Max Blumenthal has the latest on the Kamm/Blau case, translating the gag order for Anat Kam(m?) and describing the fear of reporting on the matter inside Israel:
The most notable piece of information is that Israel’s National and International Serious Crimes Unit spearheaded the investigation into Kam’s conduct. The involvement of this unit, which in the past has gone after Israeli journalists for traveling to designated enemy nations like Syria, and therefore seems primarily concerned with crimes committed abroad, raises the question of whether Kam leaked documents to reporters besides Blau who work for international papers.
While American bloggers like Richard Silverstein have been reporting on the Kam affair for weeks, some Israeli bloggers have taken down their posts, fearing that they could harm Kam’s defense — and possibly place themselves in danger — by provoking the Shin Bet and reactionary political elements. The fact that the contents of the gag order were not shown to anyone until tonight only added to the climate of confusion and fear.
There are exceptions to the blackout, however. The Israeli reporter Mya Guarneri has written about the Kam affair at The National, a foreign paper. And the scandal has received in-depth treatment from the Palestinian news service, Ma’an News, which recently lost a top editor, Jared Malsin (an American graduate of Yale University), when Israeli security services ordered his deportation on the grounds that he had published damaging reports about Israeli military conduct in the Occupied Territories. Besides a few vigilant Israeli bloggers, a Facebook page devoted to Kam’s case is hosting what blogger Didi Remez calls “a de facto civil disobedience campaign.”
Two major papers in Israel have tried to find their way around the gag order. Yedioth Ahronoth satirized the media blackout, submitting Judith Miller’s report about Kam to the military censor, then publishing a redacted version of the article (see it here). And Haaretz has run an interview with a former Supreme Court Justice, Dalia Dorner, who mocks the order as pointless in the age of the internet. “If the entire world knows about [the Kam affair],” Dorner said, “issuing a gag order is baseless.” However, the article does not mention Kam directly or describe the details of her case.
