Are Israeli spies popping up all over?
Yesterday's Wall Street Journal editorial page carried an excellent column by Commentary senior editor Gabriel Schoenfeld on the government's prosecution of former AIPAC employees Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman under the espionage laws. I took a look at the column last night in "Lobbyists or spies." I invited Gabe to expand on his column here and he has kindly responded:
Michael Scheuer, the former CIA officer who ran the agency’s Osama bin Laden desk in the mid 1990’s, is a man obsessed.Gabe does not mention that his Michael Scheuer Watch series has prompted Scheuer himself to come out of the woodwork and comment on his posts, "on some occasions writing three separate comments within minutes in response to a single item by" Schoenfeld. As of Michael Scheuer Watch #9 (the most recent post in the series), however, Scheuer had gone AWOL. Schoenfeld attempts to lure him back by posting an astute message from a reader who addresses a few impertinent queries to Scheuer directly.What is his obsession? It’s the nefarious power of the Jewish state. Not long ago on a show called Antiwar Radio, he explained to listeners that Israeli intelligence is “very active” in the United States, that Israeli spies are “popping up all over,” and these spies “do whatever they want inside of America and no one carries them to task for it.” Indeed, because both the Democratic and Republican parties are “owned by AIPAC,” the U.S. government “consistently tries to suppress any kind of publication” of information pertaining to Israel’s ubiquitous espionage.
This demented rant really caught my interest. The man who uttered these words was in charge of protecting us from one of our most lethal foes. After he left the CIA he became a widely quoted expert on counterterrorism, with a teaching job at Georgetown and consulting gigs at the major networks. In my Michael Scheuer Watch over at Connecting the Dots, I have been examining all aspects of his career.
I have been interested in, among other things, some of the subtle and not so subtle contradictions in his ravings. For example, his contention that the two major U.S. political parties are under the “control of AIPAC” and that the U.S. government is “suppress[ing]” information about Israeli espionage here does not coexist very well with the fact that the Justice Department is now prosecuting two now-former AIPAC employees for allegedly passing classified information to Israel.
As I argue in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, the prosecution’s case against the two AIPAC men is deeply flawed, and should never have been brought. But I have a theory about its genesis and Michael Scheuer figures prominently in my theory.
He is a living example of how a pathologically anti-Semitic character made his way through the bowels of the intelligence community into a position of responsibility and trust. Presumably, if there is one such character, there might be two, or three, or more. And some of them might be in the FBI, which is where the investigation of the AIPAC officials began.
The AIPAC trial is set to begin in January. Only one outcome of the trial is clear: crackpots on the far Left and the far Right, and hybrids in the center like Scheuer, are going to crawl out of the woodwork.
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