This is likely to become an interesting issue:
Prime Minister's Office calls emergency meeting with heads of Israeli media outlets
Purpose of unusual meeting is to request editors' cooperation in preventing publication of affair which could prove embarrassing to government agency.
The Prime Minister's Office called on Tuesday an emergency meeting of the Israeli Editors Committee, an informal forum comprised of the editors and owners of major Israeli media outlets, 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 "incident" is revolving around a "Prisoner X" of whom any news has been censored in Israel for nearly three years. Several articles in Israeli media about him were vanished by the censors. But as the Australian ABCnews has now shown (video, 28min) new details on the case this attempt of continued censorship is just silly. Haaretz is helpfully pointing its readers to the original story:
Evidence has been unearthed that strongly suggests Israel's infamous Prisoner X, who was jailed under extraordinary circumstances in 2010, was an Australian national from Melbourne.
Investigations by the ABC's Foreign Correspondent program have revealed Ben Zygier, who used the name Ben Alon in Israel, was found hanged in a high-security cell at a prison near Tel Aviv in late 2010.
His body was flown to Melbourne for burial a week later.
The death goes part of the way to explain the existence in Israel of a so-called Prisoner X, widely speculated in local and international media as an inmate whose presence has been acknowledged by neither the jail system nor the government.
The case is regarded as one of the most sensitive secrets of Israel's intelligence community, with the government going to extraordinary lengths to stifle media coverage and gag attempts by human rights organisations to expose the situation.
The Prisoner X cell is a jail within a jail at Ayalon Prison in the city of Ramla. It was built for the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The ABC understands Mr Zygier became its occupant in early 2010. His incarceration was so secret that it is claimed not even guards knew his identity.
The Australian security services may think that Mr Zygier was a Mossad agent.
On January 19 2010 Mossad operatives assassinated the Hamas commander Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh in a hotel in Dubai. The police in Dubai acted astonishingly fast using videos and stills from various security cameras (part 1, 2, 3) to stitch together the evidence and to identify the Mossad agents involved. The agents involved used passports from various countries including Australian passports though none with the name of Ben Zygier or Ben Alon.
In December 2010 his always wrong "source" told Richard Silverstein that Prisoner X was a Iranian Revolutionary Guard General abducted by Mossad.
If Ben Zygier (photo) was indeed involved with Mossad and ended up as "Prisoner X" he must have done something very extraordinary. Did he blow the whistle about the Dubai assassination? One wonders when we will learn what he did.