Thursday, May 26, 2005

THE LARRY FRANKLIN TRIAL - TIPPING POINT?

Thanks to commenter Nota at Atrios, I came across an article by Justin Raimondo about the Franklin scandal that I think deserves some attention. You might recall that Franklin will be charged with passing secret and top secret documents to Rosen and Weismann, who at that time were employees of AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Here's an excerpt to whet your interest:

Franklin, a longtime Defense Intelligence Agency analyst and fervent neoconservative, was observed by FBI agents in the summer of 2003 imparting top secret information to two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the spearhead of Israel's amen corner in the U.S. What is striking about this story is that Franklin's perfidy was discovered only because these two top officials – Steve Rosen, AIPAC's longtime policy director, and Keith Weissman, their Iran specialist – were already under surveillance by law enforcement agencies.

Douglas Feith, Franklin's boss, is close to Israel's Likud party, and in 1996, he and Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks, Jr, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser prepared a position paper for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, "A Clean Break," that outlined a strategy for extracting Israel from its strategic dilemma: the invasion of Iraq, followed by the elimination of Syria, and the neutralization of Iran, topped their agenda.

Franklin is due to be arraigned in federal court on May 27 for a preliminary hearing, and once again this important story will be in the news.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

With Franklin safely in the pen, Americans should be more worried about Randy Scheunemann, McCain's top foreign policy advisor. He successfully sold convicted embezzler Ahmed Chalabi and his bogus "WMD" information to newspapers and top Bush officials, and wants to invade Iran as well. These guys are loyal to little more than the ultraconservative Israeli government and the almight dollar.