Jane Harman and the AIPAC case

I did not want to write anything further today, but the Harman imbroglio and the AIPAC case have taken new turns.

Juan Cole notes an interview with Nancy Pelosi, who says that she was aware two years ago that Harman was involved in a wiretap.

She said, “The only reason Jane was not chosen is because she already had two terms. It had nothing to do with wiretaps or Iraq.”

Iraq? Who said anything about Iraq?

The Washington Post says that the FBI, not the NSA, set the wiretap.

AIPAC: The WP says that the administration may drop the AIPAC spying case -- an outcome which WP editorialists have demanded. (Keep in mind that Rosen and Weissman leaked classified data not just to the Israelis but to a WP reporter.)

Again I ask: Why was Susan Lindauer, who was nothing more than a naive kid, charged with acting as an unregistered agent for Saddam Hussein's Iraq -- yet Rosen, Weissman and Saban will never be charged for acting as agents for Israel? Just what does one have to do to be charged with acting as an unregistered agent for Israel?

Are the Israelis now allowed to spy on us?

Those who think that Obama will take a tougher stance on Israel should draw the obvious comparisons. The Bush administration initiated the AIPAC case; Obama seems ready to drop it. The Reagan administration prosecuted Pollard. Obama is telling all modern Pollards that the coast is clear.

I agree with these observations:

In the AIPAC espionage case, the deliverer of the espionage material, Larry Franklin was found guilty and sentenced to twelve years but the recipients of this material, two ex AIPAC employees may have their cases dropped. This maybe unconformable to fathom but it seems that when dealing with potential allegations of impropriety or investigations of Israel, AIPAC, or government officials involved with these entities our government seems to bury the story, our media ignores it, until the story dies under the power and influence of political and media lobbying of its own lobbying volition.

The timing seems more than suspicious. Why did the dropping of the case follow so quickly on the heels of the Harman revelations? I'm not the only one asking:

The specific reason the story is coming out now is that my side, the critics of the Israel lobby, are about to lose a battle: it looks like the case against Steven Rosen and Ken Weissman, the Israel lobbyists charged with sharing secrets with the Israelis five years ago, a case postponed forever, is going to get dropped by the Justice Department. The lawyers who believe in that case are surely upset about this and have managed to leak one of the big truffles of their investigation to the press so as to goose the public outrage over the central issue at stake: corruption of policymaking due to the Israel interest. I don’t know that they’re the source. But that’s my supposition.

L.A. Times columnist Tim Rutten, writing from the opposite perspective (he calls the Harman case "faux" and he applauds the dropping of charges against AIPAC), also sees a connection:

Now the question is: Who would drag Harman, Pelosi and Saban into this faux scandal to prevent such an exit?

"Faux" it ain't. And Saban was no innocent dragged into the Harman scandal. He's the Power Ranger who created the scandal -- and he's untouchable.

By the way, the registration of foreign agents is covered under 22 U.S.C. § 611 et seq. Perhaps Mr. Saban will want to read the law (especially subsection (c)). He is not above that law, although everyone seems to think so.

The history of the Foreign Agents Registration Act is quite interesting. Seems to me that our relations with Israel and the rest of the Middle East would be much improved if we went back to something like the pre-1966 standards, which targeted propagandists. Indeed, the real problems began after 1966.