- How Israel Uses U.S. Weapons to Threaten Our
Troops Unfriendly
Fire
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- Wherever they go to stamp out trouble, America's fighting
men and women are placed in harm's wayónot by our myriad enemies,
but by our own energetic arms manufacturers and their compatriots
in so-called
allied nations, who help our foes arm themselves against us.
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- That lesson was underscored this month in the China spy
plane incident. U.S. officials now say Chinese F-8 jets, like the one that
collided with our lumbering EP-3E, are armed with an Israeli-made
air-to-air
missile. The Python-3 missile was produced by the Israeli
Armaments Development
Authority.
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- Jane's Defense Review reports that the Python-3 missile
traces its origins back through several generations of weapons to
the American
Sidewinder, an air-to-air missile created in the late 1960s and purchased
by Israel. The Israelis souped up the weapon and tested it in the
Bek·a
Valley of Lebanon during 1982, then sold it to China. There are reports
of export orders from Israel to Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Romania, South
Africa, and Thailand. Israel is believed to have licensed the new design
to China, which now manufactures its own line of air-to-air
missiles.
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- "We don't have any comment on sales from Israel
to foreign countries," said Rafael Barak, deputy chief of mission
at the Israeli embassy in Washington. "We're surrounded by enemies
that don't hide the intention that they want to kill us."
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- As everyone knows, the U.S. leaps at every chance to
build up the might of our ally Israel. But this was a bit much, having
a virtual surrogate in the Middle East selling missiles to China that might
very well be used to kill our own troops. Said one Pentagon official, who
spoke to CNN on the condition that he not be named, "Here we
are bending
over backward to give Israel a qualitative edge, and they are
selling hardware
to our adversaries."
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- This is part of the price the U.S. pays for being the
world's largest arms dealer. Last year, we sold more than $8 billion in
weapons, with licenses for outstanding sales totaling another
$26.4 billion.
In 1998 the U.S. armed or trained the military of 168 nations.
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- The overall effects of this business are increasingly
dangerous to civiliansóas when an American-made plane in Peru downed
an aircraft carrying Baptist missionaries last weekóand in certain
instances pose great risk to American troops as well. The U.S. provided
ammo and small arms to Indonesia while that country was putting down the
East Timor rebellion. We gave weapons to Colombia that, according human
rights groups, were used to kill civilians.
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- The most celebrated case was the refusal of President
Bill Clinton to ban outright the manufacture of land mines, which kill
civilians around the world at alarming rates. A deal to let the Israelis
sell U.S. enhanced-radar technology to China was blocked last year under
pressure from the Clinton administration.
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- Yet American arms continue to provide the springboard
for modernizing the world's armies. Currently, the United Arab Emirates
is purchasing advanced models of U.S. fighters that exceed anything we
now have in operation.
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- Israel gets $3 billion in arms aid from the U.S. every
year. In 2000, there was a move in Congress to shave $250 million from
the package because Israel was then in the midst of negotiations to sell
Phalcon missiles to the Chinese. The Phalcons, according to the Pentagon,
were actually U.S. weapons that had been enhanced by the Israelis, who
then claimed them as their own invention.
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