http://www.counterpunch.org/leupp05012009.html....
(Franklin had worked in the Office of Special Plans under neocons Douglas Feith and Abram Shulsky and participated in the Rome meeting in December 2001 with Michael Ledeen that likely hatched the Niger uranium forged letters plot.) He was given a reduced sentence of 12 ½ years for cooperating with prosecutors in January 2006.
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The Congressional leadership including Pelosi was subsequently notified of the wiretap, although Harman only became aware of it last week. But Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez declined to even authorize such an investigation, because, according to Stein and others, the Bush administration appreciated her services to date in supporting the administration’s program of illegal surveillance and expected her to provide further services in future. (Okay, their reasoning apparently went, so she was wheeling and dealing politically with an Israeli agent. But she was helping them persuade the New York Times to sit on its story about their warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. “We need Jane,” Gonzalez reportedly declared.)
So several years went by. “Blue Dog” Democrat Harman performed dutiful service to the Bush administration. In December 2005, Harman urged the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times to sit on a story about wireless wiretapping, and she was a consistent defender of the Iraq War. When the Democrats won the 2006 election, Pelosi, who had been informed about the wiretap of her colleague, declined to appoint Harman to the intelligence post
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Recall how two years ago neocon godfather Norman Podhoretz was praying for Bush to bomb Iran in an address to AIPAC, op-ed in the New York Times, and longer piece in Commentary, and meeting with Bush and Cheney to privately to make the case. George Bush had embraced the most paranoid language of the Lobby in referring to the Iranian regime. Ahmadinejad had supposedly threatened to “wipe Israel off the map” (no matter how many time journalists and scholars pointed out that, no, he was quoting Ayatollah Khomeini, about the occupation of Jerusalem passing from the pages of time like the Soviet Union, like the rule of the Shah…) From August 2007 Bush deliberately intimated that Iran, with no nuclear weapons, threatened Israel, a country with over 100 nuclear weapons, with “nuclear holocaust.” He thus---very explosively---joined the memory of the Nazi slaughter of European Jewry with the Iranian civilian nuclear program.
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I think we should see the dismissal of the Rosen-Weissman case by the Justice Department in this context. It’s a sop to the Lobby, and apparently the president had a personal hand in it. If the U.S. will not bomb Iran for Israel, neither will it prosecute AIPAC members for spying for Israel. Fair enough?
Last month an indignant official in the Justice Department, thinking, “Oh no, they’re going to dismiss this case,” decided to leak the Jane Harman transcripts to Jeff Stein just so to educate the public, in the absence of a trial, about how politics work in this country. Rosen, Weissman, Harman, and Gonzalez all walk free as AIPAC gears up for its annual conference (with Harman a featured speaker) and for a campaign around passage of HR 1985 (the “Iran Diplomatic Enhancement Act”) which, despite its name, is all about provoking war.
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