Where’s the Justice at the Justice Department?
By JAMES G. ABOUREZK
The big news last week was the defection of Republican Senator Arlen Specter to the Democrats; the bankruptcy filing of the Chrysler Corporation, and finally, the retirement of Justice David Souter from the U.S. Supreme Court.
A much smaller news item competing with these sensational stories was that the U.S. Justice Department announced that it is dropping the espionage charges against two former AIPAC agents. The story was so small that it barely was a blip on the media’s radar, bringing absolutely no comment on the network news and talk shows.
That’s known as clever public relations. Announce the bad news on a day when it won’t be noticed.
Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman had been charged in 2005 with the crime of espionage; specifically, handing over to Israel secret information they had retrieved from Larry Franklin, who was then a policy analyst in the U.S. Defense Department, working for Douglas Feith and for Paul Wolfowitz.
Franklin pleaded guilty to relaying top secret information on Iran to Rosen and Weissman, and was sentenced to 12 years and 7 months in prison, a term he is currently serving.
In the New York Times story detailing the Justice Department’s decision to drop the charges against Rosen and Weissman, the prosecutors claimed that the presiding federal judge, T.S. Ellis III, had raised the bar for the prosecution to prove its case against the two to a level they did not believe they could meet. The Judge said that the prosecutors could only prevail if they could prove that Rosen and Weissman “knew that their distribution of the information would harm U.S. National Security.” That was enough to make them dismiss the charges.
No one in the headquarters of the Justice Department took part in the announcement, but it was made by the prosecutors themselves, presumably the U.S. Attorney in charge of prosecution.
I’ve had some experience in court with U.S. Attorneys. What I know about how they operate is that if they don’t have a case, they will bring so many charges that forces the unlucky Defendant to plead guilty to at least one or two of them.
I would like to turn now the case of Sami Al-Arian, who was a college professor in Florida. Sami is a Palestinian, born in Kuwait. And why wasn’t he born in Palestine like a good Palestinian should be? Because, most likely, his parents were chased out of Palestine when Israel undertook its ethnic cleansing of that land in order to create an exclusive Jewish state.
Al Arian was charged in 2003 in a 50 count indictment, essentially with a plethora of terrorism charges. He waited 28 months in solitary in harsh conditions, before being tried in 2005. The trial lasted six months, with some 80 witnesses and 400 transcripts of intercepted phone conversations and faxes.
At the end of the prosecution’s case, Al Arian’s lawyers rested without offering any evidence or witnesses in his defense. After 13 days of deliberation, the jury acquitted Al Arian on 8 of 17 counts, and deadlocked on the other with 10 to 2 favoring acquittal. Two of the co-defendants charged along with Al Arian were totally acquitted.
Undaunted, the Justice Department prosecutors said they were considering re-trying Al Arian on the deadlocked jury charges, one of which carried a life sentence.