A friend has passed along Norman Pearlstine’s piece in WSJ urging Michael Mukasey to drop the AIPAC case. Pearlstine argues that the lobbyists were performing routine business:
there have been few prosecutions of government
leakers for espionage in recent decades and… before AIPAC, the
government had never sought to make receipt of classified information
and passing it on to others a crime under the Espionage Act.Like it or not, the lobbyists were operating in a system in which leaks have become essential to the function of government in Washington.
It is often impossible for a journalist or a lobbyist to know whether
leaked information is classified. And, surprisingly, the leaking of
classified information may be legal, so long as the information has
first been declassified.That sounds like a high hurdle, but it is not.
According to a 2004 Report of the Information Security Oversight
Office, more than 4,000 government officials have the authority to
declassify information. Such declassification is relatively simple…
OK. But Pearlstine fails to mention that the leaked info was going to the Israeli Embassy, a foreign government. Raising the question that Grant Smith at IRMEP has repeatedly raised, whether AIPAC shouldn’t have to register as foreign agents. Just what is going on here? Of course it goes to the heart of the dual-loyalty definition of Jewish identity today: we’re supposed to care about Israel more than the U.S. Like the two Long Island boys Kyra Phillips interviewed on CNN last summer as they were heading off to help the Israelis butcher Lebanon. Phillips had the presence of mind to ask why they weren’t going off to serve in Iraq. Never occured to them…
Is this business as usual? All the more reason to have a trial, to so we hear about the sort of stuff they were passing along, and hear from the ideologue Douglas Feith. Open up these routine practices to the disinfectant of light.
