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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Some headlines and summaries from JTA
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Who leaked the leak case?
The judge in the classified information case against two former pro-Israel lobbyists ordered an investigation into the leak of the investigation two years ago.
Judge T.S. Ellis III last week ordered the Justice Department “to conduct an investigation into the identity of any government employee responsible for the August 2004 disclosure to CBS News of information related to the investigation of the defendants/whether the investigation relied on information collected pursuant to FISA,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
FISA is the highly secretive process through which the government obtains wiretaps.
Television cameras were positioned outside the headquarters of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee prior to the Aug. 27, 2004, FBI raid on the offices of Steve Rosen, AIPAC’s former foreign policy boss, and Keith Weissman, its former Iran analyst.
CBS News reported at the time that the case involved wiretaps.
Rosen and Weissman have been charged with obtaining classified information from government leakers.
Group: Israel should protect its own
Israel should rethink its military ethics in light of Hezbollah’s use of civilian shields, a North American organization representing Orthodox rabbis said.
The Rabbinical Council of America said the Israeli army might have endangered its own troops out of a concern not to harm Lebanese civilians, the Jerusalem Post reported.
Representatives with the centrist Orthodox group made the statement after a three-day tour of Israel last week that included interviews with wounded soldiers.
U.S. lawmaker drops links to Arab sites
A U.S. lawmaker removed links to anti-Israel Arab American sites, the Detroit Jewish News reported.
The Web site of U.S. Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) was linked for five years to the Web sites of the Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the Arab American News. ADC’s site contains accounts of “massacres” in Lebanon with inflated numbers of casualties.
The Arab American News, which labels Israeli actions in Lebanon the “Israeli aggression,” is headed by Osama Siblani, chairman of the Congress of Arab American Organizations, which co-sponsored pro-Hezbollah rallies and news conferences, the Jewish News reported.
The links were removed following recent inquiries by the Jewish weekly. Dingell’s spokesman told the Jewish News the sites also had information on immigration issues, but he removed the links “because they are voicing sentiments about the conflict” that Dingell “strongly disagrees with and that are offensive to Mr. Dingell” and some of his constituents.
Fleischer rips Carter in letter
President Bush’s former press secretary lambasted Jimmy Carter for saying Israel’s military response to Hezbollah attacks had no legal or moral basis.
Ari Fleischer’s letter to Carter, dated Monday, rebukes the ex-president for his remarks in an Aug. 15 interview with Der Spiegel.
Carter accused Israel of lacking “any legal or moral justification for their massive bombing of the entire nation of Lebanon.”
Carter equated Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners with the soldiers Hezbollah captured in the July 12 raid that launched the war. “Israel is holding almost 10,000 prisoners, so when the militants in Lebanon or in Gaza take one or two soldiers, Israel looks upon this as a justification for an attack on the civilian population of Lebanon and Gaza,” Carter said. “I do not think that’s justified, no.”
Fleischer said those words “are music to Hezbollah’s ears and your message is a blow to long-term peace. Your condemnation of Israel, the victim, only encourages Hezbollah, the attacker, to bide its time and attack again.”
Fleischer, who is Jewish, was Bush’s press secretary from 2001-2003.
A call to the Carter Center on Tuesday was not returned.
http://www.jta.org/
posted by Somebody @ 11:17 PM Permanent Link
 
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