Bloomberg has just put up this story,
Pentagon Analyst Gets 12 Years for Passing Secrets
A former U.S. Defense Department analyst was sentenced to about 12 1/2 years in prison for passing classified documents to an Israeli diplomat and two men who worked for a pro-Israel lobbying group.
Lawrence A. Franklin, who worked on the Pentagon's Iran desk until June 30, 2004, was also fined $10,0000 [sic — is that substantially more than ten grand?] today in federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. He pleaded guilty in October and, pending completion of his cooperation in the government's investigation, prosecutors said today they may ask for a reduction in his prison term.
12 1/2 years! That's gotta hurt. Too late to do a deal? Or was that sentence lowered from something much more harsh ecause he did do a deal? As Lyasias points out in the comments (i was way too excited reading the article and i read this far too quickly to digest it), he appears to still have some room for a deal, pending his continued cooperation. W00t! Names— give us names!
Franklin was charged with revealing top secret information to 2 AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) employees, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who then allegedly passed on the information to Israel.
There was some suspicion last year that this case may have connections to the Fitzgerald investigation of L'Affaire Plame.
Kossack Paul in Berkely posted a link to the AP story from Yahoo! news, Ex-Pentagon Analyst Sentenced to 12 Years
Franklin at one time worked for Feith, then the Pentagon's No. 3 official, on issues involving the Middle East. During a court appearance last year, Franklin said he would occasionally be questioned directly by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former top Pentagon official Paul Wolfowitz on policy issues.
Tom Paine fills in some more, Bigger Than AIPAC (from last summer):
But as the full text of the indictment makes clear, the conspiracy involved not just Franklin and the AIPAC officials, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, but at least several other Pentagon officials who played intermediary roles, at least two other Israeli officials, and one official at a "Washington, D.C. think tank." It's an old-fashioned spy story involving the passing of secret documents, hush-hush meetings and outright espionage, along with good-old-boy networking.
But the network tied to the "Franklin case"--which ought to be called the "AIPAC case," since it was AIPAC that was really under investigation by the FBI--provides an important window into a shadowy world. It is clear that by probing the details of the case, the FBI has got hold of a dangerous loose end of much larger story. By pulling on that string hard enough, the FBI and the Justice Department might just unravel that larger story, which is beginning to look more and more like it involves the same nexus of Pentagon civilians, White House functionaries, and American Enterprise Institute officials who thumped the drums for war in Iraq in 2001-2003 and who are now trying to whip up an anti-Iranian frenzy as well.
Needless to say, all of this got short shrift from the mainstream media when it was revealed last week.
Ah, but this will certainly bring it back to the front burner, won't it?
Won't it?