The Israeli Lobby Has Won Another Round!

Dropping the AIPAC Spying Case

Aipac Logo (The Powerfull Israeli Lobby that has a strangle hold on U.S. Congress and Senate

By Gary

On August 4, 2005 American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) operatives Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman were arrested on charges relating to espionage on behalf of Israel.

This had a lot to do with Iran. It followed the arrest in May 2004 of Larry Franklin, the Pentagon’s top Iran analyst by the FBI after he had been caught turning over secret documents (including ones pertaining to Iran) to Israeli Embassy staffers including Mossad Station Chief Naor Gilon. FBI

(Franklin had worked in the Office of Special Plans under neocons Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky and participated in the Rome meeting in December 2001 with Michael Ledeen that likely hatched the Niger uranium forged letters plot.) He was given a reduced sentence of 12 ½ years for cooperating with prosecutors in January 2006.

You might suppose that Israeli intelligence officers would have intimate access to U.S. intelligence without resorting to espionage. According to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, Israeli officials didn’t even need to sign in when visiting Feith’s Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon when she worked there in 2002.This whole affair is testimony to the extraordinary concern of the Jewish state with Iran, with knowing whatever the U.S. knows about Iran’s nuclear program, and with influencing U.S. plans to “deal with” Iran.

Sometime after the Rosen-Weissman arrests Jane Harman had a telephone conversation with a “suspected Israeli agent” under NSA wiretap. The agent asked her, as a California Representative and member of the Intelligence Committee to use her influence to reduce the charges against the indicted men. She agreed to “waddle in” to the matter, “if you think it would make a difference” but thought she might have more influence with an unnamed official at the White House.

This would be done in exchange for the Israeli agent arranging for an AIPAC fundraiser (widely identified as California billionaire Haim Saban) to put pressure on Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat expected to become House speaker after the 2006 election, to select Harman as head of the Intelligence Committee. Justice Department lawyers upon hearing the tape felt that they had caught the congresswoman in a “completed crime” demanding investigation.

The Congressional leadership including Pelosi was subsequently notified of the wiretap, although Harman only became aware of it last week. But Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez declined to even authorize such an investigation, because, according to Stein and others, the Bush administration appreciated her services to date in supporting the administration’s program of illegal surveillance and expected her to provide further services in future. (Okay, their reasoning apparently went, so she was wheeling and dealing politically with an Israeli agent. But she was helping them persuade the New York Times to sit on its story about their warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. “We need Jane,” Gonzalez reportedly declared.)

So several years went by. “Blue Dog” Democrat Harman performed dutiful service to the Bush administration. In December 2005, Harman urged the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times to sit on a story about wireless wiretapping, and she was a consistent defender of the Iraq War. When the Democrats won the 2006 election, Pelosi, who had been informed about the wiretap of her colleague, declined to appoint Harman to the intelligence post.

Meanwhile the Rosen-Weissman trial was delayed by an appeals court ruling that allowed the defense to use classified information in proceedings and a lower-court judge’s decision ruling that prosecutors must show that the two men knew that the information they allegedly disclosed would harm the U.S. or aid a foreign government and that they knew what they were doing was illegal. And no doubt, behind the scenes, high-powered politicians were waddling in on behalf of Rosen and Weissman.

The Israel Lobby of which AIPAC is the highest expression suffered little damage from the arrests. It continued to muster huge congressional majorities for resolutions targeting Syria and Iran and supporting Israel, even at the height of the Gaza blitz. On the other hand, the political fortunes of the neoconservatives, as a faction within the Bush administration actively promoting “regime change” throughout Southwest Asia for the security interests of Israel, declined significantly during Bush’s second term.

Recall how two years ago neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz was praying for Bush to bomb Iran in an address to AIPAC, op-ed in the New York Times, and longer piece in Commentary, and meeting with Bush and Cheney to privately to make the case. George Bush had embraced the most paranoid language of the Lobby in referring to the Iranian regime. Ahmadinejad had supposedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” (no matter how many time journalists and scholars pointed out that, no, he was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, about the occupation of Jerusalem passing from the pages of time like the Soviet Union, like the rule of the Shah…) From August 2007 Bush deliberately intimated that Iran, with no nuclear weapons, threatened Israel, a country with over 100 nuclear weapons, with “nuclear holocaust.” He thus—very explosively—joined the memory of the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry with the Iranian civilian nuclear program.

However, the hopes of the Israeli government, the Lobby and the neocons within the administration and media cheering section were dashed when Bush failed to authorize the sale of bunker busting bombs to Israel in 2008. The administration left office with the mullahs still in power in Tehran.

The atmosphere of confrontation with Iran has somewhat receded; now Roger Cohen’s New York Times columns give us a realistic look at the state of Jews in Iran. (Of course it draws fire from the likes of Jeffrey Goldberg who, having disseminated disinformation justifying war prior to the attack on Iraq calls Cohen “a Jewish apologist for an anti-Semitic regime…[who] has debased himself.”) The drive to get the U.S. to bomb Iran, and the broader campaign to irrationally vilify Iran, has stymied somewhat.

For years, and up until very recently, the Israelis have been saying that if the U.S. does not take care of the Iranian nuclear problem, they will take military action themselves. So Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman raised some eyebrows April 26 when he told the Austrian Kleine Zeitung that Israel would not attack Iran. “We are not talking about a military attack. Israel cannot resolve militarily the entire world’s problem. I propose that the United States, as the largest power in the world, take responsibility for resolving the Iranian question.” Earlier he’d told a Russian paper that Israel’s main strategic threat was now Pakistan anyway. (That, I could have told you, is the one Muslim country with nuclear weapons.) Isn’t it odd how that resembles Obama’s view of the world?

Soon thereafter Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress that bombing Iranian nuclear sites would have only temporary, ineffective results, and that imposing sanctions made more sense. Obama is indeed focusing on Pakistan, or “Af-Pak” as his advisors are unfortunately calling Afghanistan and Pakistan, and he may want Iran’s cooperation in pursuing his objectives there. There appears to be complete unity of purpose in support of the governments of both countries and in opposition to the Taliban groups. So the threat of a U.S. bombing attack on Iran has indeed receded somewhat.

I think we should see the dismissal of the Rosen-Weissman case by the Justice Department in this context. It’s a sop to the Lobby, and apparently the president had a personal hand in it. If the U.S. will not bomb Iran for Israel, neither will it prosecute AIPAC members for spying for Israel. Fair enough?

Last month an indignant official in the Justice Department, thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to dismiss this case,” decided to leak the Jane Harman transcripts to Jeff Stein just so to educate the public, in the absence of a trial, about how politics work in this country. Rosen, Weissman, Harman, and Gonzalez all walk free as AIPAC gears up for its annual conference (with Harman a featured speaker) and for a campaign around passage of HR 1985 (the “Iran Diplomatic Enhancement Act”) which, despite its name, is all about provoking war.

Source: www.Counterpunch.org

Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and Adjunct Professor of Religion. He is the author of Servants, Shophands and Laborers in in the Cities of Tokugawa Japan; Male Colors: The Construction of Homosexuality in Tokugawa Japan; and Interracial Intimacy in Japan: Western Men and Japanese Women, 1543-1900. He is also a contributor to CounterPunch’s merciless chronicle of the wars on Iraq, Afghanistan and Yugoslavia, Imperial Crusades.

He can be reached at: gleupp@granite.tufts.edu

Justice Dept. Seeks To Drop Charges Against former AIPAC Officiales!!!

By Josh Meyer

11:46 AM PDT, May 1, 2009
Reporting from Washington — The Justice Department said today that it will ask for dismissal of all charges in a politically sensitive criminal case against two former officials of an influential pro-Israel lobbying organization, saying recent court decisions had made it hard for federal prosecutors to win the case.

The disclosure, which is all but certain to be approved by a federal judge, will likely end the five-year legal battle between the government and lawyers for Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, formerly of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

It is the second major prosecution dropped by Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. since taking over in January. Last month the government dropped its prosecution of former Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens even though he had already been convicted, citing widespread misconduct by prosecutors in the case.

The Bush administration’s Justice Department had accused Rosen and Weissman of obtaining classified information from the U.S. government and then disclosing it to third parties in a way that could either harm the national security or aid a foreign country, in this case, Israel.

The high-profile legal team for the two men, who later left AIPAC, have accused the government of trying to “criminalize” the kind of horse-trading in information that has long occurred in Washington. After many delays and postponements, the trial for Rosen and Weissman had been set for June 2 in the federal courthouse in Alexandria, Va., where the Justice Department filed the court motions today.

The intrigue surrounding the case, already chock full of references to top-secret intelligence matters, intensified significantly in recent weeks with news reports that Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), a staunch ally of AIPAC, had been caught on federal wiretaps in 2005 offering to lobby Bush administration officials to help the two lobbyists in exchange for help in obtaining the coveted chairmanship of the House intelligence committee.

Harman said she had done nothing wrong.

Rosen and Weissman had pleaded not guilty and also denied doing anything illegal.

(A third defendant in the case, former Pentagon official Lawrence A. Franklin, pleaded guilty to giving classified defense information to Rosen and Weissman and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.)

Defense lawyers for Rosen and Weissman — Abbe D. Lowell for Rosen and John Nassikas for Weissman — credited the government for dismissing the charges, saying that the investigation has been misguided since the FBI first searched AIPAC’s offices in 2004.

“It was wrong for the government to single out AIPAC and our clients and allege wrongdoing when all they ever did was their job of helping the United States create better foreign policy . . . and it was especially wrong not to see the many flaws in the case so that these two men and their families had to live under this unfair cloud for so long,” Lowell and Nassikas said in a statement.

“We are extremely grateful that this new administration, in coordination with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Virginia, has taken seriously their obligation to evaluate cases on the merits and not to allow an unjust prosecution to continue solely due to momentum.”

Referring to their clients, the lawyers also noted that the case had “taken a tremendous toll on them. They lost their jobs unnecessarily, they were shunned by many in their community and they were left to fight these outrageous charges on their own.”

According to the indictment, Rosen and Weissman conspired to obtain and then disseminate classified information on sensitive issues such as U.S. policy toward Iran, the status of U.S. counter-terrorism investigations in the Middle East and current intelligence on the fight against al Qaeda and other terrorist networks.

Recently, lawyers for Rosen and Weissman won several major victories in the case, including the right to subpoena as defense witnesses a large number of former top Bush administration officials, including former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, in an effort to bolster the two lobbyists’ contentions that the Bush administration — and other administrations before it — had routinely discussed sensitive information with AIPAC as part of a sanctioned back-channel relationship between the United States and Israel. AIPAC also has close relationships with numerous ranking members of Congress and officials in all sectors of the U.S. government.

U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III had made some legal rulings that set a high bar for the prosecutors, including a requirement that they prove that Rosen and Weissman knowingly meant to harm the United States or aid another country by trading in sensitive national defense information.

In a statement issued this morning, the acting top federal prosecutor in the Virginia court district, U.S. Atty. Dana J. Boente, said the government was moving to dismiss the charges because of additional burdens imposed on prosecutors by the recent court decisions.

“When this indictment was brought, the government believed it could prove this case beyond a reasonable doubt based on the statute,” Boente said.

But, Boente added, “given the diminished likelihood the government will prevail at trial under the additional intent requirements imposed by the court and the inevitable disclosure of classified information that would occur at any trial in this matter, we have asked the court to dismiss the indictment.”

Rosen and Weissman were not charged with espionage. Instead, prosecutors accused them of getting classified information from government sources like Franklin and then mishandling it by leaking it to reporters, think tank personnel and, most controversially, Israeli government officials, often in exchange for other information.

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, who tracked the case closely for its effect on U.S. espionage policy and freedom of information, said the charges were almost unprecedented and misguided from the outset, in that authorities used provisions of the 1917 Espionage Act that had never before been applied to lobbyists.

“This is a repudiation of the attempt to use the Espionage Act against leaks and those who receive them,” Aftergood said. “That’s what made it so troublesome. Espionage charges would have been fine; they would have been found innocent or guilty. Instead they were charged with a much more diffuse and flimsier crime.”
Source LATIMES

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The Lobby strikes back!
Government moves to dismiss AIPAC case.

May 2, 2009 Posted by Elias

The Spies Who Got Away and one who didn't

by Justin Raimondo, May 04, 2009

After five years of legal maneuvering and orchestrated protests from the Lobby’s amen corner, Israel’s point men in Washington have finally succeeded in their efforts to quash the prosecution of Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who had been charged with committing espionage on behalf of Israel. It is a victory that not only signals the continuation of the Lobby’s dominance in Washington, in spite of growing popular revulsion against lobbyists in general, but also gives the Israelis a blank check to spy on their American patrons to their hearts’ content.

The hosannas being sung by the Lobby’s media echo chamber – the Washington Post, the neocon blogosphere, and the official conservative movement represented by National Review and the Weekly Standard – are all about "vindication." That is the word used by Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic’s Israel-centric columnist, to describe the decision to drop the charges, but – as usual – his interpretation of the facts leaves much to be desired.

The statement [.pdf] from the prosecutors avers that the case was dropped due to the success of the "graymail" strategy pursued by the defense. The government had to consider "the likelihood that classified information will be revealed at trial, any damage to the national security that might result from a disclosure of classified information and the likelihood the government would prevail at trial," as well as the "changed landscape" of the case, a reference to the many rulings by judge T.S. Ellis that forced prosecutors to delay going to trial for five years.

After a long, drawn-out process of legal back-and-forth, the judge had set up the trial as a veritable three-ring circus, upholding defense subpoenas issued to such notables as Condoleezza Rice, Stephen J. Hadley, and a whole host of former and current U.S. government officials, who would have been dragged into the courtroom and closely questioned about highly classified intelligence matters. Ellis also granted defense motions to include a wide range of classified information, including documents – the idea being to make the U.S. government spill the secrets the Israelis stole, via Rosen, Weissman, and their co-conspirator Larry Franklin, a former top analyst at the Pentagon whose specialty is Iran.

Franklin pled guilty to espionage charges in 2005 and was sentenced to 12 years in the hoosegow plus a substantial fine. His handlers, however, have escaped, not only unscathed but hailed by the Lobby and its friends as persecuted heroes. Yet the confession, conviction, and sentencing of Franklin stand as the perfect rebuke to the AIPACers’ claims of "vindication." If no crime was committed, then why not free Franklin? This is precisely what his defenders have advocated, yet it won’t happen for the very good reason that the charges against Franklin stand, along with his confession and his punishment, as testimony to the fact that a real crime was indeed committed.

One merely has to read the indictment to see that: at one clandestine rendezvous of the Rosen-Weissman-Franklin spy cell, they moved the venue to three different restaurants in the course of a single meeting. They were afraid – rightly, as it turned out – they were being followed, because they knew they were committing a crime.

Yet this knowledge, according to the judge in this case, wasn’t enough to establish their guilt. What government prosecutors had to prove, Ellis ruled, is that the defendants intended to harm the U.S. and its national security interests, consciously and deliberately, a uniquely narrow standard that doesn’t seem to apply to any other statute on the books. The closest is "hate crimes" legislation, which purports to read the minds of the perpetrators of violent acts and directly perceive their motives. The Ellis doctrine, if you will, applied to laws against espionage means the subjective perceptions of the accused, not their objectively verifiable actions, are the key to determining whether or not a crime has been committed.

Did Rosen and Weissman hand over top-secret U.S. intelligence to Israeli government officials, yes or no? Well, yes, but… they thought they were defending the "real" interests of the U.S. by doing so, since, as we all know, U.S. and Israeli interests are always and forever identical. From this perspective, Rosen, Weissman, and certainly Franklin were just misguided "idealists" who perhaps went a little too far, but their hearts, after all, were in the right place.

What this decision means is that espionage has been legalized, for all intents and purposes, as long as it is engaged in by Israel – and not, say, Iran, Russia, or China – and insofar as these fifth columnists-cum-lobbyists take pains to argue that they’re doing it for our own good.

This was precisely the argument made by Franklin’s lawyers before he made a deal with the government to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for leniency: that he handed over classified information to Rosen, Weissman, and at least two Israeli government officials, out of "patriotism," because he thought U.S. policy wasn’t pro-Israel enough. Judge Ellis displayed his sympathy for this "misguided idealist" ploy when he commended Franklin [.pdf] for having the purest of motives even as he handed down the sentence.

If we look at the concerted efforts undertaken by the Israelis and their American adjunct organizations to influence U.S. policymaking, especially when it comes to the Middle East, as a covert action operation – a focused campaign involving both Israeli and American components – then it surely has to go down in the annals of spycraft as one of the most successful in history. The consequence of this case is that Israeli agents – of whatever citizenship status – can now move freely over the boundaries between lobbying and espionage, with nary a worry about being held accountable.

Israeli spying in the U.S. is a subject the American media has not dared cover. Except for Antiwar.com and a few other sources, coverage of the Rosen-Weissman case has been sketchy to nonexistent. It wasn’t until the Harman affair blew up in the Lobby’s face and captured headlines for a while that anyone even remembered it: in the news business, five years is an eternity.

Yet the significance of this case and its far-reaching implications for U.S.-Israeli relations would seem to dictate a different level of coverage. That famous four-part Fox News report on the surprising extent of Israel’s covert activities in the U.S. underscores the dangers of granting this type of access – particularly when it seems to be almost entirely a one-way deal.

In addition, the dismissal of all charges against Rosen and Weissman means that the rest of the spooks who haunt Washington will be further emboldened. After all, if it is okay for the Israelis to mine the corridors of power for vital U.S. secrets, then why not them? Whether the Justice Department will give the Chinese, say, the same sort of kid-gloves treatment as is now being afforded to Israel’s American agents remains to be seen. Somehow, I doubt it, yet one wonders how they’ll go about legalizing such a glaring double-standard.

Espionage in an ordinary state is an easily recognizable crime: it involves stealing closely guarded information, which the government classifies as "top secret," and passing it on to foreign governments, deliberately and with aforethought. The U.S., however, is no ordinary state. Washington, D.C., is the Imperial City, the capital of a world empire, where the trading of insider information is the chief industry. With foreign lobbyists gathered at the foot of the throne, all clamoring for attention, any and every means to gain favor and influence at court is used, and then some. The Americans, who decide the fate of nations with a single decree, find themselves invaded by supplicants whose methods are increasingly aggressive – and successful. To be besieged by them is part of the price of empire.

As Garet Garrett warned half a century ago: "There is no security at the top of the world" – no, not even when it comes to guarding the nation’s most closely held secrets. We have become, as Garrett predicted, a prisoner of our own satellites: "No Empire is secure in itself," he wrote, in 1952, "its security is in the hands of its allies." In the case of our increasingly troublesome ally, Israel, this is now literally true: in dropping the charges against Rosen and Weissman – and allowing AIPAC, the organization for which they worked and which served as a cover for illegal activities, to function without registering as a foreign agent – we have handed them the keys to the safe deposit box wherein our most vital secrets lie.

The decision to drop this case was clearly made at the top, not by the local prosecutors. Indeed, there was reportedly an energetic internal debate. The lawyers for Rosen and Weissman, for their part, clearly credited the Obama administration for the decision to quash the case, as the Washington Post reported:

"Lawyers for Rosen and Weissman attributed the withdrawal of the case in part to the Obama administration. ‘We are extremely grateful that this new administration … has taken seriously their obligation to evaluate cases on the merits,’ the lawyers, Abbe D. Lowell, John Nassikas, and Baruch Weiss, said in a statement."

While there is no direct evidence of any involvement by the White House, we have every reason to take this statement at face value. The idea that this was a decision made solely by prosecutors, over the strenuous objections of the FBI agents on this case, is further debunked by a New York Times account, which pointedly qualified routine denials of political interference:

"Several other officials said, however, that while senior political appointees at the Justice Department did not direct subordinates to drop the case, they were heavily involved in the deliberations. These officials said David S. Kris, the newly appointed chief of the department’s national security division, and Dana J. Boente, the interim United States attorney in Alexandria, had conferred regularly with prosecutors and ultimately decided to accept the recommendation to abandon the case. Attorney General Eric H. Holder was informed and raised no objections."

Whether this case was dropped because it became a trading card in Obama’s increasingly contentious relations with the Israelis or because it was the victim of Israel’s increasingly aggressive intervention in American politics we’ll leave for future historians to decide. What is clear, at this point, is that it is now effectively legal for AIPAC and its allies to function quite openly as an intelligence-gathering entity for the Israeli state. The line between lobbying and espionage has been erased, at least as far as Israel’s activities in the U.S. are concerned.