Larry Franklin, Still free.

Phil Giraldi:

"The third reason to oppose AIPAC is the corruption of the U.S. political system by the Lobby’s money and power, resulting in a bought-and-paid-for Congress and a rule of law for everyone except those guilty of crimes on behalf of Israel. Even when one is caught red-handed and confesses to spying for Israel, it is apparently no big deal, aside from the cost of a lawyer. Israel runs an extremely aggressive espionage program inside the United States involving hundreds of operatives and agents, but the only Israeli spy to be arrested, charged, and imprisoned is Jonathan Pollard, and that was over 20 years ago. Even Larry Franklin, the Pentagon "Iran expert" who spied for Israel because he believed AIPAC would get him a better job on the National Security Council, is not actually in jail in spite of his 12-year sentence. He is reportedly free due to his service as a witness in the recently terminated AIPAC Steve Rosen-Keith Weissman espionage trial.

Ben-Ami Kadish, former engineer at the Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey, who was part of the same network that recruited Pollard, pleaded guilty to reduced charges in December after supplying advanced nuclear and ballistic technology to Israel. He was supposed to be sentenced in February. That did not take place, and there have been repeated delays in his court appearance. He is now supposed to be sentenced later this month, but prosecutors reportedly will not demand any jail time. He will go free, as have Rosen and Weissman, after a politically tainted prosecution that wasted millions of dollars and went nowhere. It is undeniable that the two men passed information that they knew to be classified to the Israeli embassy. Former government officials Kenneth Pollack and David Satterfield, who were identified in the indictment as having also passed classified information to AIPAC, were not even charged with a crime. Pollack, formerly on the National Security Council, is the director of research at the Saban Center of the Brookings Institution. The media suspended its coverage of the AIPAC story two days after the dismissal of charges.

Another AIPAC favorite, Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), was caught on the phone trading favors with an agent working for Israeli intelligence. Her misbehavior has been completely free of consequence. A cooperative media dropped the story five days after it surfaced, and neither Democrats nor Republicans seem interested in one of their own who may have been spying for Tel Aviv. The only congressional anger over the incident is being directed at the FBI, which is in the hot seat for its alleged violation of Harman’s privacy through its completely legal wiretap."

sibel and scott again. Congress is a failed channel for whistleblowers.

There is a new Sibel Edmonds - Scott Horton interview at Antiwar Radio. Audio here, transcript here. The interviews with Scott have typically been the most informative interviews that Sibel has given.

Sibel contributes a wealth of valuable 'process' information for those who are trying to understand the Harman / AIPAC / Goss story, as well as those of you still trying to get your head around Sibel's case. I recommend that you read the whole thing.

I also want to highlight one particular issue that Sibel raises, namely that her organization, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC), received important information about certain abuses of power by the Executive Branch, and the NSWBC attempted to assist these whistleblowers by helping them air their particular issues within the relevant channels available to whistleblowers - specifically, Congress:

"And it was not only for the reasons such as my own personal case with the State Secrets Privilege etc, but what really got me extremely upset (about the latest Harman stories) was the fact that in 2005 and 2006, my organization took several whistleblowers from the NSA and the Justice Department to certain offices in Congress including Harman's office and Pelosi's office, and now we are sitting here, feeling like fools."

Basically, these whistleblowers risked their careers so that Harman and others could feather their own political nests with the information provided to them by legitimate whistleblowers. It's no wonder that the entire US political system is broken.

The evil temptations of lobbyists

Sibel Edmonds has a new op-ed over at BradBlog.

Brad's introduction reads:

The former FBI translator and whistleblower suggests blackmail may be at the heart of Congressional refusal to bring accountability and oversight to its own members - such as both Hastert and Harman - in matters of espionage and national security.

Read it all.

Sibel criticizes those on the left and the right, in the corporate media and alternative press, Democratic and Republican, who have either ignored the Harman/AIPAC story, or have attempted to spin the story in various directions, echoing Jeff Stein's recent criticisms of "some wild imaginations... in the blogarama coverage."

Sibel notes that the Harman case, at first glance:

"may appear to involve blackmailing --- or a milder version, exploitation of Congress by the Executive Branch --- deeper analysis would suggest even further implications, where Congressional members themselves use the incriminating information against each other to prevent pursuit or investigation of cases that they may be directly or indirectly involved in."

Regarding Harman, and those spinning the story, Sibel says:

"But, let's not forget, the misuse of incriminating information, for the purpose of blackmail, does not turn the practitioner of the wrongful deed into a victim, nor does it make the wrongful criminal deed less wrong. Instead of spinning the story, taking away attention from the facts in hand, and making Harman a victim, we must focus on this case, on Harman, as an example of a very serious disease that has infected our Congress for far too long. Those who have been entrusted with the oversight and accountability of our government cannot do so if they are vulnerable to such blackmail from the very same people they are overseeing…Period."

That is, if Harman is guilty, her guilt is independent of any motives of those targeting and/or blackmailing her, and the only way of cleaning up the system is to stand up against the 'blackmail,' whether hard or soft.

Not surprisingly, Sibel points to the direct parallels between the Harman case and the Hastert case. As far as has been publicly reported, we only 'know' that Harman was picked up on wiretaps that targeted other suspected Israeli agents, but Sibel makes clear that in the Hastert case, Hastert himself was specifically "targeted by FBI counterintelligence and counterespionage investigations."

In fact, as Sibel has repeatedly said, in 1998/9, there was so much evidence against Hastert that there were substantial steps taken to appoint a Special Prosecutor - apparently derailed by the Clinton impeachment (which incidentally led to the rise of Turkey's clients, Bob Livingston and then Hastert, to Speaker of the House.) As Sibel has repeatedly emphasized, when the Executive Branch finds evidence of illegal activity by Americans on FISA wiretaps, they can and should then open up criminal cases against the perpetrators - whether counter-narcotics, counter-espionage or whatever - and this is apparently exactly what they did in the case of Hastert, and others.

The 'debate' about what to do in the Harman case has always essentially assumed that the FBI can do exactly that; transfer something learned during a counter-intelligence investigation to somewhere that it can be acted upon. So I was very surprised to see TPM Muckraker 'report' today that:

"And Melvin Goodman, a former CIA analyst who's now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, underlined the extent to which a leak of this nature would violate national security protocol. "When American names came up on these intercepts, they were handled very carefully," Goodman told TPMuckraker. "The names would be blacked out.""

Now, I generally like the work of TPM Muckraker, but they (and others) have (correctly) been named by Jeff Stein as leading the 'Harman -was-framed' pushback.

I'm also a fan of Mel Goodman, so I suspect that his comments here have been mis-characterized, and I wouldn't be surprised to see him walking-back certain elements of his on-the-record comments. (At the end of the column, he notes that "some within the FBI were "incredibly bitter about the way [Attorney General Eric] Holder dropped the case."")

I am not an expert on FISA and minimization procedures, but if Goodman is correct that Harman's name should have been blacked out on a FISA wiretap, then perhaps this was an abuse of power (although, as Sibel says, that doesn't forgive the underlying crime), or perhaps Harman was, in fact, the target of these wiretaps. Perhaps the wiretaps were legitimately the result of a FISA investigation, and that might explain why her name was not minimized? Again, I don't pretend to know what I'm talking about here, but that might explain some of the discrepancies about the reporting here. As I noted here, for some reason, "Hastert seems keen to emphasize... that the wiretap was a "legally authorized wiretap")

I'm getting a bit off-track.

Make sure you read Sibel's whole piece.

Sibel ends by quoting Will Rogers:

"If we have Senators and Congressmen there that can't protect themselves against the evil temptations of lobbyists, we don't need to change our lobbies, we need to change our representatives."

So true, and yet weirdly discomforting. Is it possible?

AIPAC case dismissed. What happens to Larry Franklin?

So the long-expected dismissal of the AIPAC/Rosen/Weissman case has arrived - in a Friday news dump. Great.

Greenwald's response is typical:

(D)espite being as vigorous a critic of AIPAC as can be, I absolutely believe the Obama DOJ did the right thing.
[]
No matter how harmful one might believe AIPAC to be, the end of this prosecution is something everyone who cares about press freedoms and even free speech should cheer.

There is a problem with that, though, as JTA's Ron Kampeas writes:

But Boente (acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia) made it clear that while Rosen and Weissman are free, the government likes the tool it unearthed in an obscure section of the 1917 Espionage Act -- the ability to charge civilians with dealing in classified information -- and it's going to keep it.

Phil Giraldi adds:

"If you pass information that you know to be classified to a foreign Embassy, that should be considered espionage, shouldn’t it?
[]
Is there something wrong here? Yes, something terribly wrong, though for the life of me I don’t know how we will ever take our government back. Nothing changes. AIPAC always wins. Depressing."

One other point: None of the coverage today mentions the fact that Larry Franklin is currently a free man, and that his eventual sentence was supposed to be dependent on him co-operating. What happens to Franklin now? And what happens to all of the other evidence he has given FBI counter-intelligence in the meantime? Will that ever be acted upon?

**Update: Court filing due May 14

Harman/AIPAC on The Daily Show

Last week Phil Giraldi asked "So I have to ask, why isn’t the MSM interested in aggressively pursuing this (Harman/AIPAC) story?"

Jon Stewart is doing his bit to help out.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Your Government Not at Work - Jane Harman Scandal
thedailyshow.com
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Why did CIA go after AIPAC and Harman and get away with it?

There's some push-back in various quarters about the charges against Jane Harman - mostly from pro-Israeli sources.

The main arguments as I understand them are: a) There's no there, there, and b) The CIA/Porter Goss is involved in some sort of vendetta against Harman.

Let's assume both of those are true.

The fascinating thing, then, is that the CIA/Goss is apparently willing to throw the Israel Lobby under the bus in their efforts to get Harman. That is some serious collateral damage!

Many of the Harman defenders are 'pro-Israel' - and curoiusly, much of the defense is Harman-specific. For some reason they don't seem to be arguing in defense of The Lobby/AIPAC. That is, apparently it is not surprising at all that The Lobby would try to turn Harman into an asset, but 'she didn't act on her promise!'. No crime here!

But even if Harman didn't act on her promise to the Israeli agent, and regardless of the definition of a 'completed crime,' surely there is news in the fact that an Israeli agent tried to place an 'asset' (or at a minimum, a prospective-asset) at the heart of US intelligence. (Of course, as a general matter, this is not surprising - but in this particular instance, it is still a significant crime, at the heart of the US government.)

Consider the counter-factual. Imagine, hypothetically, that an agent of Iran was caught offering a member of congress the Chair of House Intelligence. Imagine how different the reporting on this case would be. It appears as though all sides have simply accepted the fact that the Israel Lobby is engaged in this type of activity.

Perhaps that is why Goss et al were so comfortable in apparently throwing AIPAC under the bus in their atempts to harm Harman. It didn't even occur to them that any of this might reflect badly on AIPAC - and they were correct!


(As an aside, the Israeli Lobby seems to have decided on an interesting way to divert attention from the case. David Frum at the AEI, for example, writes:

"The story is almost insanely complicated."

No. It isn't. Not at all. And especially not to Frum, or to the audience he is writing for.)

-------------

The flipside to all of this is the Sibel Edmonds case. For some reason, nobody is shopping around the wiretaps of Hastert and others receiving bribes. Why not?

Consider Giraldi's recent pieces on Harman but substitute Hastert for Harman, and (maybe) substitute Israel for Turkey:

As a former intelligence officer who has himself recruited agents of influence, I can tell you that Harman was the fruit of a high level Israeli covert action.
[...]
The Israeli on the phone was committing espionage against the United States by trying to influence the actions of a government official and Harman was committing a number of possible crimes by agreeing to cooperate in return for her own personal advancement.

Please take my word for it that the quid pro quo is precisely how an intelligence officer recruits an agent. You ask for a favor and give a favor in return. As both the favor and the reward are illegal and the agreement itself can be used to blackmail the target of the operation, the target henceforth will be obligated to do what the intelligence officer wants or risk exposure.

Consider that Hastert (and others) received legal campaign donations, then illegal campaign donations, then suitcases full of cash. It is exactly that cascading level of criminality that Giraldi speaks of. It is impossible to get rid of the skeleton in the closet, so the 'victim' of the original crime might as well profit from it along the way. There's plenty of money to share around.

CQ: Hastert knew of AIPAC infiltration

Jeff Stein has a new brain-twister of an article in CQ titled 'CIA “Whistleblower” Told Hastert About Suppression of Harman Wiretap.'

The premise of the article is that in 2006, ODNI Negroponte, apparently at the behest of Attorney General Gonzales, blocked DCI Porter Goss from following protocol and informing the House leadership, Hastert and Pelosi, about the Harman wiretaps. In May 2006, Michael Hayden replaced Goss as DCI, but still there was no briefing for Hastert and Pelosi.

In the Fall of 2006, someone from CIA HQ, either under orders or freelancing, 'blew the whistle' to Hastert, 'incensed' that the protocols had been breached, then wrote a letter to Attorney General Gonzales demanding to be briefed. Gonzales ignored the request for weeks, but eventually told Hastert that there was nothing in the files to warrant a briefing.

By this time, the 'whistleblower' was becoming "agitated" about the lack of movement on the case. Fearing that the whistle blower might release the wiretap transcripts to the media - which would expose the operation against AIPAC and "unfairly 'smear' Harman as a foreign agent," (who they knew to be "highly respected") - Hastert's staff told Pelosi's staff about the wiretap on Harman in 'early October' 2006. Pelosi's Chief of Staff “remembers a conversation about it with (Hastert's Chief of Staff ), but that’s all.”

Kudos to Jeff Stein for getting Hastert on the record about this, and continuing to chase the story - and I'm sure that the 'facts' presented here are (mostly) accurate, but the combination of narrative & spin presented here doesn't make much sense. I'm not criticizing Stein here - but there's much more going on here than Stein offers in this piece.

Hastert
For starters, Hastert was most likely not really concerned about separation-of-power arguments, nor about following protocol. His demand for a briefing was much more likely because he desperately wanted to know the status of the 'sister investigation' that caught him on wiretaps in the years leading up to 1999, and probably since then.

Similarly, Hastert's efforts to inform Pelosi were intended to appease the so-called whistleblower from the CIA so that the news of the investigation didn't get exposed in public, because that would be very bad for Hastert and his cronies.

For some reason, Hastert thought that telling Pelosi would assuage the 'agitated' CIA 'whistleblower,' and stop him from going to the media. But as Jeff Stein reported last week, a CIA official independently told Pelosi. "She knew. We made sure she knew," said one of the former officials, chuckling."

(As an aside, from the pieces of Hastert's statements that Stein published, Hastert seems keen to emphasize two points: a) that the wiretap was a "legally authorized wiretap related to an espionage investigation" and b) that he "instructed (his) staff in early October 2006." I'm not exactly sure of the significance of either of those yet, but they are interesting details.)

Goss and the CIA
We also don't know the motivations of the CIA 'whistleblower.' Was Porter Goss really worried about the protocol of informing the House Leadership? Was he really worried that there might be a mole in their midst? Goss himself was Chair of the House Intelligence Committee from 1997 to 2005, so he was well aware that Hastert himself, and others in the House, had been compromised by Israeli and Turkish surrogates.

Perhaps the CIA 'whistleblower' actually was freelancing, and was legitimately concerned about the possibility that Harman would become Chair of House Intelligence. In that case, they only needed to tell Pelosi, but they told Hastert too, under the guise that the protocol dictated that both Hastert and Pelosi should know this information.

Regardless, at the same time that the CIA 'whistleblower' was telling Hastert, he was apparently exposing the issue in the media regardless of Hastert's efforts.

Hastert instructed his "staff in early October 2006 to tell Leader Pelosi" about the wiretaps, but the Time article detailing the essence of the story was published on Oct 20, 2006 anyway.

In a ridiculed op-ed in the New York Times in early 2006 called Loose Lips Sink Spies, Goss wrote:

I take seriously my agency's responsibility to protect our national security. Unauthorized disclosures undermine our efforts and abuse the trust of the people we are sworn to protect. Since becoming director, I have filed criminal reports with the Department of Justice because of such compromises. That department is committed to working with us to investigate these cases aggressively...

Our enemies cannot match the creativity, expertise, technical genius and tradecraft that the C.I.A. brings to bear in this war. Criminal disclosures of national security information, however, can erase much of that advantage. The terrorists gain an edge when they keep their secrets and we don't keep ours.

Your choice, Mr Goss: A) Did you file a criminal report with the DoJ in this case? Or B) Was this an 'authorized disclosure'?

Pelosi
The incurious Nancy Pelosi is apparently befuddled about these events.

In May 2006, according to LA Weekly, Harman "had some major contributors call Pelosi to impress upon her the importance of keeping Jane in place. According to these members, this tactic, too, hasn't endeared Harman to Pelosi."

The Harman thing was obviously on her radar, then - both privately and in the press - at a time when "Pelosi had soured on her California colleague."

At some point, apparently in the early Fall of 2006, the CIA officials unofficially told Pelosi:

that Harman had been overheard on a wiretap agreeing to intercede with Justice Department officials to try to reduce espionage-related charges against two officials of the American Israel Political Affairs Committee, or AIPAC.

However, Pelosi only has some vague recollection of this. Now she says that she can not remember exactly who told her, but "she thought it was the FBI."

But again, according to the 'whistleblowers':

"She knew. We made sure she knew," said one of the former officials, chuckling."

But according to Pelosi, they apparently didn't 'make sure' that she really knew.

And again, in "early October," Hastert briefed Pelosi on the matter, in a highly irregular meeting, that Harman was on the wiretaps. This meeting presumably included the fact that Hastert was 'incensed' at the breach of protocol, that Gonzales was blocking the whole thing, and that CIA officials from headquarters had decided to circumvent their chain of command, yet Pelosi's firewall Chief of Staff "remembers a conversation about it... but that’s all.”

And this was all during the time when there was a large battle taking place - in public and behind closed doors - about who Pelosi would appoint to Chair the House Intelligence Committee (Reyes was appointed in December 2006)

Yet apparently this was all eminently forgettable to Pelosi.

(Compare and contrast Hastert's level of detail with Pelosi's haziness. I suspect that Hastert's apparent clarity of recollection is due to Hastert doing some CYA - both then and now. And I suspect that Pelosi's haziness is due to same.)

Why It Matters
As Phil Giraldi said in his interview with Scott Horton last week, if not for the wiretap:

(Y)ou might have had someone who was - essentially - an Israeli agent either heading the House Permanent Intelligence Committee - or heading the CIA, which was another job that Jane Harman had a shot at.

At his blog on Saturday, Giraldi said:

As a former intelligence officer who has himself recruited agents of influence, I can tell you that Harman was the fruit of a high level Israeli covert action.

Whomever Harman spoke to, she was surely aware that she was in contact with someone empowered to promise her rewards from Israel and the Israeli lobby. The threat to withhold contributions from the Democratic Party if Harman were not to be named chairman is significant, as it indicates that it was all part of a careful plan.

The Israeli on the phone was committing espionage against the United States by trying to influence the actions of a government official and Harman was committing a number of possible crimes by agreeing to cooperate in return for her own personal advancement.

Please take my word for it that the quid pro quo is precisely how an intelligence officer recruits an agent. You ask for a favor and give a favor in return. As both the favor and the reward are illegal and the agreement itself can be used to blackmail the target of the operation, the target henceforth will be obligated to do what the intelligence officer wants or risk exposure.

This whole transaction is particularly important in the context of Jane Harman and what she might have represented to the Israelis. She was chairman presumptive of the House Intelligence Committee and subsequently was spoken of as being on the short list for Obama’s Director of Central Intelligence. If she had obtained either position, which would have happened if the FBI had not been privy to the transaction, she would have had complete access to all of America’s secrets and would have been involved in policy making. She would also have been working for Israel. So I have to ask, why isn’t the MSM interested in aggressively pursuing this story?

Jeff Stein
Again, kudos to Jeff Stein for pushing this story so hard. And congratulations to him for continuing to get people on the record and advancing the story. He has said that he was completely taken by surprise by the traction that this story has received. And at the same time, Giraldi is also correct that the MSM needs to agressively push it further.

Update:
Giraldi has a new article. Read the whole thing, but this excerpt was maybe the juiciest:

"Once you are on the hook in an intelligence relationship, there is no getting off it. Had Harman done a favor for the Israelis and been rewarded in return, it would have been a skeleton in her closet forever. The Israelis might also have taped the incriminating conversations, presumably unaware that the FBI was also on the line. The Israelis would surely remind her of her crime whenever they need a favor, and she would be forced to pay the piper whenever called upon. What could have been better for Israel than owning the director of central intelligence or the head of the House Intelligence Committee? What could have been worse for the United States?"