Spying For Country X
04.19.2007 - 4:33 PMOn June 4, the AIPAC trial will commence in Northern Virginia. Keith Weissman and Steven J. Rosen, two former employees of the pro-Israel lobbying organization, are charged with violations of the espionage statutes for allegedly passing along “national defense information” to journalists and to representatives of the government of Israel. But before the trial can begin, the court has had to consider a raft of motions, including an important one that was ruled on earlier this week.
Prosecutors had sought to keep much of the classified information at issue in the case from being released to the public. To that end, they had proposed elaborate procedures under which secret evidence would be presented to the jury but kept from broad distribution. T.S. Ellis III, the judge presiding over the case, has explained what this would have entailed.
Witnesses would not be permitted to
speak the names of certain specific countries, foreign persons, or other things, but would instead use a code, “Country A,” “Report X,” “Foreign Person Y,” “Foreign Person Z,” and the like. That code would be provided to counsel, the Court, and the jury. The system of codes would change, moreover, to reflect . . . different alleged overt acts disclosing . . . classified information presumably to prevent the public from inferring the meaning or discerning the meaning of the code that’s being used.
The defendants’ attorneys vociferously protested this approach, claiming it is a clear violation of their clients’ Sixth Amendment right to a public trial.
Even more significantly, they pointed out, it effectively prejudged a fundamental issue lying at the very heart of the case: whether the information passed along by the two lobbyists was truly closely held national defense information. By compelling discussion of the evidence to take place only in code, the procedures would implicitly encourage jurors to conclude that the information was indeed precisely that.
In a critical decision, Judge Ellis ruled in the defendants’ favor, finding that the government’s proposed procedures suffered from a number of “fatal” defects. Among other things, the defendants would be
unfairly hindered in their effort to explain why they believed information that they sought to obtain, and the information they received and disseminated, was not NDI [national defense information]. They should be able to explain precisely what they knew, when, from whom they learned it, why they didn’t have the requisite mens rea, which I have discussed in several of the opinions that I have already written.
Statements like, “I heard from Foreign Person C the fact about Country X, reflected at Exhibit A, page three, paragraph four, line two,” seem to me to be insufficient for fairness.
As I have argued in the pages of COMMENTARY, the United States has a powerful interest in keeping its defense and foreign-policy secrets. But as I have also argued, it must do so in accordance with law.
From beginning to end, the AIPAC prosecution has been rife with government conduct that smells, and which Judge Ellis has treated accordingly. If this most recent ruling by Judge Ellis is a taste of what is to come, my advice to the defense lawyers is to dispense with a jury and let the judge try the case. And if my advice is followed, I would bet heavily on an acquittal.
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April 19th, 2007 at 10:08 PM
This case has indeed been odd, not least because the incontrovertibly culpable individual — the DOD employee, Lawrence Franklin — was already identified and prosecuted.
I am frankly suspicious, these days, of all “classified information” prosecutions of anyone who was not, at the time of the alleged offense, a government employee charged explicitly with the protection of the classified information in question. In the AIPAC case, it was Franklin on whom the obligation fell to refrain from giving classified information to unauthorized persons (Weissman and Rosen). The point of prosecuting Weissman and Rosen has never been entirely clear. They arguably had no inherent obligation to “protect” what Franklin told them (whatever “protect” even means, once the information has escaped the system of protection designed for it), even aside from any comparisons of their work at AIPAC with journalism.
In the case of the NYT’s revelations on wiretapping and financial intelligence, someone with a government clearance, who disclosed that information improperly, is the one (or more) who should hang.
I do think that if the very act of providing information to a journalist is a felony — as it is in the case of a government employee with a clearance revealing classified information — then there should be no journalistic privilege to hide behind. A journalist should be compelled to reveal who committed the crime; as Weissman and Rosen should have been, if the FBI had become aware that they had unauthorized access to classified information without knowing who Franklin was.
This would not stifle freedom of the press in any way. Freedom of the press is not endangered by the existence of national secrets, and was never meant to undermine their keeping. At any rate, the selectivity of choosing to prosecute employees of AIPAC, of all organizations, does indeed smell — when there seems to be quite an array of government employees hemorrhaging information to other unauthorized recipients.
April 20th, 2007 at 8:37 AM
Hello, JD! Nice to see you branching out from that other place.
April 20th, 2007 at 9:48 AM
I know next to nothing about the government’s case against AIPAC and its employees but I have strong notions about the source of the charges and the poisonous environment that inspired them.
The need to mask the identities of national players in the case says it all. US policy in the Middle East is and always has been schizophrenic and duplicitous. Naming names and speaking simple truth is impossible because we can’t be honest.
I suspect that as in the in the Pollard case which I followed closely, atmospherics in the AIPAC case far outweigh substance. The damage done our country by Jonathan Pollard was minimal. The worst of it was that the administration, especially the Secretary of Defense who was Pollard’s boss, was embarrassed by the revelation that we were not sharing satellite intelligence vital to its security with one of our closest allies.
The prosecution made much of the sheer volume of the information Pollard turned over. But a few truckloads of raw, real-time satellite pictures of conventionally armed tactical missiles being installed in the pesthole next door was of interest mainly to Israel. As far as the larger interests of the United States were concerned, the intelligence stolen didn’t amount to a hill of beans.
The prosecution harped on the fact that Pollard accepted money for his services and spent it lavishly and foolishly but Wolf Blitzer makes a compelling case that Pollard’s motives were more complicated than mere greed. Indeed, that he was corrupted by seasoned and hardened Israeli intelligence operatives who couldn’t trust an American Jew who had come to them for purely idealistic reasons.
Other charges were concocted including the slander that Israel had sold some of the stolen data pertinent to their affairs to the Chinese. A far-fetched concern was raised that Soviet intelligence might glean something about American spy satellite capabilities or techniques from its intelligence gathering in Israel. But this was mostly nonsense.
The issue first and last was and is the trustworthiness of Jews with classified, highly sensitive national secrets. And more. Given their deep emotional ties to the State of Israel, are Jews capable of loyalty to a single country not Israel? Are American Jews guilty of dual loyalty? Worse, do the Jews represent a fifth column inimical to the national interests of the United States?
Wolf Blitzer reports that in the period immediately Pollard’s arrest, Federal employees in the intelligence services with identifiably Jewish names were cut out of the loop. This, along with keening hysteria and over-the-top statements by the Defense Secretary more accurately reveal the true nature of Pollard’s offence.
Pollard was a confused fool with serious and tragic character flaws and—according to Blitzer—a rich and adventurous fantasy life for a gray intelligence analyst. But he isn’t Klaus Fuchs or Julius or Ethel Rosenberg. Even those of us who believe that, in light of history, Fuchs and the Rosenbergs ought to be dug up and electrocuted again can’t but be troubled by Pollard’s continued incarceration.
The elephant in the living room of the Pollard case was personified by Caspar Weinberger. Pollard’s stupid treachery was not by any stretch of the imagination the worst case of espionage in the history of the United States as the Secretary wildly asserted. It was not even the worst case of espionage on Weinberger’s watch.
The unaccountable lengths to which Weinberger went to hurt Pollard, not least his letter of condemnation to the Judge, is disturbing. In this Jew’s somewhat wayward Orthodox circles it was taken for granted that the Saudi-friendly, second generation Episcopal Christian Defense Secretary with the Jewish name had a bit of a Jew problem. Tourquemada Syndrome was the general diagnosis. Not a full-blown case of the rug chewing Heebies, to be sure. But twisted all the same.
Pollard’s problem and that of the AIPAC people on trial is a problem of Jewish Americans at large. Can we ever be fully trusted minority in a majority whose foundation myth identifies Jews with treachery? The difficulty for all of us is Judas, the only character besides the divinely cuckolded Joseph who retains his original Hebrew name in the Christian Gospels.
More urgent than the unmercifully long imprisonment of Pollard or the fate of the AIPAC people I hope and trust are innocent and will so be judged, is the business of dispelling the unspoken slander that underlies both cases. The myth of Judas needs to be undone.
Is such an enterprise possible? To give the shepherd’s hook to the villain of a foundation myth accepted and venerated by millions? I believe it is if we’re willing to be aggressive and do what we have never done before: Turn the slander on the loudest slanderers. Make scapegoats of those who make scapegoats of us.
Roman Catholics, it seems to me, are far more vulnerable to charges of dual loyalty than Jews. It has been a while since a Nativist identified a Catholic as a Popish Pagan worshipper of the Roman Antichrist but I believe such hoary themes can be revived.
American Catholics, mainly German and Irish were on the wrong side of two world wars. The German American Bund whose ranks were packed with Irish fellow travelers was overwhelmingly and identifiably Roman Catholic. Father Coughlin enthusiastically flogged the cause. During the Civil war, seventy-thousand disloyal Irish Catholic New Yorkers took up the Southern cause, lynched blacks, destroyed portions of a major Northern city, and fought Union troops brought in to suppress them, killing and mutilating veterans of Gettysburg. Speak of an American fifth column.
If Judas is synonymous with betrayal, there are far more Judases among the Irish than there are among the Jews. The Jews remain loyal to their ancestors, their God, their ancient religion and their native languages. The Irish betrayed all of these by grafting themselves to a Roman reinvention of Jewish Religion, culture and history. How many Irish Judases have betrayed Ireland and their fellow Irishmen can be judged from the fact that for nearly a millennium, a handful of English nobles and bureaucrats in each generation were able to control the Emerald Isle and all its inhabitants. It could not have been accomplished without massive betrayal and disloyalty among the Irish
The Judases among the Germans can be more exactly quantified thanks to the files of the East German Stasi captured intact after the wall fell. One out of twelve was the Judas quotient in the former German People’s Republic. If an East German invited eleven friends to dinner the Stasi were sure to have the menu. Spouses betrayed the most intimate details of their personal lives to the police. German children ratted out their parents and parents ratted out their children And the Stasi was a police force working for the hated Soviets. What might the German Judas quotient have been under the better liked and entirely native Gespapo? One German snitch out of six? One German rat in three?
Then there’s the strangest of accounts by Carl Bernstien in his biography of the last Pope. According to Bernstein, a group of high ranking Reagan administration officials—all fervent, daily Mass attending Roman Catholics—turned over to the Vatican Foreign Office classified CIA studies of the activities of Protestant missionaries in traditionally Catholic Latin America. If the story is true, this was a greater treason than Pollard committed for a far lesser cause by government employees far more senior involving a foreign government considerably less aligned with American goals than Israel.
Why pick on Catholics? First because they’re vulnerable and that’s all the reason they ever needed to pick on us. Second, Catholic voices are the loudest raised against the Jews. It seems that every time a priest gets arrested for pedophilia one or another spokesman for the Catholic League finds a microphone to complain about the gang of Jewish homosexuals in Hollywood who are destroying American culture and morality with their films.
An odd statistic coming out of the fallout from the pervert priest scandals suggest that sentences meted out to Protestant ministers arrested for sex crimes are significantly harsher than those meted out to Roman priests. This is particularly surprising considering that the victims of the Protestant clergymen are mainly adolescent females while victims of the Priests tend to be somewhat younger males. Heavy Roman Catholic representation in law enforcement is cited as a possible reason.
If I sound like a raving anti-Catholic who sees Jesuits in his soup, so be it. I think the point I am making is practical. The FBI is a disproportionately Roman Catholic organization with a history of bigotry and civil rights abuse. At one time an FBI man and a stalwart Roman Catholic like the father of Christopher Boyce, the Falcon of the Falcon and Snowman, could secure a top secret position in the defense establishment for his former altar boy son purely on his good old boy say so. Catholics cops were trustworthy because they were Catholics. Them times have to be put behind us.
AIPAC has been targeted by the FBI for investigation. The faceless good old boys at the FBI who did the targeting need to be aggressively rocked back on their heels. We’re long past the nineteen-sixties when the FBI could wage clandestine warfare against civil rights and citizen’s interest groups. Putting Catholics on the defensive for their faith is tit for tat. Bigotry begets bigotry. Make the bastards pay dearly now and they won’t try it again.
April 20th, 2007 at 11:40 AM
Mr.Levavi, one of these days you may get a phone call from Bill O’Reilly. I hope you are as articulate in front of a camera as you are in front of a keyboard. That said, please bear in mind that rehearsing ancient (or even modern) grievances is a tough sell with average Americans.