Between friendly countries
Last update - 06:50 07/10/2005
Pentagon official Larry Franklin, a Middle East expert and researcher, confessed this week to having passed classified information to a senior diplomat at Israel's embassy in Washington and to two senior employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The affair has been under investigation for a long time, and it appears that the FBI has been employing wiretaps in the probe since 2002. The assessment is that most of the parties involved in the investigation exercised maximum caution in order to avoid causing excessive damage to those under investigation, who included senior American and Israeli diplomats.
The indictment against Franklin does not make any claim that employees of either AIPAC or the Israeli Embassy in Washington engaged in espionage; rather, it accuses him of illegally passing on information about national security issues. There is no claim that the Israeli Embassy recruited Franklin to spy for it. But even this lesser charge against Franklin is sufficient to land him with an extremely heavy sentence and to cause shock waves in the relationship between the two countries.
The two senior AIPAC employees, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were fired even before indictments were submitted against them. Thus, the accusations are not directed against AIPAC as an organization. It is clear that a deal was cut between AIPAC's attorneys and the American prosecutors. But in any event, the two men, who worked for Israel's benefit as they understood it, should not be abandoned by Israel and its friends.
Despite the precautions that AIPAC took, pessimists nevertheless fear that relations between the United States and Israel will be negatively affected. AIPAC needs no warnings from the U.S. administration. It is an American organization, even though its declared goal is to improve relations between America and Israel and to make the U.S. administration and Congress cognizant of Israel's needs and of its contribution to American policy.
The other side of the Franklin affair relates to the Israeli Embassy and senior Israeli diplomat Naor Gillon. Ever since the Jonathan Pollard espionage case, Israel has shied away from anything liable even to recall this sorry affair. Israel, as a country whose representatives in Washington have regular contact with many administration officials, has no reason to act as if it were a guilty party in this new affair.
The FBI is an American investigatory agency, not an Israeli one, and if it wishes to obtain information about employees of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, or about former Mossad agents, it must submit an official request to Israel, rather than contact the people in question directly. There are several rules that friendly countries do not allow themselves to break when it comes, for instance, to a friendly country's former intelligence agents.
Without anybody wishing it, and perhaps due to neglect, lack of caution and lack of alertness, the ground between Israel and the United States has become strewn with unnecessary mines. These include the spare parts for an Israeli assault drone that were sold to China, the classified information that was leaked from the Pentagon to AIPAC employees and the information that Franklin passed to a senior Israeli diplomat. These mines must be disarmed, and no additional booby traps must be added to them
Link Here
Pentagon official Larry Franklin, a Middle East expert and researcher, confessed this week to having passed classified information to a senior diplomat at Israel's embassy in Washington and to two senior employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The affair has been under investigation for a long time, and it appears that the FBI has been employing wiretaps in the probe since 2002. The assessment is that most of the parties involved in the investigation exercised maximum caution in order to avoid causing excessive damage to those under investigation, who included senior American and Israeli diplomats.
The indictment against Franklin does not make any claim that employees of either AIPAC or the Israeli Embassy in Washington engaged in espionage; rather, it accuses him of illegally passing on information about national security issues. There is no claim that the Israeli Embassy recruited Franklin to spy for it. But even this lesser charge against Franklin is sufficient to land him with an extremely heavy sentence and to cause shock waves in the relationship between the two countries.
The two senior AIPAC employees, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, were fired even before indictments were submitted against them. Thus, the accusations are not directed against AIPAC as an organization. It is clear that a deal was cut between AIPAC's attorneys and the American prosecutors. But in any event, the two men, who worked for Israel's benefit as they understood it, should not be abandoned by Israel and its friends.
Despite the precautions that AIPAC took, pessimists nevertheless fear that relations between the United States and Israel will be negatively affected. AIPAC needs no warnings from the U.S. administration. It is an American organization, even though its declared goal is to improve relations between America and Israel and to make the U.S. administration and Congress cognizant of Israel's needs and of its contribution to American policy.
The other side of the Franklin affair relates to the Israeli Embassy and senior Israeli diplomat Naor Gillon. Ever since the Jonathan Pollard espionage case, Israel has shied away from anything liable even to recall this sorry affair. Israel, as a country whose representatives in Washington have regular contact with many administration officials, has no reason to act as if it were a guilty party in this new affair.
The FBI is an American investigatory agency, not an Israeli one, and if it wishes to obtain information about employees of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, or about former Mossad agents, it must submit an official request to Israel, rather than contact the people in question directly. There are several rules that friendly countries do not allow themselves to break when it comes, for instance, to a friendly country's former intelligence agents.
Without anybody wishing it, and perhaps due to neglect, lack of caution and lack of alertness, the ground between Israel and the United States has become strewn with unnecessary mines. These include the spare parts for an Israeli assault drone that were sold to China, the classified information that was leaked from the Pentagon to AIPAC employees and the information that Franklin passed to a senior Israeli diplomat. These mines must be disarmed, and no additional booby traps must be added to them
Link Here
posted by Kangaroo Brisbane Australia at 11:23 PM
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