AIPAC and Espionage: Guilty, by Justin Raimondo

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/

AIPAC and Espionage: Guilty, by Justin Raimondo

There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare.
? Sun Tzu

September 30, 2005
AIPAC and Espionage: Guilty as Hell

Pentagon analyst plea bargains, threatens to expose Israel's Washington cabal
by Justin Raimondo

The plea bargain struck by former Pentagon analyst Lawrence A. Franklin ?
charged with five counts of handing over classified information to officials of
a pro-Israel lobbying group, who passed it on to Israeli diplomatic personnel ?
has delivered a body blow to the defense of the two remaining accused spies.
Steve Rosen, who for 20 years was the chief lobbyist over at the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and Keith Weissman, AIPAC's top foreign policy
analyst, befriended Franklin and pumped him for top-secret information ?
including sensitive data about al-Qaeda, the Khobar Towers terrorist attack,
Iran's weapons program, and attacks on U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Now they face the
likely prospect of Franklin testifying to their treason in court.

For months, AIPAC's defenders have been bruiting it about that this prosecution
is persecution, that the whole thing is a "setup." What Rosen, Weissman, and
Franklin are accused of is routine, said their defenders ? "everybody does it" ?
and the decision to go after AIPAC is thinly disguised anti-Semitism, the 21st
century American equivalent of Kristallnacht. They have impugned the FBI as some
sort of neo-Nazi outfit, exonerated the accused before even hearing the charges,
and engaged in a smear campaign against anyone who wonders why it is that a
purportedly American organization is engaged in an intelligence-gathering
operation involving the transfer of top-secret information to a foreign
government.

Now the man they portrayed as being a persecuted victim is admitting that, yes,
he spied for Israel, and, furthermore, the clear implication of this apparent
plea bargain is that he is prepared to expose the spy ring that Israel was ? and
perhaps still is ? running inside AIPAC, one of the most powerful lobbying
groups in Washington.

This case has received relatively little publicity in relation to its
importance. It isn't just the fact that, for the first time in recent memory,
Israel's powerful lobby has been humbled. What is going on here is the exposure
of Israel's underground army in the U.S. ? covert legions of propagandists and
outright spies, whose job it is to not only make the case for Israel but to bend
American policy to suit Israel's needs (and, in the process, penetrate
closely-held U.S. secrets).

Particularly fascinating is the apparent longevity of the ongoing investigation:
the implication of the latest indictment [.pdf] is that FBI counterintelligence
officials have been looking into Israel's covert activities in the U.S. since at
least 1999, when Rosen apparently was observed telling a "foreign official" that
he (Rosen) had "picked up an extremely sensitive piece of intelligence"
identified as "codeword protected." At this meeting, the indictment avers, Rosen
handed over this information ? regarding "terrorist activities in Central Asia"
? to the foreign official.

The AIPAC spy nest has been burrowing deeply into Washington's official secrets
without regard for propriety or party. The indictment describes the duo's
extensive contacts with a wide range of U.S. government officials, Israeli
diplomats, and other individuals, none of them identified by name. However, two
have been subsequently outed in the media by sources close to the investigation:
they are David Satterfield, a deputy assistant secretary for Near Eastern
affairs and now the second most senior U.S. government representative in
occupied Iraq, and Kenneth Pollack, who served on the National Security Council
in the Clinton administration. Said Pollack: "I believe I am USGO-1," identified
in the second indictment as having met with Rosen and Weissman on Dec. 12, 2000.
Pollack handed over classified information about "strategy options" against an
unidentified "Middle Eastern country."

Pollack, a key Democratic Party foreign policy adviser, authored an influential
book, The Threatening Storm, which convinced many liberals to jump on board the
pro-war bandwagon. "If we observe how we were lied into war with Iraq, and by
whom," I wrote in May, "the whole affair looks more like an Israeli covert
operation by the day." The AIPAC spy scandal is confirming this in spades ? and
much else, too. It is also showing that the Israelis were not about to stop with
Iraq, but were ? and are ? lobbying furiously for more military action in the
Middle East, this time aiming for regime change in Tehran. The indictments
issued against Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman describe a systematic attempt by
Israel's fifth column in Washington to garner top-secret U.S. intelligence about
Iran, its weapons program, and U.S. deliberations about what action to take.

The chief beneficiaries of the conquest of Iraq, and subsequent threats against
both Iran and Syria, have been, in descending order, Israel, Iran, and Osama bin
Laden. Al-Qaeda has used the invasion as a recruiting tool and training ground
for its global jihad against the United States. Iran has extended its influence
deep into southern Iraq and has penetrated the central government in Baghdad. In
the long run, however, Israel benefits the most, as a major Middle Eastern Arab
country fragments into at least three pieces and the U.S. military is
ineluctably drawn into neighboring countries.

While the U.S. imposes an occupation eerily reminiscent of Israel's longstanding
occupation of Palestinian lands and prepares to deal with Israel's enemies in
the region, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon makes major incursions into the West
Bank, even while supposedly "withdrawing" from Gaza. In the meantime, the
political and military bonds between the U.S. and Israel are strengthened, as
the two allies present an indissoluble united front against the entire Muslim
world.

Except the alliance is far from indissoluble, as the AIPAC spy scandal reveals.
The U.S.-Israeli relationship, often described as "special," is rather more
ambiguous than is generally recognized, both by Israel's staunchest friends and
its most implacable enemies. This has come out in Israel's funneling American
military technology to China, and the threat of American sanctions, but was also
made manifest earlier by indications that Israel was conducting extensive spying
operations in the U.S. prior to 9/11 ? suspicions that are considerably
strengthened by the AIPAC spy brouhaha.

Israel's secret war against America has so far been conducted in the dark, but
the Rosen-Weissman trial will expose these night creatures to the light of day.
Blinking and cursing, they'll be confronted with their treason, and, even as
they whine that "everybody does it," the story of how and why a cabal of foreign
agents came to exert so much influence on the shape of U.S. foreign policy will
be told.

In the course of bending American policy to the Israelis' will, they had to
compromise the national security of the United States ? and that's what tripped
them up, in the end.

The blogger Billmon succinctly summed up how this case throws a new light on the
real contours of U.S.-Israeli relations and puts an entirely different face on
the "special relationship":

"While the marriage may look like perfect conjugal bliss from the Washington
end, the Jerusalem end has a different point of view ? and always will. The
Israelis understand, even if their American patrons do not, that they live in
another country, one with its own national interests, its own strategic
ambitions and its own enemies, none of which necessarily overlap with America's.


"They don't even make much of an attempt to hide it, as this writer for David
Horowitz's Frontpage (to Israel what the Daily Worker once was to the Soviet
Union) makes clear: 'A more independent Israel is determined to make its own
mark on the world ? questioning U.S. authority more frequently in order to
establish its own autonomous relations with other countries.'

"A good idea. It's just a shame our own political lap dogs and their media water
carriers won't do likewise."

The Soviet analogy is very apt, The success of both the KGB and the Mossad in
Washington, albeit at different times, was in both cases enabled by an alliance
born of political necessity as well as military utility. Our World War II
alliance with the Soviets made the KGB's job a lot easier, allowing them to set
up a network based on ideological loyalty that later reaped intelligence
dividends. In addition, there was a lot of domestic political pressure to give
the Russians what they wanted, as the Communists took the lead in dragging us
into war in order to save Stalin's "workers' paradise" from Hitler's legions.
America's longstanding relationship with Israel similarly gave the Israelis the
basic structure of a very efficient and increasingly bold spying apparatus in
the U.S., the tentacles of which reached into the upper echelons of the U.S.
government, including the Pentagon. AIPAC functions simultaneously as a lobbying
group ? one whose will is rarely defied by legislators ? and as a key link in
the chain of espionage that binds us to the Israelis in a very "special
relationship."

Israel's legendary Mossad intelligence service, with its reputation for both
efficiency and ruthlessness, reportedly shadowed the 9/11 hijackers on American
soil as they prepared to launch the biggest terrorist attack in our history.
Multiple sources reported a large-scale surveillance operation directed at U.S.
government buildings, including offices of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the FBI,
U.S. courthouses, and some military bases and research facilities. The AIPAC spy
cell in Washington was the brain, and the "Israeli art students" ? whose
movements shadowed the hijackers in Florida and elsewhere ? were the arms and
feet of a subterranean creature whose dimensions we are only just beginning to
discover.

? Justin Raimondo


Justin Raimondo is the editorial director of Antiwar.com. He is the author of An
Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard (Prometheus Books, 2000). He
is also the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the
Conservative Movement (with an Introduction by Patrick J. Buchanan), (Center for
Libertarian Studies, 1993), and Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S.
Intervention in the Balkans (1996).

He is a contributing editor for The American Conservative, a Senior Fellow at
the Randolph Bourne Institute, and an Adjunct Scholar with the Ludwig von Mises
Institute, and writes frequently for Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture.


Reproduction of material from any original Antiwar.com pages
without written permission is strictly prohibited.
Copyright 2005 Antiwar.com


.

Quantcast