spying – Hank Kalet

Thoughts on dual loyaltyin wake of Monroe man’s arrest

As I said yesterday, the news that a Monroe man has been arrested on espionage charges connected to the passing of weapons information to Israel is raising the insidious charge of dual loyalties once again.

It’s a dangerous avenue to travel down, though I will say that it no longer has the mainstream cache it carried during the mid-1980s, when Jonathan Pollard was charged and sentenced for similar — and allaegedly related — activity.

But it remains out there. As an editorial in the New Jersey Jewish News notes, the allegations against Ben-Ami Kadish

rockets Americans and Israelis back to the bad old Pollard days, when U.S. officials were outraged, Israeli officials were humiliated, and American Jews cringed under charges of “dual loyalty” and bristled that a rogue American and his reckless handlers would jeopardize so much to betray a friend.

Reporting on the Kadish case has already unleashed an avalanche of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic invective on Web sites, by the usual gang of Internet cranks and inveterate bigots. They are bound to spin elaborate conspiracy theories out of the allegations, just as some pro-Israel commentators will hint ominously at the “timing” of the charges and toss out tall tales of their own.

That mainstream news organizations have stayed away from the charge, along with most of the mainstream conservative voices, can be attributed both to the special place in which Israel is held as an American ally and to the marginalization of anti-Semitic language.

The dual-loyalty argument, however, remains a mainstream argument — even if American Jews are no longer overt targets (covert, yes, attacked in whispered charges by organizations that prefer to stay out of the sunlight). The prime targets these days are Arab-Americans and American Muslims, who are consistently asked to denounce the violence done by extremists — in a way that no other ethnic group is.

Consider the attacks on Barack Obama tied to his middle name, Hussein., coming from rightwing radio — and many mainstream groups and commentators tied to the Republican Party. The blog, Democracy Arsenal, outlined the issue this way in December:

There is a sizable cross-section of Republicans who think that being a Muslim disqualifies one for higher public service (you can count Mitt Romney, who has been quite open in peddling anti-Muslim remarks, among them). I suspect that a good number of Democrats may feel similarly, but due to political correctness, would never openly say so – that being a Muslim, while we face a predominantly Muslim terrorist threat, would represent a conflict of interest and would bring about questions of “dual loyalty.” If the dual loyalty smear sounds familiar, it should, as it is one of the more pernicious smears that can be leveled in American politics.

Beyond the attacks on Obama, we’ve seen the same kind of noxious innuendo leveled at U.S. Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), the first Muslim to serve in Congress, and other prominent Muslims — as well as prominent Chinese Americans and others.

The other side of this, unfortunately, is the use of the dual-loyalty slur by the likes of neo-cons like Daniel Pipes and Richard Perle to defend themselves against charges that they are slavishly committed to Israel, regardless of Israel’s policies. It is interesting that, over the years, supporters of Israel have conflated criticism of Israel’s government and criticism of prominent American allies of Israel with anti-Semitism and that neocons have developed a rather large bag of tricks to counter legitimate criticism without addressing the actual critique.

In the end, the dual-loyalty charge does nothing more than damage our discourse.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Spies among us

The timing on this story is odd, given the piece the Times did in its Week in Review section on Sunday on the changing motivations for spying. According to a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the southern region of New York and various press reports, Ben-Ami Kadish of Monroe Township, an 84-year-old former Army engineer, was charged Tuesday with espionage for leaking secret defense documents to the Israeli government in the 1980s and “could face life in prison or possibly the death penalty if convicted on the most serious charge,” according to The New York Times. He was released on $300,000 bail.

His case is linked to that of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the naval analyst serving a life sentence for leaking documents to Israel around the same time. An Israeli official who came to Mr. Kadish’s house to photograph documents also received information from Mr. Pollard, prosecutors said. Federal officials said authorities became aware of what they called Mr. Kadish’s spying activities only in recent months but would not say how they learned of his efforts more than 20 years later.

Mr. Kadish admitted to an F.B.I. agent last month that he had shown 50 to 100 classified documents to the Israeli official, according to prosecutors’ court filings on Tuesday.

The case is troubling because it involves nuclear weapons and missile systems, according to the U.S. Attorney.

The complaint specifically mentions three documents that Mr. Kadish is accused of leaking — one “concerning nuclear weaponry” containing “atomic-related information”; one regarding a modified version of an F-15 fighter jet that the United States sold to another country; and one containing information about the Patriot missile system.

Mr. Kadish told the F.B.I. agent that he had not received money from the Israeli official, only small gifts and the occasional dinner, the complaint said.

The Times also said that

Prosecutors declined to provide details on what was in the documents and would not say what harm, if any, had come to American interests as a result. According to court papers, Mr. Kadish’s crimes occurred between 1979 and 1985, when he worked as a mechanical engineer at Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, N.J., an Army research and development center. He would sign secret documents out of the library and take them to his home in New Jersey — prosecutors would not say in which town — where the Israeli official, a science adviser at the Israeli consulate in New York, would photograph them in the basement, according to court papers.

What links this story to the Week in Review piece, however, is this sentence down near the end — a sentence that raises the specter of dual-loyalties:

According to the article, Mr. Kadish grew up in Palestine, fought for the creation of Israel and served in both the British and American military during World War II.

Reread that sentence and then read this section from the Week in Review:

A new study by a Defense Department contractor shows that divided loyalty, usually on the part of naturalized Americans with roots in a foreign land, has become the dominant motive.

From 1947 to 1990, the study found, fewer than 1 in 5 Americans charged with spying were acting solely or primarily out of patriotic, as opposed to ideological, loyalty to a foreign country. Since 1990, according to the study’s author, Katherine L. Herbig, divided loyalty has been the sole or primary motive in about half of all cases.

“Dual loyalty is a problem we haven’t seen on such a scale since the Revolution,” when many colonists swore allegiance to the British king, said Joel F. Brenner, the top counterintelligence official in the office of the director of national intelligence.

Dual loyalty. It is a question that has dogged immigrant groups since the earliest days of the Republic, with various pieces of legislation and executive orders targeting everyone from new immigrants and oppositions parties in the late 1700s, to second- and third-generation Japanese-Americans during World War II to Jews to Muslims now.

Consider the questions surrounding John F. Kennedy’s presidential run, the overt and covert arguments surrounding his loyalty to the pope.

And then there is the Pollard case. In 1999, several American Jewish organizations were lobbying for his release on humanitarian grounds —

Here is part of a response to the effort that ran in The New York Times:

The real crux of the Pollard defense is not that his crime was minor because of the number and type of stolen documents, but that it was minor because of the country for which he stole them: Israel. And this is what makes the Jewish groups’ argument so problematic. The United States and Israel have been allies since Israel gained independence, and that longstanding alliance may have lulled some into the belief that the two countries’ interests are the same. But they are not; no two countries’ are.

When Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested for passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in 1950, some on the left argued that they were legitimately sharing information with America’s wartime ally. Others charged anti-Semitism. But Jewish groups led by the American Jewish Committee, citing patriotism, steadfastly refused to call for clemency. (The committee has not called for Mr. Pollard’s release, though it has urged the President to formally review the case.)

Indeed, the American Jewish community’s traditional response to the ugly charge of dual loyalty has been: there is none, we owe our sole national allegiance to the United States. In arguing that spying for Israel is a lesser offense than spying for other countries, Jewish groups appear now to have strayed from that position. To apologize for an American official’s decision to put another country’s interests ahead of his own can be seen as essentially defending dual loyalty.

Peter Beinart, author of the piece, hits on something very real, but also raises the spector of something very dangerous. Pollard — and allegedly Kadish — certainly was guilty of placing the interests of another country above his own nation’s, as do his defenders.

The problem is that the charge of dual loyalty tends to become amorphous, as it did with the Nissei during World War II and American Muslims now. The limited occurrences of spying or terrorism on the part of a Japanese-American or an Arab-American become justification for profiling — or imprisoning — entire groups. This danger is absent from the Week in Review piece, but it is very real. It goes to the heart of what it means to be an American, what patriotism means and what hold our ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds have on our sense of selves and our sense of others’ loyalties.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Spygate, the sequal

Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, is taking a hardline on spying — but not by the federal government. Specter, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee and considered an expert on constitutional matters, is targeting spying by NFL teams.

He wrote commissioner Roger Goodell on Nov. 15. He got no response.

Specter, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote Goodell again more than a month later, after getting no acknowledgment to the initial communication.

Two days before the Super Bowl, there is plenty of response.

In a phone interview Thursday with The New York Times, Specter said the committee at some point will call on Goodell to discuss why the league destroyed the tapes that revealed the Patriots had been spying on the competition.

“That requires an explanation,” Specter told The Times. “The NFL has a very preferred status in our country with their antitrust exemption. The American people are entitled to be sure about the integrity of the game. It’s analogous to the CIA destruction of tapes, or any time you have records destroyed.”

If this seems ludicrous to you, you’re not alone. Spying by the Patriots within the context of a football game maybe important to the NFL and to its fans, but to compare it to the CIA’s spying on Americans — well, that trivializes the importance of the CIA tape scandal, which has constitutional implications.

Speculation has it that Specter must be a Giants fan, though I doubt it. Eagles fan, maybe.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Stand up to the president or get out of the way

I’m still not sure that Cindy Sheehan is making the right move in threatening to challenge House Speaker Nancy Pelosi next year, but she is right about the weakness of the Democrats.

They need some backbone — especially when it comes to defending the basic principles of our constitution.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, in a farely pointed editorial today, calls the Democrats “gutless chumps” who “are worried about being cast as weak on terrorism” and “willing to cave before they fully understand how thoroughly they were hoodwinked by President Bush on other surveillance matters.”

Congress has only a scant notion of how contemptuously the White House has treated a 1978 law that requires special judicial review of surveillance in intelligence cases. And what are the Democrats poised to do? Give the executive branch anything it wants.

“Gutless chumps” might be an understatement.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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