Good recent summary of Rosen/Weismann/AIPAC Espionage Case

Convincing a jury that Rosen and Weissman possessed this criminal state of mind won’t be easy. To counter the charge, defense lawyers intend to lay bare the largely hidden world of back-channel Washington diplomacy. They will try to show that senior officials regularly gave AIPAC officials sensitive information with the full expectation that it would be passed along to Israelis and others. In that way, they will contend that AIPAC played a role in developing US foreign policy.

Over prosecutors’ objections, defendants won court approval to subpoena 15 current and former top administration officials. Their names read like the lineup for a crisis meeting in the White House Situation Room during President Bush’s first term: national-security adviser Condoleezza Rice (now secretary of State); current national-security adviser Stephen Hadley; Richard Armitage, former deputy secretary of State; William Burns, US ambassador to Russia; Marc Grossman, former undersecretary of State for political affairs; David Satterfield, now the State Department’s coordinator for Iraq; Elliott Abrams, deputy national-security adviser; Paul Wolfowitz, former deputy secretary of Defense; and Douglas Feith, former undersecretary of Defense.

Judge Ellis didn’t okay these subpoenas lightly. He did so after being persuaded that each of these officials would be able to testify about specific meetings or conversations—either with the two defendants or with others at AIPAC—that dealt with information comparable in sensitivity to the kind Rosen and Weissman allegedly obtained and passed on.

Ellis also knew that the subpoenas might derail the case. If the administration balks at allowing sworn testimony by senior officials about sensitive conversations, the case against Rosen and Weissman could be dismissed.

The line between information that can and can’t get passed is blurred by the amount of officially sanctioned daily intelligence sharing between the United States and its allies. Such exchanges are particularly intense between the United States and Israel, which regularly trade information and assessments on terrorism and other perceived threats.

“It’s absurd for anyone to think that the Israelis have to enlist people to spy,” says Sandra Charles, a former Pentagon and National Security Council official who consults in Washington for Persian Gulf Arab governments. “They can go to the highest levels of the administration if they want to find out what the thinking is on US policy.”

To James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute, the case casts a shadow not only over AIPAC but also over other groups, such as his, that engage in what he calls “ethnic lobbying.” But he says he doesn’t have any sympathy for Rosen and Weissman. Like AIPAC lobbyists, Zogby has met with senior American policymakers and been asked to convey signals to and from foreign officials—in his case, Arab leaders. “[US officials] would say to me, ‘You’re going to the Gulf—ask this,’ or ‘If we say this to [Yasser] Arafat, what will he say?’ ”

“Everybody in this business knows the difference” between that kind of discreet communication and what Rosen and Weissman are charged with, Zogby claims. “Their choice was to pass on information they knew was sensitive to Israel.”