AIPAC Gov Suit Dropped

(It is about time...)

Friday, May 01

AIPAC Case Dropped -- A Shameful Chapter is Closed

    Jonathan Tobin - 05.01.2009

    The Jewish Telegraphic Agency reports that the Justice Department has
    finally done the right thing and dropped its prosecution of two former
    AIPAC analysts.

    This was long overdue. The problem here was not just that court
    rulings had made convictions impossible. It was that there was no case
    to begin with. The idea that the government could prosecute two
    private individuals under the 1917 Espionage Act for passing along
    government leaks was absurd. The whole point of the exercise was
    obviously an attempt on the part of some people in the FBI to
    embarrass the pro-Israel lobby. But what they wound up doing was
    something that potentially made every off-the-record communication
    between people in the government and journalists or lobbyists a crime.
    That was never going to fly as a matter of law or justice.

    But the threat to journalistic freedom didn't deter many in the press
    from promoting this misguided setup as a "spy story." That was, if you
    recall, the way it was originally put forward in a government leak to
    CBS News. On August 27, 2004, CBS broke a story about an FBI
    investigation into a possible spy in the U.S. Department of Defense
    working for Israel. The story reported that the FBI had uncovered a
    spy working as a policy analyst for Under Secretary of Defense for
    Policy Douglas Feith and then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul
    Wolfowitz. The country thought this was a repeat of the Jonathan
    Pollard spy scandal with connections to two prominent "neo-cons" in
    the government.

    But what was really going on was that the government was spying on
    AIPAC, not the other way around. The case against Rosen and Weissman
    was based on a government "sting," in which Larry Franklin, a defense
    department official who was bullied into accepting a guilty plea and
    was later sentenced to over 12 years in prison, passed on false
    information to them about threats from Iran.

    Unfortunately for Rosen and Weissman, the government bullied AIPAC
    into abandoning them to their fate. The two were fired and later the
    organization refused to pay their defense costs. Both of these points
    are the subjects of lawsuits by Rosen and Weissman against their
    former employer. AIPAC is going to need to settle those suits pronto.

    Now after almost five years, Rosen and Weissman are finally off the
    hook and can get on with the rest of their lives. Both deserve credit
    for having the courage to resist the enormous pressure that was placed
    on them to give in and plead guilty.

    But questions need to be asked about why so much time, energy, and
    money was expended by the government on a case that never had much of
    a basis in law, fact, or morality. The real scandal was not the false
    story about Israeli spies that the government leaked, but about a
    Justice Department that sought to use its power to destroy the lives
    of a couple of pro-Israel analysts/lobbyists and to stigmatize the
    entire pro-Israel community, (not to mention those who were alarmed
    about the danger from Iran).

    A shameful chapter in American judicial history is closed but the
    recriminations over this outrage should just be getting started.


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