Anat Kamm was convicted of divulging secret information – but the GSS smeared her as a dangerous spy
Yesterday, a plea bargain was signed in the Anat Kamm case, and she pled guilty (Hebrew) to felonies she obviously committed: unauthorized possession of secret information and unauthorized delivery of it to unauthorized personnel. In return, the prosecution will not claim she did so “with the intention of harming state security”, which could have sent her to a life sentence. Today, the court eased her house arrest (Hebrew), allowing her to leave her house – probably because it finally realized she is unlikely to use the time to break into the computer of another general.
One has to keep in mind how it all started, some ten months ago: with a gag order gagging a gag order, i.e. not only forbidding publication of details of the case, but also forbidding a report about the forbidden report. Kamm was detained and interrogated, and the GSS – AKA Shabak, Shin Bet, ISA – started a hunt for the Haaretz journalist Uri Blau – and Israeli media was forbidden to write a single word about it. The Israeli blogosphere rumbled with rumor and counter-rumor, but people who wanted to read a clear sentence about the case had to look outside of Israel.
Then, in May, GSS chief Yuval Diskin held a press conference, where he bandied the term “aggravated espionage” about, and described the affair as one of the most severe in the history of Israel, comparing Kamm unfavorably to Tali Fahima. Even at the time, it was a sure bet (Hebrew) that this was merely noise, an attempt to scare the victim and turn the public against her, and that this will turn end in a much, much lighter plea bargain – just as the prosecution made a point of not demanding the death penalty for Fahima at the beginning of the legal process and finished with all of its claims shot, and had to settle for a sentence of three years. Diskin said at the time that enemy organizations “could only dream” of the documents Kamm copied; he knew, as did any sensible observer, Kamm had no contact whatsoever to any enemy organizations; that she gave the information to an Israeli newspaper, which is subject to the military censorship – and that the information showed IDF generals allowed themselves to make a mockery of Supreme Court decisions, and ordered killings when arrests were feasible.
But Diskin, in his presser, turned Kamm into an enemy of the people, and such she shall remain as far as most Israelis are concerned until her last day. The official sentence will matter but little; Diskin has demonstrated what happens to someone who exposes the nakedness of the security system, and did so twice: once by exposing the fact generals disregarded court decisions, and once by showing how laughable was the security in General Naveh’s office, which allowed Kamm to simply copy his entire directory of documents. Our hush-hush apparatus was exposed, as usual, as oscillating between stupid carelessness and full system panic.
Anat Kamm is a leaker, a conveyer of knowledge, not a spy; a spy wants the knowledge he gained specific information kept secret. We now know she was another victim of a GSS smear campaign, like Fahima and many, many others. Not the Israeli public would care: 52% of it believe (Hebrew) freedom of expression should be curtained if the information “harms the country’s image”, which most assuredly happened; and 64% would accept limitation on freedom of expression in case of a “security threat”, which is very, very vague – especially when it is used as an excuse for shutting up people.
For a leak to be effective, it needs a large segment of the public willing to accept the information, to allow it to enrage it, and to do something about it. When the public willfully refuses to listen, when he treats the generals and the secret policemen as totems, turning the person exposing the truth into an enemy of the public is a piece of cake.
Public? As if. There is no Israeli public. What we have is a stampede-prone herd.
February 7, 2011
12:24 pm
Kamm will get off with a slap on the wrist…maybe a suspended sentence and/or community service. How do I know this: (1) She is a far-Leftist, (2) she only had to sit under house arresnt during the legal proceedings. No reason to worry about her.
February 7, 2011
1:07 pm
Ben, Kamm is a bona-fide centrist, significantly to the right of most 972 bloggers. Consider her spirited critique of conscientious objection to the draft: http://news.walla.co.il/?w=//1335949
February 7, 2011
1:37 pm
Okay, Dimi, maybe you are right, but she is carrying out the work of the Far Left and she will be rewarded for it by the powers that be regardless of her personal beliefs.
February 7, 2011
2:16 pm
Dimi,
Pretty much everyone is to the right of 972 bloggers.
February 7, 2011
3:55 pm
Don’t see how blowing the whistle of a general blatantly disregarding a Supreme Court order is anything other than patriotic. Provided you support democracy, separation of power, judicial and civilian control over the military, etc, and would rather have a democratic Israel than something resembling, say, Pakistan.
February 7, 2011
9:53 pm
We’re actually individuals, not part of a unified ideological blob
To the point, the question of conscientious objection is one which has been dividing the Israeli left for decades. Kamm is clearly on the centrist, Zionist side of it – classic Meretz, radical only in the belief (alien to most Israelis) that the IDF ought to be held accountable for its actions.
February 7, 2011
10:27 pm
Yossi,
I wasn’t arguing with what political “label” she should have or described as. I was just describing my observation from reading 972+ and my knowledge of Israeli politics.
February 8, 2011
3:46 am
From things I’ve read, she strikes me as even a bit right of center. She’s very much of the classic whistle-blower mold; the disillusioned true believer who was motivated by anger at the disparity between the reality and her fantasy.
February 9, 2011
10:23 pm
interestingly enough, much of what you said about Anat Kam can also be said about Steve Rosen. Rosen was smeared by the anti israel left and max blumenthal because he was set up in a sting operation to want to leak info he had heard about iranian revolutionary guards kidnapping israelis who where helping to train Kurdish security forces. I guess protecting israeli soldiers training kurds from iranian revolutionary guards dosent exactly fall under noble whistleblowing for blumenthal and the anti zionists at mondoweiss who somehow consider it treason.
February 9, 2011
11:54 pm
F, I don’t see that. Soliciting information from a government official for the benefit of a foreign government sounds much more like espionage to me. I think it’s strange that Rosen, a US citizen, was not charged with espionage, while the government official (Franklin?) from whom he got information was.
February 10, 2011
6:17 pm
Its quite simple really but you are obviously not familiar with the details of the case. Steve Rosen did not “solicit information for the benefit of a foreign government” unless you think that Anat Kam also solicited information “for the benefit” of the Palestinian Authority. Steve Rosen is an Iran expert. He had lunch with another Iran expert Larry Franklin who was set up by the FBI to do a sting operation, giving Steve Rosen fake information that Iranian Revolutionary Guards were planning on kidnapping Israeli soldiers that had been training Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq. Rosen then leaked the information to the media and told what he had heard to his friend at the Israeli embassy – out of concern for the lives of the soldiers.
So if you think Anat Kam is some sort of moral individual for leaking classified info about assassinations of Hamas leaders but Steve Rosen is some sort of traitor for doing the same regarding Iranian plans to kidnap Israeli soldiers – then I suggest you think reflect on that incongruency.