The federal case against two former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the pro-Israel lobby giant, continues to fuel the conspiracy theories on the left and the right that depict Israel and it its supporters as arch manipulators responsible for every American ill, starting with the Iraq war.
But to a growing number of observers across the political spectrum, the ongoing prosecution is beginning to look like an administration vendetta against the First Amendment, not a serious effort to protect critical national security information.
Some of that perception may be spun by the defendants’ lawyers, but it’s getting harder to find anybody in Washington who believes the government has a solid case against the former lobbyists. Instead, the prosecution seems part of a broader pattern of suppressing the flow of information to the public. And not just security secrets.
A quick refresher: the case involves former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin, who pleaded guilty to charges of leaking vital defense information and was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
The alleged recipients of that information were Steve Rosen, the former policy director for AIPAC, and Keith Weissman, an Iran specialist, who were indicted last August under the rarely invoked 1917 Espionage Act.
When it was revealed last year that federal prosecutors were looking at the two, anti-Israel forces gleefully predicted a new Israel spy scandal that would cut the pro-Israel lobby down to size, since the two were under investigation for passing the leaked information to Israeli diplomats as well as American journalists.
Within the Jewish world, there was unease and ambivalence. AIPAC is at once deeply respected for its Capitol Hill successes and resented for its dominance of the pro-Israel agenda and for what critics regard as selective support for the government in Jerusalem — enthusiastic when the government is right of center, grudging when it leans left.
And Rosen has been a mercurial figure, widely regarded as brilliant but also the flash point for many of the pro-Israel lobby’s controversies.
Rosen, who once compared the lobby to a “night flower” that thrives best in the dark, was one of the prime architects of AIPAC’s secretive style. He was a master spinner of the press and reportedly a major factor in several personnel upheavals. There are a number of former AIPAC officials who blame Rosen for their involuntary departures; some were only too eager to believe the worst when it was reported he was under investigation.
But for analysts without a political axe to grind, the case looked fishy from the outset, and the odor got worse when the two were indicted last August. They were not charged with possessing secret documents or spying, just with hearing the classified information and verbally passing it on to others.
AIPAC, it seemed, was never a target of the investigation, and the administration continued to treat the group with favor, sending top officials to its annual policy conference — this year it was Vice President Dick Cheney.
In a series of court hearings, T.S. Ellis, the presiding judge, seemed more and more skeptical about the government’s broad application of the antique Espionage Act.
Other administration actions suggested a broader effort against what it calls leaks, but what critics call free speech and a free press.
Federal officials are now busily reclassifying as secret documents that had already been declassified. Investigators recently tried to get their hands on quarter-century old records of the late columnist Jack Anderson, presumably because they were seeking Anderson’s informants from that long-ago time.
The goal seems to be to criminalize the very act of knowing information the government deems classified.
There is growing talk in Washington that reporters who speak with government officials — and who may, knowingly or unknowingly, hear government secrets — may be in the prosecutors’ cross hairs. Ditto the advocacy groups representing a universe of views that depend on personal contacts with government officials and the steady flow of information to represent their constituents.
Even the non-alarmist Washington Post — hardly a shill for the pro-Israel lobby — wrote in a recent editorial that a successful prosecution could “radically diminish the openness of U.S. government while criminalizing huge swaths of academic debate and journalism. No one has announced it in so many words, but if the government succeeds, for the first time non-officials — activists, congressional staffers, journalists — would be deemed criminal for transmitting secret information or even for just receiving it.”
Increasingly, it looks like this prosecution is less about protecting national security and more about protecting an administration mired in a war it started by mistake or by deception from being called to account for its failings.
And if it succeeds, it could cast a chill on our democratic life that even AIPAC’s harshest detractors may come to see as a national disaster.
James Besser is a Washington correspondent for Jewish newspapers across the country.