WASHINGTON (CN) – With billions in pending aid payments to Israel, the government and a researcher are at loggerheads about a gag order that keeps U.S. officials from releasing any information about Israel's nuclear weapons program.
Israel's nuclear program is one of the country's worst kept secrets, and one that successive U.S. presidents since Gerald Ford have avoided publicly acknowledging.
Grant Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle East Policy, complained in a federal complaint this summer that money Israel receives from the United States violates a long-standing ban on giving foreign aid to clandestine nuclear powers. But the Department of Justice said in a Dec. 12 opposition brief that Smith lacks evidence and standing.
"As an initial matter, plaintiff has not suffered any 'particularized' injury stemming from the government’s provision of foreign aid to Israel," the brief states.
Smith fought back in a reply brief on Dec. 18, revisiting his argument that the combination of improper government classification and threatened prosecution creates a de facto gag order.
By creating a policy of "willful ignorance," Smith says the government is muting his efforts to tell the public how Israel's nuclear program destabilizes the Middle East.
"When all information about a particular domain of government activity suddenly dries up, is no longer reported on, and uncommented by any government official, the public assumes there is no longer anything worth reporting," Smith's reply brief states. "Such a state is inimical to democracy," he added.
Discussing the case in a phone interview, Smith said the “gag order is trying to accomplish an impossible task: putting the genie of knowledge back into the bottle of secrets.”
“There is no way to do that," Smith added.
Smith said the gag order stopped public-interest research on Israel's nuclear program, and it effectively "deputized and turned into an accomplice" anyone who had worked on this issue.
In his reply brief, the researcher balked that he has no more standing to sue than any other generally aggrieved American.
"The plaintiff as a recognized information provider in this field, therefore decidedly does not concede only generalized grievances that he shares with 'all Americans' as contended by the defendants," the brief states.
Smith says amendments to the 1961 Foreign Assistance Act known as Symington and Glenn bar clandestine nuclear powers from receiving American aid.
"We're trying to convince the judge that the defendants wanted to institutionalize willful ignorance so that these aid deliveries could be unchallenged - so no one could ever say they were violating the Arms Export Control Act," Smith said.
He also claims the government - at the behest of successive presidents - has implemented a systemic policy of nuclear ambiguity to suppress information, which culminated in a 2012 Department of Energy classification bulletin known as WNP-136.
Smith claims the bulletin violates the Administrative Procedure Act and directs government employees to keep mum on Israel's nuclear program.