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AIPAC on Trial
The lobby argues that good Americans spy for Israel.
By Justin Raimondo
05/08/07 "American
Conservative" -- - 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.
Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com.
Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative
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