The press has noted that Israel launched a new generation of “communications” satellite into orbit this week: the Amos-4. Built by Israel Aerospace Industries at a cost of $365-million, it was successfully launched in Kazakhstan. What is less known is that the Amos-4 has an important military payload aboard. In fact, the Ministry of Defense is one of the most important customers for this project. The defense minister watched the launch from a live feed in Israel. The satellite contains advanced spy gear allowing Israel to surveill military and/or nuclear facilities in Iran and Syria. Though the news report again doesn’t state this, following from Edward Snowden’s revelations about the NSA’s ability to intercept and monitor much of the e-mail and telephone traffic in the U.S., we may presume that projects like Amos-4 could enable Israel to do the same to virtually all its enemies, including some countries like Russia which are nominally not enemies. An Israeli friend alerted me to this story, based on a Channel 2 news segment reporting the intelligence function. But the report was censored and the cleansed version doesn’t mention any of this.
Posted on: Fri, 06 Sep 2013 14:07:55 +0000
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