Should Seymour Hersh have been prosecuted?

One element of the “AIPAC spy case” that’s disturbing is the selective nature of the prosecution. The editors of the Washington Post were against the prosecution on the grounds that passing on classified information to reporters is often how news gets reported. While the cases against Keith Weissman and Steven Rosen were dropped, Larry Franklin, who was used to entrap the two AIPAC officials was prosecuted and punished. According to the Forward, this is the information that Franklin passed on to Weissman and Rosen:

This cooperation culminated in a June 26, 2003, meeting at an Italian restaurant in Arlington, Va., where Franklin was sent by the FBI to carry out a sting operation against the AIPAC lobbyists. Before his meeting with Weissman, agents wired Franklin with microphones and transmitters and provided him with a fake classified document alleging there was clear life-threatening danger posed to Israelis secretly operating in Iraq’s Kurdish region. Passing on the information would help seal the case against the AIPAC staffers.

About a year later Seymour Hersh reported about Israelis operating in Kurdistan. As far as I can tell he is the only reporter who was reporting this activity. Al Jazeerah at the time reported that the Kurds denied that Israel was operating in its territory. Ha’aretz had a report on the topic that cited Hersh.

But what isn’t clear is what Hersh’s sources for his story were:

In a series of interviews in Europe, the Middle East, and the United States, officials told me that by the end of last year Israel had concluded that the Bush Administration would not be able to bring stability or democracy to Iraq, and that Israel needed other options. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s government decided, I was told, to minimize the damage that the war was causing to Israel’s strategic position by expanding its long-standing relationship with Iraq’s Kurds and establishing a significant presence on the ground in the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan.

Nor is it clear which elements of the document fed to Franklin were classified. Was it only the information about the supposed threat to Israeli interests in Kurdistan? Or was it that Israel was operating in Kurdistan too? If he got that information from American officials shouldn’t Hersh have also been prosecuted?

Franklin, though, was targeted though, so he could get to Weissman and Rosen. And Franklin, though feeling betrayed by the pair, made a disturbing charge:

According to Franklin, the investigators he dealt with believed “that Pollard had a secret partner, a mole, probably in the OSD.” This quest to expose the mole, Franklin said, was, in part, “energized by a more malevolent emotion — antisemitism.”

In part, it was also fed by a deep suspicion toward Israel. “In the intelligence community,” he said, “you refer to Israelis as ‘Izzis’ and it doesn’t have a pleasant connotation. They can’t get away with kikes, so they say Izzis.” This suspicion became clear to Franklin as he learned of the way investigators viewed activists of the pro-Israel lobby.

After reading Franklin’s charges, it’s not hard to remember that a Defense Department scientist, David Tenenbaum was falsely charged for spying for Israel back in 1997. After 11 years, he had his name cleared.

The investigation then went on to quote several Pentagon officials involved in the case against Mr. Tenenbaum acknowledging that his religion and his contacts in Israel were grounds at least in part for launching the investigation against him. A discrimination suit brought by Mr. Tenenbaum was thrown out of federal court after the government requested the judge acknowledge that the Army would need to disclose state secrets in order to mount its defense.

According to a sworn affidavit of Mr. Tenenbaum, when he took his first polygraph test in 1997, his questioner said to him: “I have done other Jews before and gotten them to confess and I’ll get you to confess too,” and, “I can tell you are lying by looking into your eyes.”

(h/t Daled Amos. Plus check out documents to the Tenenbaum case here.)

How selective were the authorities in pursuing Weissman and Rosen? And what motivated them?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.