AIPAC wins
Jeff Stein in Congressional Quarterly:
Even the shouting’s over.
“Rep. Jane Harman received cheers at the AIPAC policy conference this morning for attacking the wiretapping of her conversations with allies of Israel,” Politico’s Ben Smith reported Sunday.
And why not?
AIPAC — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — had just won a grand victory of sorts with the Justice Department dropping its far-fetched, ill-conceived espionage case against two of its former officials, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman.
Never mind that AIPAC fired the two in April 2005, many months after the FBI’s investigation surfaced, citing their alleged failure to “comport with standards that AIPAC expects of all its employees.”
And what standards did they violate? Getting a Pentagon official to leak information about U.S. policy in the Middle East? Does anyone seriously think AIPAC prohibits its operatives from eliciting sensitive information from defense and intelligence officials?
Of course not. Does The Washington Post? And that was the problem with the AIPAC case from the get-go, as many before me have remarked: The Justice Department was criminalizing behavior that reporters and lobbyists carry on every day.
The Justice Department’s big mistake was in not making clear its real intent: To show that AIPAC’s officials should be required to register as foreign agents, that is to say, that their activities in Washington are no different than lobbyists for, say, Turkey or any other foreign government. Their job is to find out about and influence U.S. policy.
And how do they do that? By getting access to top American policymakers and members of Congress — like Jane Harman , who in 2005 — when U.S. intelligence intercepted her conversation with a target of a wiretap on suspected Israeli operatives — was the top Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
Now, have no doubt about it: Israeli agents are busy stealing American industrial, technical and military secrets — witness the spy Jonathan Pollard — and tapping into its telecommunications lines through myriad avenues.
But the Justice Department’s AIPAC case should never have muddied classic espionage with foreign lobbying…
