Spy takes  U.S.-Israeli secrets to grave

Last  week’s death of Israeli spymaster David Kimche – and the omissions in  his obituaries about his most sensitive operations, especially those  regarding the United States – are a reminder of how much crucial history  is being lost as key figures from this era take their secrets to the  grave.

The failure to  debrief as many of these people as possible can be blamed significantly  on U.S. mainstream journalists who in years past took the lead in  collecting, vetting and presenting serious evidence of historical  wrongdoing, such as the Pentagon Papers secrets about the Vietnam War  and complex political scandals like Watergate.

But in recent years,  newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post have ignored many national security crimes or even have gone on the  offensive against journalists who tried to examine them, such as the  ugly assault on investigative reporter Gary Webb over his work on the  now-CIA-admitted cocaine trafficking by Ronald Reagan’s Nicaraguan  contra rebels.

The problem has been  compounded by the timidity of Democratic leaders to conduct thorough  investigations of Republican wrongdoing, such as in 1993 when Bill  Clinton became President and in 2009 under Barack Obama. In both cases,  new Democratic administrations thought that looking forward, not  backward, would achieve some measure of bipartisanship. Not likely.

And, the American  Left has offered little help, usually staying on the sidelines when  there's evidence of a genuine government conspiracy (though some  leftists have gotten carried away with invented conspiracies, such as  the 9/11 “truth” movement’s witness-less claims about "controlled  demolitions" of the Twin Towers and "a missile, not a plane, hitting the  Pentagon.”)

This combination of  disinterest in actual conspiracies and fascination with conspiracy  parlor games has made the assembling of real history about the past  several decades next to impossible.

Now, Kimche’s death  on March 8 marks another lost opportunity. Most newspaper obituaries  touched on some of the known high- and low-points of his long career as a  spy/diplomat who was called “the man with the suitcase” for his work  with the Mossad paying off foreign officials and spreading around money  that advanced Israel’s national security goals.

Yet, from these  obits, it’s clear that much more was known about Kimche’s clandestine  work bribing African despots or supplying guns to right-wing militaries  in Central America than his purported involvement in influencing  political events in Washington, possibly because Israel and its many  supporters regard the U.S. connection as still far too sensitive.

Even the better  obits neglected how Kimche, in the late 1970s, shared Prime Minister  Menachem Begin’s contempt for President Jimmy....continue     http://www.aljazeera.com/news/articles/39/Spy-takes-US-Israeli-secrets-to-grave.html