent, Ben Zygier
by RICHARD SILVERSTEIN on FEBRUARY 12, 2013 · 59 COMMENTS
in MIDEAST PEACE
![[Image: MOR--Ben-Zygier---20130213151101450547.j...=240%2C360]](http://i1.wp.com/images.smh.com.au/2013/02/13/4028886/MOR--Ben-Zygier---20130213151101450547.jpg?resize=240%2C360)
Ben Zygier in IDF uniform
What's extraordinary about this is that the MK who questioned Neiman used Zygier's name in the Knesset and so broke an ironclad taboo not to publicly expose the identity of Israeli agents, even after they die.
My guess is that Zygier was not just disappeared, but that once he entered the Israeli prison he didn't exist. Neiman admitted that Zygier had never been tried for his alleged crime. That means that unlike Marcus Klingberg, the KGB spy who was also disappeared for many years, Zygier wasn't even given the semblance of due process.
Let's ask ourselves why a state would do such a thing. My impression is that if the Australian Jew had sold his country down the riversay, selling state secrets to the highest bidder, that Israel wouldn't hesitate to put such a person on trial. A public trial would, at the least, deter anyone else from taking that road. But what if Zygier did this out of an act of conscience? What if he was so troubled by something he did or saw that he sought to expose it?
I'm just using this as a hypothetical and haven't checked whether the dates correspond chronologically, but say he was one of the Australian-Israelis heard speaking English with an Aussie accent on the Mavi Marmara during the attack. Let's say he saw point-blank executions. Let's say he could attest that cold-blooded murder was planned beforehand, and not just done in an act of spontaneous rage. Such exposure would cause irreparable harm to Israel's relations with Turkey and Australia. That might be worth disappearing someone. Further, the notion that a Mossad agent would betray his agency and country for the sake of conscience is something quite unprecedented in Israel. Such instances are rare to the point of obscurity. For Zygier to have done something like would strike a blow to a patriotic national consensus supporting the intelligence services no matter what they do. It would mark a fundamental break with patriotic tradition. Something an Israeli government might decide it could not afford.
Another astonishing aspect of this case is that Bibi Netanyahu summoned the editor's committee of managers of all the Israeli news outlets and asked them to respect a gag not for the sake of national security, but in order to protect a national agency "from embarrassment." Can anyone imagine the media of any other democracy in the world accepting such a burden? Yet Israel's have. They have reported the Knesset debate, but nothing further. I know this annoys the hell out of Haaretz because they mockinglypublished a story about this along with a map that blacked out all of Israel. (By the way, this marks my "undisappearance" from the pages of Haaretz, in whose pages I have not been mentioned for years). This is similar to the mocking story Yediot published during the Anat Kamm affair in which 2/3 of the words were blacked out. Within a few days the gag was lifted more out of shame than anything else.
UPDATE: Another aspect of Bibi's pitch to the editors for omerta was that this affair would embarrass "a foreign government." This presumably would be Australia. But how would it embarrass Australia beyond the matter of Zygier abusing his Australian passport for espionage? Unless of course, Zygier was doing such things with the knowledge of Australian officials who either turned a blind eye or accepted it.
Australian FM Bob Carr just released a statement amending a previous one in which he said the Australian government knew nothing of Zygier's case until the family asked for his body to be repatriated to Australia. In fact, an Australian diplomat in the Tel Aviv embassy knew the Mossad agent had been arrested. That raises the question what the foreign ministry did or tried to do on his behalf. The foreign minister at the time of his arrest was Kevin Rudd, which might implicate him in some way if his ministry did not do everything it could have on Zygier's behalf (see more on Rudd below).
Another Australian report goes a bit farther and implies that an Australian intelligence agency was informed of Zygier's detention (presumably by the Mossad), which in turn notified the foreign ministry. The question is what happened after that and why more wasn't done to help Zygier. At the least, it seems the government has a lot of accounting to do. It seems they essentially abandoned one of their own citizens to his fate.
One facet of this story is deeply troubling: the response of the family. If your son had the same fate Zygier did, even if you were a patriotic Zionist, wouldn't you exert all the pressure in your power to find out what happened? The Australian foreign minister said his government was hampered by the family's unwillingness to lodge any formal request for assistance. Since the victim was incommunicado, a family request was necessary but not forthcoming. I would understand (at least in principle if not in practice) if you remained silent out of loyalty to Israel and a wish not to embarrass it. But it's my understanding the family's motives were not these. This will hopefully be explained further in the by and by.
As to who might've leaked this story to the ABC network which aired the documentary yesterday. There is one Australian who might benefit from exposing this story: Kevin Rudd. The Labor Party is deep in the pits in terms of the next election and revealing this story would further harm the chances that Julia Gillard can lead the party. It would naturally turn to him for leadership and offer him another opportunity to be prime minister. The danger, however, is that this scandal might so damage not just Gillard, but the entire party, that it sends the Liberal Party to victory in the election.
UPDATE I: Sol Salbe tells me that the deputy leader of the Opposition Liberal Party, one of the most kosher of pro-Israel politicians on the national scene had a meeting today with the Israeli ambassador. She said she would tell him that while she could accept secrecy in guaranteeing national security she could not accept a gag order simply to save embarrassment. As Sol said, when one of its most prominent right-wing supporters tells Israel to end the gag, you know it's in a losing battle.
A few hours ago (around 7PM on February 13th) Israel partially removed the press gag. What does that mean? Not very much. Now Israeli journalists can tell you Zygier was wearing white socks when he hung himself. But seriously, they can now report on the ABC documentary. Before they couldn't even mention it. But they can only tell what was reported in the TV program. They can't do any original reporting on the story. Imagine you're a beat reporter for the local newspaper in Oshkosh or Paducah and the police chief tells you you can only report on a city council corruption scandal according to what's published in a newspaper in Toronto or Melbourne. Make sense?
Jodi Rudoren's front page NY Times article has been published. She mentions Tikun Olam accurately, as far as it goes, noting the error in my reporting Prisoner X. She does neglect that I was the first foreign journalist who reported Zygier's existence as Prisoner X, which I would think is a fact worth noting.
Thanks again to Sol Salbe for offering me the benefit of his thoughts, wisdom and conjecture on this story.
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2013/0...gier-case/