Today:
Two former employees of an influential pro-Israel lobbying group were indicted yesterday on charges that they illegally received and passed on classified information to foreign officials and reporters over a period of five years, part of a case that has complicated relations between the United States and one of its closest allies.
The indictment also recasts the government's allegations against Lawrence A. Franklin, a Defense Department analyst who had already been charged with disclosing secret information about possible attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and other topics. One of six original counts was dropped against Franklin, 58, of Kearneysville, W.Va.
Franklin, who pleaded not guilty to the earlier charges, faces up to 45 years in prison if convicted on all counts, officials said.
Do I sense leverage? 45 years in Prison?
Franklin's attorney, Plato Cacheris, said the charges were "not welcome but expected." Cacheris said he may request that Franklin be prosecuted separately from the others.
Charges were "expected" by Franklin and attorney can I ask why? and in relation to the charges against Weissmann and Rosen or Franklin himself?
Rosen and Weissmann seemed surprised by the recently disclosed charges against them.
We know from the New Yorker
In December of 2001, he (Franklin) and Rhode met in Rome with Michael Ledeen and a group of Iranians, including Manucher Ghorbanifar. Ledeen, who helped arrange the meeting, told me that the dissidents gave Franklin and Rhode information about Iranian threats against American soldiers in Afghanistan. (Rhode did not return calls seeking comment.) Franklin was initially skeptical about the meeting, Ledeen said, but emerged believing that America could do business with these dissidents.
Franklin unlike the other neo-cons is not an insider from way back...he isn't on any JINSA board or apart of the AEI but rather an analyst that firmly believed in toppleing the regime in Iran. Which made the neo-cons think that he's one of them but this quote speaks volumes that he had reservations initially about the allegations and evidence Ghorbanifar and friends were feeding the Neo-cons during the Rome meeting that was subsequently "stove piped" to Cheney and then fed to the mass media to build a case for war in Iraq. The evidence that could have past between Ghorbanifar, SISMI, Franklin and others, forged Niger documents, testimony that Mohammad Atta was in Prague meeting the Iraqi amabassador there, Iraq was transferring uranium to Iran, all of which proved to be false and was only given in exchange for currency...
On a sidenote, shortly after Bush approved to transfer money appropriated for the War in Afganistan to prepraration on an attack in Iraq, Leedeen takes another trip to Rome in late summer/early fall 2002 and soon afterward the forged Niger documents are out in the open to an SISMI/French associated Intelligence asset and an Italian Journalist. My specultaion, but I think we bought the forged documents with congressional appropriated money for the war on Afganistan.
TIN FOIL WARNING GOES HERE
Back to Franklin
In June of 2004, F.B.I. agents searched Franklin's Pentagon office and his home in West Virginia, and allegedly found eighty-three classified documents. Some had to do with the Iran debate, but some pertained to Al Qaeda and Iraq. (A separate federal indictment, citing the documents, has been handed down in West Virginia.) According to a person with knowledge of Franklin's case, the agents told Franklin that Rosen and Weissman were working against America's interests. Franklin faced ruin--the documents found in his house could cost him his job, the agents said. Franklin, who did not have a lawyer, agreed to coöperate in the investigation of Rosen and Weissman, although apparently he was not given in return a specific promise of leniency. Soon, he was wired, and was asked to contact the two aipac employees. On July 21st, Franklin called Weissman and said that he had to speak to him immediately--that it was a matter of life and death. They arranged to meet outside the Nordstrom's department store at Pentagon City.
A month before that meeting, The New Yorker had published an article by Seymour Hersh about the activities of Israeli intelligence agents in northern Iraq. Franklin, who held a top-secret security clearance, allegedly told Weissman that he had new, classified information indicating that Iranian agents were planning to kidnap and kill the Israelis referred to by Hersh. American intelligence knew about the threat, Franklin said, but Israel might not. He also said that the Iranians had infiltrated southern Iraq, and were planning attacks on American soldiers. Rosen and Weissman, Franklin hoped, could insure that senior Administration officials received this news. It is unclear whether what Franklin relayed was true or whether it had been manufactured by the F.B.I. The Bureau has refused to comment on the case.
Weissman hurried back to aipac's headquarters and briefed Rosen and Howard Kohr, aipac's executive director. According to aipac sources, Rosen and Weissman asked Kohr to give the information to Elliott Abrams, the senior Middle East official on the National Security Council. Kohr didn't get in touch with Abrams, but Rosen and Weissman made two calls. They called Gilon and told him about the threat to Israeli agents in Iraq, and then they called Glenn Kessler, a diplomatic correspondent at the Washington Post, and told him about the threat to Americans.
A month later, on the morning of August 27, 2004, F.B.I. agents visited Rosen at his home, in Silver Spring, Maryland, seeking to question him. Rosen quickly called aipac's lawyers. That night, CBS News reported that an unnamed Israeli "mole" had been discovered in the Pentagon, and that the mole had been passing documents to two officials of aipac, who were passing the documents on to Israeli officials.
Within days, the names of Franklin, Rosen, and Weissman were made public. The F.B.I. informed Franklin that he was going to be charged with illegal possession of classified documents. Franklin was said by friends to be frightened, and surprised. He said that he could not afford to hire a lawyer. The F.B.I. arranged for a court-appointed attorney to represent him. The lawyer, a former federal prosecutor, advised him to plead guilty to espionage charges, and receive a prison sentence of six to eight years.
At about this time, Franklin received a call from Michael Ledeen, his ally in matters of Iran policy. "I called him and said, `Larry, what's going on?' " Ledeen recalled. "He said, `Don't worry. Sharansky' "--Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident--" `survived years in the Gulag, and I'll survive prison, too.' I said, `What are you talking about?' He told me what was going on. I asked him if he had a good lawyer." Ledeen called the criminal-defense attorney Plato Cacheris. "I knew him from when he served as Fawn's attorney," Ledeen said, referring to Fawn Hall, who was Colonel Oliver North's secretary at the time of the Iran-Contra affair. Cacheris has also represented Monica Lewinsky and the F.B.I. agent Robert Hanssen, who spied for Moscow. Cacheris offered to represent Franklin pro bono, and Franklin accepted the offer.
Apart from the fact that Franklin was complicit in the FBI sting to net Rosen and Weissman after a multi year probe this is what really astonishes me "Iranian agents were planning to kidnap and kill the Israelis referred to by Hersh." The intelligence they used was probably intelligence that was similiar in nature that Ghorbanifar and friends were passing on to the Neo-Cons.
As the New Yorker speculates why would you use real intelligence in an FBI sting operation? Doesn't that invade the parameters of entrapment? Unless of course the intelligence is real but known to be false because of dubious sorces...err Ghorbanifar.
So Franklin helps bag Rosen and Weissmann by wearing a wire, what else will he do to avoid 45 years of prison when the FBI appointed attorney was telling him to plead guilty and serve "six to eight years"?
Maybe testify to what exactly transpired during the Rome meetings with said dubious sources that have strangly close ties in timing and people to forged Niger documents?
Maybe testify to fixing of intelligence by office of special plans and VP office to promote a war waged on false pre-texts.
Maybe testify about the adminstration policy of destroying bureaucrats who had the tenacity to question the administration while they pursued said deviance.