[wvns] Good Americans Spy for Israel?
AIPAC on Trial:
The lobby argues that good Americans spy for Israel
by Justin Raimondo
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
http://amconmag.com/2007/2007_05_07/article.html
Is there a First Amendment right to engage in espionage? Dorothy
Rabinowitz seems to think so. Describing the actions of Steve Rosen
and Keith Weissman, two former top officials of AIPAC, the premier
Israel lobbying group, who passed purloined intelligence to Israeli
government officials, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
characterized them as "activities that go on every day in Washington,
and that are clearly protected under the First Amendment." If what
Rabinowitz says is true—if passing classified information to foreign
officials is routine in the nation's capital—then we are all in big
trouble.
On Aug. 4, 2005, Rosen, Weissman, and Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin
were indicted by a federal grand jury and charged with violating
provisions of the Espionage Act that forbid divulging national defense
information to persons not authorized to receive it. The indictment
traces the treasonous trio's circuitous path as they met in the
shadows—in empty restaurants, at Union Station in Washington, on
street corners. Rosen and Weissman sought out and cultivated Franklin,
milking him for information that they dutifully transmitted to their
Israeli handlers. According to Rabinowitz, however, they were merely
"doing what they had every reason to view as their jobs"—which is
true, assuming they understood their jobs to be spying for Israel.
The trial is scheduled to begin June 7. As the day of reckoning
approaches, the Israel lobby is ratcheting up the rhetoric. So, too,
is the defense: in a duet of hysterical accusations and frenzied
rationalizations, the accused spies' defenders have described the
proceedings as a frame-up, the result of an intra-bureaucratic
struggle within the government, and a plot by anti-Semites in Bush's
Justice Department to carry out a Washington pogrom. None of these
flights of imagination are any more convincing than the Dream Team's
defense of O.J. Simpson. Yet the noise level continues to rise, as if
sheer volume, instead of logical arguments, could overwhelm the
copious evidence of the defendants' guilt.
The indictment lists numerous acts of espionage, dating back to 1999,
in which Rosen and/or Weissman acted as conduits for classified
information flowing from Washington to Tel Aviv. The feds had been
watching for a long time: the indictment makes clear that Rosen and
Weissman didn't make a move without the FBI's counterintelligence unit
knowing about it. This surveillance is how they happened on Larry
Franklin, the Pentagon's top Iran analyst, who walked in on a luncheon
meeting in Arlington, Virginia, attended by Rosen, Weissman, and Naor
Gilon, chief of the political-affairs section at the Israeli Embassy.
The feds were listening in as Franklin—referring to a document dated
June 25 and marked "top secret"—announced he had secrets to tell.
Tell not sell: unlike the majority of post-Cold War spies, the
AIPAC-Franklin espionage ring wasn't centered around financial gain
but ideology. Franklin is a dedicated neoconservative, a minor yet key
player in the neocon network, who served in the military attache's
office in the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv in the late 1990s and was a
Defense Intelligence Agency analyst with expertise in Iranian affairs
working in Douglas Feith's policy shop.
The counter-intelligence unit was hot on Franklin's trail, and they
watched his every move—his wholesale transfer of top-secret
information on Iran, al-Qaeda, and other intelligence of interest to
Israel to Rosen and Weissman, who funneled it to their contacts in the
Israeli Embassy. The FBI gave Franklin enough rope to hang himself,
and then moved in, showing up at his door and confronting him with his
treachery. A search of his home and office turned up a veritable
lending library of classified documents dating back years, all of
which had doubtless been made available to the Israelis. Faced with
the probability of a long prison stretch, Franklin agreed to wear a
wire to his subsequent meetings with Rosen and Weissman. In the months
that followed, the FBI built its case, recording conversations and
following the AIPAC duo.
And they did a good job, apparently, because the government is making
an unusual request: that some testimony and evidence be shielded from
the public due to its highly sensitive nature. This wasn't just a case
of pilfering a few innocuous memoranda. It looks like team AIPAC made
off with the family jewels and maybe even the deed to the house. Why
else would the Justice Department risk having a conviction thrown out
on appeal on account of such a rarely invoked legal mechanism?
The defense has protested proposed security procedures—magnetometers
at the courtroom door, security sweeps of the courtroom itself, an
officer of the court monitoring electronic surveillance while the
trial is in session—on the grounds they would prejudice the jury
against the defendants. They compare this to dragging Rosen and
Weissman before the jury in prisoners' uniforms and shackles. Yet
these security measures point to the seriousness of the matter before
the court, the depth to which the Rosen-Weissman-Franklin spy ring
penetrated the government, and the ongoing breach they have opened in
America's national-security firewall.
While most of the more cautious elements in the Jewish community are
staying well away from this case, the radicals, such as Rabbi Avi
Weiss and his AMCHA-Coalition for Jewish Concerns, who have previously
devoted their efforts to freeing Jonathan Pollard, have now turned
their attention to Rosen and Weissman. Steven Lieberman and Anne
Sterba, lawyers for the group, wrote in an amicus brief: "Trying these
two men for disclosing critical 'national defense information' to
foreign officials, without letting the public know what the alleged
information was, will allow enemies of the Jewish people to exaggerate
the significance of that evidence and will leave the press and the
public to subsist only on rumors and speculation."
The Weiss group likens the prosecution of Rosen and Weissman to the
Dreyfus case—in effect positing the existence of a vast anti-Semitic
conspiracy at the highest levels of the Justice Department. Not
exactly a credible contention, offered, as it is, without evidence,
but the defenders of Rosen and Weissman are getting more frantic as
the trial date approaches. As a writer for the Israeli newspaper
Ha'aretz put it, "Does this trial really carry any resemblance to the
Dreyfus trial? It's a different era, a different country, a different
system, a different accusation. Making this comparison demands some
imagination, much ambition, and maybe a speck of chutzpah too."
A recently unsealed defense memorandum details a Feb. 16, 2005
colloquy between Rosen's lawyer, Abbe Lowell, and Nathan Lewin,
AIPAC's legal counsel, in which the latter reveals that Paul
McNulty—then the U.S. attorney for the eastern district of Virginia
and chief prosecutor in the case—"would like to end it with minimal
damage to AIPAC." Lewin told Lowell, "He is fighting with the FBI to
limit the investigation to Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman and to avoid
expanding it." This is hardly the behavior one would expect of
contemporary anti-Dreyfusards in the Justice Department plotting to
scapegoat AIPAC and the Jews.
Clearly the Rosen-Weissman defense team is involved in a bit of
"greymail," that is, forcing the government to disclose as much
classified information as possible during the discovery phase of this
case and hoping to derail the prosecution entirely as it weighs the
effects of disclosure against the benefits of a possible conviction.
As we go to press, Judge T.S. Ellis has ruled against the
prosecution's proposal to shield sensitive testimony and evidence
behind a veil of pseudonyms and euphemism, which could delay the
begining of the trial.
Efforts to embarrass the administration go beyond accusing DOJ and
extend to prominent figures such as Condoleezza Rice, who is accused
by Abbe Lowell of leaking national defense information to AIPAC as
Franklin did. Gen. Anthony Zinni is being targeted in a similar
manner. Both have been subpoenaed, along with David Satterfield,
deputy chief of the U.S. mission to Iraq, and William Burns, U.S.
ambassador to Russia, to testify. If Rosen and Weissman are going
down, the Israel lobby seems to be saying, then so are a lot of
prominent people—some of whom, like Zinni, just happen to be their
enemies.
This isn't greymail, it's blackmail. It was Zinni, after all, who said
of the Israel lobby and the neoconservatives: "I think it's the
worst-kept secret in Washington. Everybody—everybody I talk to in
Washington—has known and fully knows what their agenda was [during the
run up to the Iraq War] and what they were trying to do."
The intrigue thickened last October as word leaked that a proposed
deal was dangled in front of Rep. Jane Harman: AIPAC would back her to
become head of the House Intelligence Committee if she would urge the
government to treat Rosen, Weissman—and AIPAC itself—with kid gloves.
The Forward reported, "Several congressional sources confirmed that
major donors to the Democratic Party have been lobbying Pelosi on
behalf of Harman's nomination to head the intelligence committee and
that these attempts were not welcomed by the House Democratic leader."
Time named Haim Saban, the billionaire Hollywood producer and major
AIPAC moneybags, as one of the supplicants. Pelosi didn't fall for it,
and Harman was rebuffed. Perhaps this was in the background when the
speaker was booed as she addressed the subsequent AIPAC national
conference, although Pelosi got back in the Israel lobby's good graces
after she stripped a provision from the military appropriations bill
that would have required the president to go to Congress for
permission to attack Iran.
The defense has fought to get the case against Rosen and Weissman
thrown out on any number of grounds: the Espionage Act is
unconstitutional, it doesn't apply to their clients but only to
government officials, and, last but not least, it's a violation of the
Israel lobby's First Amendment "right" to betray classified
information to its masters in Tel Aviv. Twisting and turning,
threatening and spitting, delaying as best it can, the defense has
tried to wriggle out of it every which way, to no avail. The trial is
going forward, and the public spectacle of the biggest espionage
scandal involving Israel since the prosecution of Pollard could
deliver a body blow to the Israel lobby at a time when it has come in
for public scrutiny and criticism as never before.
But that hasn't prevented the lobby from brazenly defending the
accused spies, in spite of the preponderance of evidence, and even
hailing them as patriots. Writing in The Forward, Michael Berenbaum
avers, "Instead of being grounds for prosecution, perhaps the
influence Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman were trying to exert—making
officials and the public aware of the danger from Iran—should be
heralded." And why should we hail espionage as laudable in this
instance? Well, you see, because the AIPAC defendants were ahead of
their time in citing the danger from Iran: "In Washington, as Rosen
and Weissman are learning the hard way, the 'crime' is often not being
wrong, but rather being right too early or at the wrong time, or being
out of sync with the conventional wisdom, or pushing an inconvenient
truth."
In light of Judge Ellis's recent ruling that in this trial the
Espionage Act is going to be interpreted narrowly and that the burden
is on the prosecution to show that the defendants knowingly harmed
U.S. national security interests, the defense might be expected to
make a pitch similar to Berenbaum's—that, instead of prosecuting Rosen
and Weissman, we ought to be pinning medals on their chests.
The AIPAC defendants weren't spies, they were merely ahead of the
curve, anticipating the day when a distinction is no longer being made
between American and Israeli interests. That is the line we are
hearing, as the curtain goes up on the trial of Rosen and Weissman.
Whether the jury or the public falls for it remains to be seen.
===
Palestinians 'Routinely Tortured' in Israeli Jails
by Conal Urquhart
Monday, May 7, 2007
Guardian/UK
TEL AVIV - Palestinians detained by Israeli security forces are
routinely tortured and ill-treated, according to a new report
published by Israeli human rights groups yesterday. The ill-treatment,
which includes beatings, sensory deprivation, back-bending,
back-stretching and other forms of physical abuse, contravenes
international law and Israeli law, the report says.
The Centre for the Defence of the Individual and B'Tselem, an Israeli
human rights group, compiled the report after interviewing 73
Palestinians who had been arrested in 2005 and 2006.
The report found that almost 50% of detainees who were arrested in
raids or at random were beaten by the army or police before they were
handed over to the Shin Bet security agency for interrogation. The
prisoners were interrogated for an average of 35 days and spent most
of their time in tiny cells in solitary confinement. They were
interrogated from five to 10 hours a day. More than half did not see a
lawyer or representative of the Red Cross for the whole period of
interrogation.
The report found that prisoners were effectively starved by being
offered food designed to appear rotten or unappetising. Their only
exercise was the walk from the cell to the interrogation room during
which they were shackled, handcuffed and blindfolded. In some cases
more extreme treatment was used. One in five detainees were deprived
of sleep for up to three days and a quarter were beaten by their
interrogators.
Out of more than 500 complaints against Shin Bet since 2001, not a
single one has been upheld. Israel's justice ministry said Shin Bet
interrogations were carried out in accordance with the law, although
it declined to comment on the "interrogation techniques" detailed in
the report.
In 1999, the supreme court banned the torture of suspects but left
several loopholes which allowed it to continue.
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