Political Skullduggery

The attempt by some in Washington to scuttle the espionage prosecution of former American Israel Public Affairs Committee employees Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman continues today with a Washington Post article arguing that these men did nothing that journalists, lobbyists, think tankers, et al., do every day.

As if this is somehow exculpatory.

The Post gathers a blue-ribbon cast of establishment types to defend the former Israel lobby employees:

Martin S. Indyk, a former ambassador to Israel says "(Rosen's) job was to trade in information. That was his great skill. He's essentially on trial for doing his job well."

Defense lawyers make similar points and have enlisted a surprising ally: Viet D. Dinh, former head of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Policy and an author of the Bush administration's USA Patriot Act. Dinh helped write a memorandum that called for the dismissal of the Espionage Act charges against the lobbyists. The memo said that in the 90 years since the act was drafted, "there have been no reported prosecutions of persons outside government for repeating information that they obtained verbally."

The memo also said that in receiving leaked classified information and relaying it to others, the lobbyists were doing what journalists, think-tank scholars and congressional staff members "do perhaps hundreds of times every day."

People speed on the nation's highways many thousands of times a day, that doesn't mean that the relatively few people who are caught and ticketed can beat the rap by using this defense.

Rosen was known in Washington for his then-novel approach to lobbying:

At AIPAC, Rosen helped pioneer executive-branch lobbying, a style of advocacy that was not widespread when he began it in the mid-1980s, but is now a routine complement to the more traditional lobbying of Congress. Before Rosen, AIPAC had believed that the way to alter American foreign policy was to get senators to sign a letter. His insight was that he could also affect the process by dealing with the staff-level bureaucrats in the executive branch who originated the policies.

He was certainly right about that. He clearly was no dummy.

As AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, he headed a 10-person department that provided the $47 million-a-year, 200-employee organization with analyses about the Middle East. To stay on the cutting edge, he aggressively swapped information and gossip with academics, journalists and employees of the Israeli government and of the State Department, the Pentagon and the White House.

Rosen did not lobby the governments' highest-ranking officials. He concentrated instead on the workaday policy-development aides and left to other AIPAC officials dealings with the likes of the secretary of state. "He was very good at what he did," said Dennis Ross, the Middle East point man for Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. "He was a smart guy. He knew the issues extremely well. He was knowledgeable about Israel and what Israel's concerns would be."

The full-court press to defend Rosen and Weissman is quite illustrative when considered in light of the Mearsheimer/Walt thesis about the influence of the Israel lobby on American foreign policy and the mainstream media.