Thursday, August 18, 2005

Billmon explains the AIPAC spy case

And in doing so raises some serious questions about National Security.
On the face of it, it's hard to grasp the legal logic for giving USG-01, USG-02 and DoD employees A and B a pass from prosecution (I kept waiting for the indictment to mention Little Cats C, D and E, but apparently the U.S. Attorney's Office doesn't read Dr. Seuss.) In Satterfield's case, for example, the indictment clearly states he leaked classified information -- including secret stuff about Al Qaeda -- to Rosen, who then passed it along to the Israelis. This is cited as one of the overt acts backing up the conspiracy charge against the AIPAC lobbyist.

But if Rosen committed a crime by promptly passing that information along to the Israelis, what about Satterfield, the guy who gave it to him? Or what about USGO-1? According to the indictment, Rosen was overheard in 1999 boasting that USGO-1 had given him "code-word protected intelligence." Such codes are normally used to protect what the spooks call SCI -- or "sensitive compartmentalized information" -- the highest possible level of classification.

According to the indictment, this particular SCI consisted of "national defense information concerning terrorist activities in Central Asia," which I'm guessing was code worded to prevent the disclosure of intelligence sources and methods (the most common use of the SCI designation). That ain't chicken feed -- nor is it the kind of harmless "policy-related" leaking that AIPAC and its media apologists have tried to portray in their spin on the scandal.
This is the same sort of stuff that got Jonathan Pollard a life sentence wthout parole, as this article details.

Our Dear Leader sure has a strange concept of National Security, what with this and Iraq and his beloved TurdBlossom.

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