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AIPAC on Trial | |
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Editor's Note:
What is AIPAC? It is the American Israeli Political Action
Committee and it lobbies Congress and does some "other"
things. Read and learn.
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AIPAC on Trial - by Justin Raimondo
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 neo-
conservative, 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 serious-
ness 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.
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Steven Lieberman and Anne Sterba, lawyers for the group,
wrote in an amicus brief: "Trying these two men for dis-
closing 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. Every-
body-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 defend-
ing 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.
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Justin Raimondo is editorial director of Antiwar.com
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