A telling sentence in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency's report (of sources' claims) that the government finally has killed off the moribund espionage case against two AIPAC staffers:

Among these (reasons to abandon the case) was an... order that prosecutors make the case that the defendants harmed the United States and not merely benefited Israel.

It always has been the key defense argument for Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman that the two men, meeting with a high Pentagon official and spy-tainted Israeli diplomatic drones, were helping negotiate a leak. That's done all the time in Washington. Nothing to see here. We can all move on.

Except, of course, in this case, the leak wasn't to journalists, or bloggers, or even corporate interests seeking lists of contract competitors and their bid documents. That last one would be unethical and illegal, probably drawing considerable jail time, but it wouldn't involve espionage, and certainly not treason. No. Treason, betraying the country, would entail turning secret government information over to a foreign power. And that's what was done in this case.

As Antiwar.com columnist Justin Raimondo points out this week:

The purpose of the AIPAC spy nest was to penetrate the U.S. government's closely guarded deliberations on a subject dear to Tel Aviv's heart: Iran's alleged nuclear program. They wanted, in particular, a document that would shed light on those internal deliberations, and their accomplice, former Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin - who confessed and was sentenced to 12 and a half years in a federal prison - was eager to give them all they wanted, and more. Unlike most spies, Franklin didn't do it for money or out of sheer hubris. He was and is a committed ideologue, a neocon who put into practice the principle that there is no daylight between Israeli and American interests.

Rosen, Weissman and their cohorts were busted, and AIPAC offices subsequently raided by the FBI, in August 2004. In its almost five years of doddering life, the case has been called "an attack on the First Amendment", a micro-pogrom launched by anti-Semitic cabals within the Justice Department and a foolish waste of time. With disingenuousness blending to farce, Alan Dershowitz has called the Rosen/Weissman prosecution, "The worst case of selective prosecution I have seen in 42 years of legal practice." 

As coverage quickly slid into the back sections and then out altogether in newspapers across the country, as it now reaches its disheartening but unsurprising conclusion, the case remains what it's always been, one of espionage and treason. And, yes, under these extremely corrupt circumstances, a foolish waste of time.

Few can be genuinely surprised at its reported demise. Defense attorney Abbe Lowell is as good and clever as they come. Judge T.S. Ellis, III, has been as indulgent to the defense, if not out-and-out biased or incompetent, as they come. Among many caltrops crippling the case were constant defense demands to see confidential government documents, interview national-security executives; Judge Ellis, swimming hard in murky legal waters far beyond his depth, rubber-stamped approval for just about all of them, grinding the proceedings to a glacial pace.

That just about drops the curtain. All that's left is the mop-up: Franklin, out and about to "aid" with the AIPAC prosecution (reportedly, he's been as cooperative as a starved weasel in a stuffed pantry), will probably see his sentence reduced, or suspended; jugged up awhile, even in a white-collar, lawn-tennis pen, and he may melt down and start spilling more beans. Rosen has filed a fat lawsuit against his old employer, alleging wrongful termination, blah, blah; that'll bubble around for awhile.

We do have that strange confluence of events - the AIPAC dismissal, serious reports of Israel attacking Iran. And it's the Iran connection that's most suspicious here, as Raimondo points out. 

I always half-wondered if this was part of a little "stove-pipe" plot to salt the Iran file with cooked-up, phony intelligence, as in the run-up to the Iraq war. Remember the 2003 State of the Union allegation of Saddam's hankering for Nigerian "yellow cake" uranium - a still deliberately ignored fraud that the IAEA exposed via Google (!) in a matter of hours? Was Franklin part of a conspiracy to share secrets with the Israelis, or sift in some spurious "evidence" Iran was a hair-breadth away from screwing fuses on A-bombs?

Remember, this was about 18 months after the Iraq invasion, which was to be the opening salvo of a strategic (and commercial) "remapping" of the Middle East. Those well-laid plans had gone sour with an unexpectedly ferocious Iraqi insurgency, Abu Ghraib and revelations the Bush Administration had bust-out lied us into an unnecessary war. The Administration was concerned more with re-election than sweeping neo-Hellenism abroad.

Was this part of a "stove-pipe, cherry-pick" routine for an expanded war east, to Iran? Was the Valerie Plame leak a year earlier part of it; after all, her function at the CIA was studying Iran's nuclear capability. With all the trouble the White House had with real intelligence analysts in the run-up to the Iraq war, why not get rid of the nettlesome obstacles beforehand? Remember, when Plame's cover was blown, so was that of her unit - and this undercover cell, which could vet and disprove dodgy "intelligence" about phantom bombs and mushroom clouds, suddenly was out of business.

We'll never know. We'll never really know if the defendants hadn't "harmed the United States" in benefitting Israel. Rosen and Weissman will never come to trial; Franklin is under no duress to talk.

It all just... went away.

Fuck all the bullshit about double standards and anti-Semitism: Baby... that's the very definition of power!