Put aside whatever you may feel about AIPAC. The case amounted to the criminalization of extremely routine practices in Washington: acquiring and distributing information that’s overclassified.

Technically, I published classified information last Monday when I reported that there was an undisclosed classified Office of Legal Counsel memorandum on torture from 2007. There’s a widespread recognition that way too much information is needlessly classified. Indeed, “Ninety-five percent of what we do shouldn’t be classified at all, or it should be a much lower level of classification,” Joan Dempsey, a former senior CIA and Pentagon official, recently estimated, according to Secrecy News. Neither Steve Rosen nor Keith Weissman, the AIPAC lobbyists in question, were government employees. Even if we’re to take the Justice Department’s former line that the leak itself was felonious, they were never accused of being the sources of it, since they couldn’t have been. (That was a guy named Larry Franklin.)

During the Chas Freeman affair, when Steve Rosen was leading the charge against Freeman’s appointment to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council for alleged hostility to Israel, alleged disinterest in human rights, and insinuated nefarious loyalties to China and Saudi Arabia, I remarked that Rosen shouldn’t have gone after another pro-Israel lobbyist with whom he disagreed over Freeman while being wrapped up in the case. I shouldn’t have said that Rosen was under indictment for spying for Israel, since that was a misstatement of the case. The point that I should have made is that someone who was railroaded in this case, with its intimations of dual loyalty, should be circumspect about flinging such charges against other people. Maybe we can all take a deep breath here — doubtful, but maybe — and reflect that it’s good for everyone who desires openness in government that the flimsy charges against Weissman and Rosen are on their way out, regardless of the politics of the accused.

The libels on me and their easily traceable email trails show conclusively that there is a powerful  lobby determined to prevent any view other than its own from being aired, still less to factor in American understanding of trends and events in the Middle East.  The tactics of the Israel Lobby plumb the depths of dishonor and indecency and include character assassination, selective misquotation, the willful distortion of the record, the fabrication of falsehoods, and an utter disregard for the truth.  The aim of this Lobby is control of the policy process through the exercise of a veto over the appointment of people who dispute the wisdom of its views, the substitution of political correctness for analysis, and the exclusion of any and all options for decision by Americans and our government other than those that it favors.

Why, doesn’t he know that all Steve Rosen cares about is human rights in China?

He urges the Obama administration to “ignore Freeman’s rightwing critics. They are the same people who will oppose your efforts to secure Israeli-Palestinian peace.” He says that the “only interest” of Jeff Goldberg of the Atlantic in opposing the Freeman nomination, although he is like Rosenberg a fierce AIPAC critic, is “defending the occupation and opposing the peace process.” He depicts me as motivated by being a spy for Israel.

Is IPF so eager to see pressure on Israel that they will throw in their lot with a Chas Freeman and attack anyone who opposes him? Senior officials of IPF reportedly are supporting both the substance and tone of Rosenberg’s attacks on Freeman critics, and do not see them as intemperate.

This reads like Rosen reached out to IPF “senior officials” to whine about Rosenberg and they told him they didn’t care about what he had to say. I wonder why that is? Maybe the Israel Policy Forum’s “senior officials” don’t particularly want to see people under indictment for spying for Israel acting like the arbiters of what a healthy U.S.-Israel relationship should look like. I know, I know, this meshuggeneh world!