Why is accused spy Steve Rosen leading the charge against Chas Freeman, Obama's pick for the National Intelligence Council? Here's a great piece in the New Jersey Jewish News yesterday by Douglas Bloomfield, a former AIPAC staffer, on what's at stake in the Steve Rosen espionage case that the government might bring to trial in May:
[In 2004] Soon after the FBI
raided AIPAC offices, the organization launched a fund-raising campaign
to defend against any charges, and the appeals for money didn’t stop
when it fired the pair. Since the scandal broke in 2004, AIPAC’s
fund-raising juggernaut has hauled in so much dough that one senior
staffer told me that “it’s coming in faster than we know what to do
with it.”
JTA quoted tax records showing AIPAC raised $86 million in 2007, doubling 2003’s $43 million. Not all of that money was a result of the espionage case, but many millions were.
In cutting loose the pair, AIPAC insisted it had no idea what they were doing. Not so, say insiders, former colleagues, sources close to the defense, and others familiar with the organization.
One of the topics AIPAC won’t want discussed, say these sources, is how closely it coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
That could not only validate AIPAC’s critics, who accuse it of being a branch of the Likud, but also lead to an investigation of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“What they don’t want out is that even though they publicly sounded like they were supporting the Oslo process, they were working all the time to undermine it,” said a well-informed source.
JTA quoted tax records showing AIPAC raised $86 million in 2007, doubling 2003’s $43 million. Not all of that money was a result of the espionage case, but many millions were.
In cutting loose the pair, AIPAC insisted it had no idea what they were doing. Not so, say insiders, former colleagues, sources close to the defense, and others familiar with the organization.
One of the topics AIPAC won’t want discussed, say these sources, is how closely it coordinated with Benjamin Netanyahu in the 1990s, when he led the Israeli Likud opposition and later when he was prime minister, to impede the Oslo peace process being pressed by President Bill Clinton and Israeli Prime Ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres.
That could not only validate AIPAC’s critics, who accuse it of being a branch of the Likud, but also lead to an investigation of violations of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
“What they don’t want out is that even though they publicly sounded like they were supporting the Oslo process, they were working all the time to undermine it,” said a well-informed source.
Related posts:
- Steve Rosen seeks ’serious discovery’ on AIPAC’s practices
- Steve Rosen is on a roll
- Justice Department interviewed Harman after Rosen/Weissman charges were dropped, says military blog
- Justice Department interviewed Harman after Rosen/Weissman charges were dropped, says military blog
- ‘Peace Now’ suggests that election will stymie ‘peace process’
{ 6 comments }
Phil is awfully free with "accused" spy charge. How about we start calling fell an accused paedophile?
Rosen epitomizes how broken and outright corrupt the centers of power, and the media that fawn over them and advance their agenda, are right now in this country.
That he has a platform at all to advance his thoughts, let alone the pretty powerful one he seems to have, is absolutely revolting.
@Steve R
To be fair, Rosen has been indicted for allegedly passing on classified information. I don't know who fell is, but I'm guessing no indictment filed.
@Phil
What Rosen is accused of doing is being told info by U.S. Government officials and passing it on. Something that happens a hundred times a day in Washington, whenever the government wants someone to know something, but doesn't want to officially tell them.
Rosen says he had no way of knowing that this wasn't such an occasion (if in fact it wasn't, since two officials who told him the information he passed on aren't even being prosecuted, despite the fact that they had taken an oath to not reveal classified information).
The prosecutor's case is the weakest I've seen since the Duke Lacross case. The charges are absurd in light of the established practice of the U.S. government using back channels to get information around. In fact, "the indictment of Rosen and Weissman is the first occasion in American history that the Espionage Act was applied to prosecute recipients of leaks who were not government officials, had not signed non-disclosure agreements, and were not accused of being agents of a foreign power." That's from wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt.
The prosecution is saying that Rosen actually knew that the information was classified and that revealing it would hurt the U.S. Since the government officials who told him the information weren't being bribed and had no reason to want to hurt the U.S., how would he know that?
If the prosecutors were smart, they would drop it rather than waiting for an acquittal.
The Effort To Block Obama's Intelligence Choice Gets Very Creepy
By M.J. Rosenberg – March 6, 2009, 11:34AM
The effort to force President Obama to withdraw the nomination of Chas Freeman as chairman of the National Intelligence Council is getting very very creepy.
Initially, it was just typically ugly. The forces that support the Likud line on Israel always try to block any appointment of anyone who opposes Israeli policies in the occupied territories. During the past eight years they got accustomed to having their people in virtually every foreign policy post. They were called neocons and one of that group's many successes was manipulating the intelligence that got us into Iraq (see Feith, Douglas).
So it was natural that when President Obama apointed someone who was on the record as strongly opposing the occupation they would go ballistic — and they did.
Steve Rosen, the indicted former AIPAC official, organized a full-court attack on Freeman, enlisting all the usual suspects (the New Republic crowd, the Weekly Standard crowd, and their various and sundry camp followers). Journalists all over Washington were contacted not only by Rosen but by his former employers to take down Freeman.
It was all about Israel, of course. Everyone involved in the anti-Freeman effort are staunch allies of the lobby.
But focusing only on Israel did not look good. So the "get Freeman" bunch decided to feign interest in his alleged ties to Saudi Arabia (of course, that is all about Israel, too) and, get this, his supposed lack of sympathy to Chinese dissidents. The latest is that they are accusing him of taking Saudi money for his foundation and are demanding that this be investigated in the name of good government.
But it's all about Israel.
It's silly to pretend that it isn't when the people applying these strict standards to Freeman never applied them to anyone before. Would they oppose a nominee who had a few million dollars invested in Israel or was unnaturally close to the Israel lobby? Of course not. They would applaud the appointment. Employees of the lobby have gone directly from it to the highest levels of the State Department. Who protested? Certainly not these people.
Here is the scary part.
I'm a pro-Israel Jew, who has visited Israel 50 times in 40 years. But I am, like 99.9% of American Jews, first an American.
The idea that the anti-Freeman crowd is running all over town demanding that anyone not close to Israel be banned from working in an American intelligence agency leaves me nauseated.
How dare they? It has taken 20 years to get over the Pollard spy scandal. It could take another 20 to get over Steve Rosen. Good Jewish American kids cannot get jobs in various US government agencies because some people who provide (or withhold) clearances think that American Jews have divided loyalties.
We don't. But crusades like this, not surprisingly, leave the impression that we do.
This isn't about Freeman.
It is about a group that has decided to go after him to warn the administration that only friends of the lobby are acceptable appointees. It is about a group that is so oblivious to Jewish history that it believes it can recklessly put their interests in Israel above everything else and not expect to build strong resentment in Washington (it was strong enough, even before this).
How dare they? My children are first generation (their mom, my wife, was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany after her parents survived the Holocaust). We love this country and will be damned if we allow anyone to convey the impression that we take it for granted.
For us, this is the "goldeneh medina" (the golden land), the best homeland Jews ever had. How dare they imply that for us it's only second best.
This whole thing is creepy. And it hurts all Jews.
It also hurts Israel, a country I love, which is being destroyed by policies these people have consistently supported. Why can't they just shut up? Haven't they done enough damage?
Last update – 12:02 03/11/2008
Defense for AIPAC spy suspects: Data at core of case was not really 'top secret'
By Josh Gerstein
Tags: Israel News, Jewish World
RICHMOND – The defense of two pro-Israel lobbyists accused of illegally obtaining and disclosing American national security secrets will argue that some of the data the men allegedly conspired to reveal came directly from the Israeli government and was not truly secret, defense lawyers told a federal appeals court last week.
Three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals spent more than 90 minutes Wednesday wrestling with the issue of how much classified information the defense should be permitted to introduce in the case of Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
The beginning of the unusual court session was held in public, but the lawyers and the judges retreated behind closed doors in a specially-cleared and guarded courtroom to discuss the most sensitive aspects of the case about halfway through the hearing.
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As they waited for the arguments to begin, defense lawyers leafed through fat binders marked in orange with the words, "TOP SECRET."
Rosen and Weissman were indicted in 2005 on charges that they gathered secrets from U.S. officials and passed the confidential information to journalists, Israeli diplomats and others in violation of the United States Espionage Act.
Rosen and Weissman are not charged with receiving or distributing any classified documents, but solely with relaying information orally. Some free speech advocates have argued that what the two men allegedly did is not much different from what journalists do every day.
Prosecutors have indicated that covert wiretaps captured the men acknowledging they knew the data was classified.
Trial dates for the pair, who were fired from AIPAC, have been repeatedly canceled as wrangling dragged on over what classified information could be revealed at trial, which could take place as soon as February. A parade of prominent witnesses are expected, including Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, former U.S. Army General Anthony Zinni and leaders of U.S.-based pro-Israel groups.
Rosen and Weissman, who have pled not guilty, face the possibility of lengthy prison terms if convicted. A Pentagon analyst who admitted leaking information to the duo, Lawrence Franklin, was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison and is cooperating with prosecutors.
The government filed the appeal last week, arguing that the trial judge, T.S. Ellis III, erred when he ruled the defense was entitled to use a classified State Department document and another from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
"That information is not actually relevant to the crime that was charged," an attorney in the Justice Department's counterespionage section, Thomas Reilly, told the judges.
Rosen's attorney, Abbe Lowell, said the State Department document shows that Israel was circulating the intelligence reports Rosen is accused of disclosing to other AIPAC employees and a foreigner not named in the indictment.
"You have to be able to prove what the Israelis knew," Lowell said. "In our defense, it is important that this information, discussed down the line by our client, is Israel-based."
Lowell did not detail the Israeli information in the open session, but declassified court records indicate the document describes intelligence about the Karine A, a ship seized by Israel in 2002 in the Red Sea. Israel said the vessel was loaded with rifles, anti-tank missiles, rockets, mortars and other weapons destined for the Gaza Strip.
Sources close to the case said the State Department memo relates to a briefing Israeli Gen. Yossi Kuperwasser gave American diplomats about the Karine A during a trip to Washington in January, 2002. Rosen got a similar briefing from Kuperwasser the same day.
Lowell suggested that the State Department memo was nearly identical to a note Rosen sent to fellow AIPAC employees.
"You'd be able to draw a line between the allegation and the assertion and where it's from," Lowell said.
Lowell also said a former State Department official, Carl Ford Jr., was prepared to testify that the bulk of the memo was actually unclassified.
"Who gets to define what's classified is the Executive Branch," Reilly insisted.
The nature of the FBI document was less clear, but a lawyer for Weissman, Baruch Weiss, said prosecutors want to prevent the defense from disputing which portion of the report made it so sensitive.
"The government wants to use the part of the document that is helpful to them and they don't want us to use the part of the document that is helpful to us," Weiss said.
The appeals judges, Robert King, Roger Gregory and Dennis Shedd, issued no immediate decision, but Shedd said he was reluctant to disturb the rulings Ellis arrived at after protracted hearings.
"You have a very high hill to climb, especially with the time the judge spent in this case," he told Reilly.
All three appeals jurists expressed skepticism about the government's claim that the ruling on classified information opened up Judge Ellis' other decisions for immediate appeal. "That would be a change to what we normally apply," Shedd said.
Generally, federal prosecutors in America cannot appeal pre-trial rulings on legal and evidentiary issues and defendants can do so only if they are convicted. Weiss said those basic rules should be kept despite the classified information issue.
"I was a prosecutor myself. Many times, I lost things I'd have loved to appeal," Weiss said. "I was stuck."
Reilly argued a law passed in 1980 to govern the use of classified information in criminal cases made clear that Congress wanted court proceedings involving national secrets handled differently.
"The point is to get it right before classified information is disclosed," he said. Through his attorney, Rosen asked to be admitted to the secret portion of the argument but was never allowed in.
The three-judge panel assigned to the case is fairly diverse politically, with Shedd appointed to the bench by the elder Bush, King named by President Clinton, and Gregory on the panel via an unusual recess appointment from Clinton and a subsequent nod from the current President Bush.
Either the defense or prosecution could ask for reconsideration of the appeals judges' ruling by the full 11-judge bench of the 4th Circuit or review by the Supreme Court, but such requests are rarely granted.
M J is certainly a professional. Watch him negotiate a hairpin bend in five sentences: "I'm a pro-Israel Jew, who has visited Israel 50 times in 40 years. But I am, like 99.9% of American Jews, first an American. The idea that the anti-Freeman crowd is running all over town demanding that anyone not close to Israel be banned from working in an American intelligence agency leaves me nauseated. How dare they? It has taken 20 years to get over the Pollard spy scandal."
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