AIPAC

Yesterday, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC, began it's annual conference in Washington just as the Justice Department was withdrawing espionage charges against Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman, two former AIPAC employees. Now, with Lawrence Franklin, an ex-Pentagon employee, serving a long prison sentence for giving classified documents to AIPAC and with a lot of evidence around to corroborate that Mr Rosen and Mr Weisman then passed the information that they had received onto the Israeli government, you might think that the US government would be acting as a sovereign state has to act in such a situation and that not only should these two characters be up in front of a judge but that there should be a thorough investigation into the activities of AIPAC.(1) An investigation that might even result in the organisations closure. Or can you imagine what might happen if some information was passed from the Pentagon to an American Arab organistation that then passed it onto Egypt or Jordan or Saudi Arabia or, horrors of horrors, the Islamic Republic of Iran. However, this is different, this is AIPAC and not only are charges against the two ex-employees of the organisation dropped, but we even have Vice President Bidden and Senator John Kerry turning up as speakers at the organisation's annual conference, where they can, no doubt, make their shitty contribution to the mass of verbal diarrhoea that the conference is going to be awash with and, on that note, the speeches have already begun with the Israeli President, Shimon Peres, saying, ""Benjamin Netanyahu was at one time my political opponent, today, he is my prime minister. He knows history and wants to make history. In our tradition, making history is making peace, and I am sure that peace is his priority."(2) It really is a mad, mad, world!
1 http://www.democracynow.org/2009/5/4/headlines#7
2 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1082939.html