Why is the Wall Street Journal in favor of espionage?
by Justin Raimondo
The title of Dorothy Rabinowitz’s Wall Street Journal screed defending two accused spies, “First They Came for the Jews,” telegraphs the strategy apologists for Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman will be using when the two AIPAC officials’ trial on charges of espionage, scheduled for June 4, finally begins. It is also a smear so outrageous it almost defies belief. What that headline communicates is the warped conception that the U.S. government, in prosecuting two prominent lobbyists on behalf of Israel for handing over sensitive classified information to Israeli officials, is the equivalent of the Nazi regime. What’s next – the WSJ editorially attacking “Bushitler”?
Rosen, long the spark plug of AIPAC’s very effective lobbying efforts, and Weissman, AIPAC’s Iran specialist, are charged with espionage on Israel’s behalf: here is the indictment. It shows that Rosen and Weissman weren’t just “ordinary citizens,” as Rabinowitz characterizes them, or even just high-powered lobbyists, acting, as is their right, to influence government policy. They were the leaders of a spy ring that was in the business of gathering classified information from their sources inside the U.S. government and feeding it to Israeli officials – a business that attracted the attention of the FBI’s counterintelligence unit way back in 1999, when, according to the indictment:
“Rosen had a conversation with Foreign Official 1 (FO-1) and told FO-1 that he (Rosen) had ‘picked up alt extremely sensitive piece of intelligence’ which Rosen described as codeword protected intelligence. Rosen then disclosed to FO-1 national defense information concerning terrorist activities in Central Asia.”At the same time, Rosen also got his hot little hands on a “secret FBI, classified FBI report” – in Rosen’s own secretly-recorded words – about the Khobar Towers terrorist attack, which he claimed he had received from U.S. government officials. Rosen also fed favored media outlets with the fruits of his labors, leaking the Khobar Towers intelligence to a friendly reporter. Rosen, in short, had been the object of the FBI’s attention for some time, and that presumably included the organization he worked for and did so much to build up as one of the most powerful – and feared – lobbies in Washington.
The indictment outlines a series of meetings between Rosen and at least two unidentified U.S. government officials – since identified as David Satterfield and Kenneth Pollack – in which the man who built AIPAC into a lobbying powerhouse turned his organization into a transmission belt that routinely moved classified information from Washington to Tel Aviv. Rabinowitz doesn’t mention any of this: instead, she merely says Rosen was “for some time the object of FBI surveillance.” The observant reader will surely ask, “And why was that?”
Apparently Rabinowitz doesn’t care about those particular readers, however, and is, instead, preaching to the choir: Israel’s amen corner in the U.S. This is a group, one suspects, that, if Israel launched air strikes against the continental U.S. tomorrow, would rationalize it without even blinking.
For the rest of us, however, Rabinowitz’s long narrative positing a Justice Department conspiracy to get “the Jews” is as wacky as one of Lyndon LaRouche’s convoluted conspiracy theories involving the Queen of England, Felix Rohatyn, Satan, and the drug trade.
To begin with, Rabinowitz claims the AIPAC duo were “entrapped in a sting,” but the reality is quite different. Yes, top Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin – after being confronted by the FBI and threatened with a long jail sentence – did wear a wire when offering Rosen and Weissman top secret information, which he took care to inform them might get them all “in trouble” if the authorities got wind of it. Yet it was Rosen who first sought out Franklin. “On or about August 5,” the indictment states, Rosen called one of his Pentagon contacts, identified only as “DoD employee A,” and asked for someone in OSD-ISA “with an expertise in Iran.” Rosen’s contact suggested Larry Franklin, described by Rabinowitz as “a staunch patriot.” In light of what happened next, however, one has to ask: a patriot of which country?
http://antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=10764