A new wrinkle in the AIPAC spy case
Isn't this interesting. . .
The Jerusalem Post reports:
"A US district court Friday allowed the defense in the trial of two former AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) employees to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify in the trial, after they claimed that Rice had leaked to the AIPAC staffers the same information that they had received from a former Pentagon employee and for which they are being prosecuted. . . In the hearing, attorney Abbe Lowell, representing former AIPAC staffer Steve Rosen, told the court that Rice's testimony is needed since she had met with Rosen in the past, while serving as National Security Adviser, and conveyed to him the same information that he and his colleague Keith Weissman later received from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin. "
[Franklin is now in prison after agreeing to cooperate with the government in the case. He worked for Bill Luti, the nut who worked for Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, the office where all that phony Iraq WMD intel was cooked up. Franklin was accussed of giving top secret intel not only to the two AIPAC employees but also Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon. ATimes]
Rosen and Weissman are now on trial for spying for Israel. They are alleged to have taken classified information having to do with U.S. Middle East policy and according to the indictment against them: [They] did willfully communicate, deliver and transmit that information directly and indirectly to a person or persons not entitled to receive it." [i.e. spied]
The defense for Rosen and Weissman now apparently want to get Condi Rice, Steven Hadley and Elliot Abrahms to testify to the fact that the classified info Rosen and Weissman gave to Israel and leaked to the media, in order to "advance [their] own personal foreign policy agenda and influence persons within and outside the United States government," was all approved by Rice and Co. and therefore not a crime.
AP reports:
"Defense attorneys suggested that top U.S. officials regularly used the lobbyists as a go-between as they crafted Middle East policy. If so, attorneys say, how are Rosen and Weissman supposed to know behavior expected of them one day is criminal the next? . . . Attorneys for Rosen and Weissman have argued that the Israeli interest group played an unofficial but sanctioned role in crafting foreign policy and that Rice and others can confirm it. " [I'd love to see that!]
Now, that's especially interesting. AIPAC had a hand in crafting our foreign policy? What a surprise! Naturally, "Federal prosecutors have said little in public about why Rice and others should not have to testify."
Of course, even going after AIPAC is an anti-semitic act, right? Must be.
"What is the connection between the Franklin/AIPAC Spy Scandal and the case of Jonathan Pollard", you might ask, as the writer for this piece at jonathanpollard.com did. "Once again the US is hysterically trumpeting charges in the media against Jews, AIPAC and Israel, which upon critical examination, are simply not substantiated by any hard evidence."
Yes, no evidence at all. Just look at the indictments, nothing there. A tissue of lies. Just like what happened to Pollard.
The Jewish Virtual Library says:
"A subcommittee of the Knesset's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee on Intelligence and Security Services concluded: "Beyond all doubt...the operational echelons (namely: the Scientific Liaison Unit headed by Rafael Eitan) decided to recruit and handle Pollard without any check or consultation with the political echelon or receiving its direct or indirect approval.' The Knesset committee took the government to task for not properly supervising the scientific unit."
So he did spy for Israel and they admit it, but he's not a traitor! Crazy.
The Jerusalem Post reports:
"A US district court Friday allowed the defense in the trial of two former AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) employees to ask Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to testify in the trial, after they claimed that Rice had leaked to the AIPAC staffers the same information that they had received from a former Pentagon employee and for which they are being prosecuted. . . In the hearing, attorney Abbe Lowell, representing former AIPAC staffer Steve Rosen, told the court that Rice's testimony is needed since she had met with Rosen in the past, while serving as National Security Adviser, and conveyed to him the same information that he and his colleague Keith Weissman later received from former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin. "
[Franklin is now in prison after agreeing to cooperate with the government in the case. He worked for Bill Luti, the nut who worked for Douglas Feith's Office of Special Plans, the office where all that phony Iraq WMD intel was cooked up. Franklin was accussed of giving top secret intel not only to the two AIPAC employees but also Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon. ATimes]
Rosen and Weissman are now on trial for spying for Israel. They are alleged to have taken classified information having to do with U.S. Middle East policy and according to the indictment against them: [They] did willfully communicate, deliver and transmit that information directly and indirectly to a person or persons not entitled to receive it." [i.e. spied]
The defense for Rosen and Weissman now apparently want to get Condi Rice, Steven Hadley and Elliot Abrahms to testify to the fact that the classified info Rosen and Weissman gave to Israel and leaked to the media, in order to "advance [their] own personal foreign policy agenda and influence persons within and outside the United States government," was all approved by Rice and Co. and therefore not a crime.
AP reports:
"Defense attorneys suggested that top U.S. officials regularly used the lobbyists as a go-between as they crafted Middle East policy. If so, attorneys say, how are Rosen and Weissman supposed to know behavior expected of them one day is criminal the next? . . . Attorneys for Rosen and Weissman have argued that the Israeli interest group played an unofficial but sanctioned role in crafting foreign policy and that Rice and others can confirm it. " [I'd love to see that!]
Now, that's especially interesting. AIPAC had a hand in crafting our foreign policy? What a surprise! Naturally, "Federal prosecutors have said little in public about why Rice and others should not have to testify."
Of course, even going after AIPAC is an anti-semitic act, right? Must be.
"What is the connection between the Franklin/AIPAC Spy Scandal and the case of Jonathan Pollard", you might ask, as the writer for this piece at jonathanpollard.com did. "Once again the US is hysterically trumpeting charges in the media against Jews, AIPAC and Israel, which upon critical examination, are simply not substantiated by any hard evidence."
Yes, no evidence at all. Just look at the indictments, nothing there. A tissue of lies. Just like what happened to Pollard.
The Jewish Virtual Library says:
"A subcommittee of the Knesset's Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee on Intelligence and Security Services concluded: "Beyond all doubt...the operational echelons (namely: the Scientific Liaison Unit headed by Rafael Eitan) decided to recruit and handle Pollard without any check or consultation with the political echelon or receiving its direct or indirect approval.' The Knesset committee took the government to task for not properly supervising the scientific unit."
So he did spy for Israel and they admit it, but he's not a traitor! Crazy.
posted by William Duane at 1:13 PM
2 Comments:
People are quite simply wrong when they accuse anyone of lying about the Iraqi WMD intelligence. It is a popular belief among Iraqi war critics and democrats in general, but it simply is not true. The fact is that even the best analysts of the world's most successful intelligence agencies can and do (at least occasionally) read the evidence incorrectly. That is not a lie, nor can any statements made by their leaders that may have been based on such conclusions be considered an outright lie. The real question should be "how did so many of the world's great intelligence agencies get it wrong?"
I believe that the answer is threefold. First of all, answers can be found in Saddam's paranoid logic. He believed that it was better to risk the wrath of the world's greatest superpowers, than to let his neighbors know that he was not as militarily capable as he had been. Secondly, vast amounts of chemical and biological weapons were never accounted for by Iraq or the United Nations. Last is the basic fact that all of the intelligence agencies around the world were saying pretty much the same thing. It would seem that the agencies were vetting information through each other rather than vetting the sources of the information itself.
As far as any UN reports are concerned, they have been wrong more often than any intelligence agency could ever be accused of with any sincerity. After the first gulf war, it was found that rather than the years away from concluding Iraqi WMD programs as claimed by the United Nations, Saddam was literally within 12 months from finishing some of his most deadly weapons development programs, which included nuclear weapons.
At the time, Saddam’s own disinformation machine was in high gear shouting the UN's reports to the heavens in the hopes that he could stall any definitive actions until his weapons programs were completed. Today we see the Iranian mouthpieces doing exactly the same thing. The simple and deadly fact of the matter is that they only need one nuclear device to change the world in a most horrific and devastating way.
The United Nations does not represent the United States let alone any other government in the world, nor does it have any incentive to protect the United States or it's citizens and the UN has in fact proven itself time and again to be completely ineffective when it comes to accurately gaging the capabilities and or intentions of hostile regimes.
Western leaders on the other hand have every incentive to be as forthright and as honest as prudence and national security allows. Western leaders and the citizens they represent are not the fools Iran would have us to be. We know with little doubt or uncertainty that when a hostile, terrorist regime such as can be found in Tehran says openly that they are working towards the capability of producing weapons grade materials on an industrial scale and furthermore that they intend to destroy Israel, and then add to that the massive construction projects and security programs currently underway in their country, perhaps, just possibly, they might be a threat.
Key [Iraq Survey Group] findings in the report:
"The ISG has not found evidence that Saddam possessed WMD stocks in 2003, but [there is] the possibility that some weapons existed in Iraq, although not of a militarily significant capability."
"There is an extensive, yet fragmentary and circumstantial body of evidence suggesting that Saddam pursued a strategy to maintain a capability to return to WMD after sanctions were lifted... "
"The problem of discerning WMD in Iraq is highlighted by the pre-war misapprehensions of weapons which were not there. Distant technical analysts mistakenly identified evidence and drew incorrect conclusions."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3718150.stm
Hussein Kamal to UN inspectoers after defecting in 1995
". . . After the Gulf War, Iraq destroyed all its chemical and biological weapons stocks and the missiles to deliver them."
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1845
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