AIPAC Espionage Trial
Leonard Charles, Inn World Report: Before we have to go, let’s talk for a moment about the Steve Rosen- Keith Weissman case which comes back into court in April. This is, to most people who have seen it, a blatant case of AIPAC’s involvement in stealing US secrets. The Espionage Act comes into play. How is this developing, and once again, will those closely associated with AIPAC be let off the hook?
Grant Smith: Well, this is a very high stakes trial, and basically, what we are talking about is that if Rosen and Weissman, along with their Department of Defense, and press, and collaborators gone forward, we might very well have American sons and daughters fighting a ground war in Iran. This is all about Iran.
But when you look at the maneuvers in the court, we’ve seen almost two years of very savvy legal maneuvering trying to get this thrown out of court on numerous pretexts. And what we see is that the press is very much in favor of seeing this go away. The Wall Street Journal had a major editorial about how new attorney general Mukasey’s first job should be throwing this out of court. We’ve seen the Washington Post and others saying that this is about free speech and that these lobbyists are the equivalent of reporters who should not be denied access to information, or any (classified) information they can find, and the judge himself has set extremely high standards. Although the act that they are being prosecuted under states that they should be shown to have either advantaged a foreign country or harmed US interests, he is insisting that it be shown that these actions taken by Rosen and Weissman actually harmed the United States. So it is extremely…if the case follows any historic pattern, we will not see this ever get to court. Certainly not April 29. The Bush administration has too much to lose, the mainstream press has too much to lose, Congress has too much to lose, and, of course, AIPAC.
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