Rosen lawyer wants Jews to ‘rise up

By · May 13, 2008

U.S. Jews should “rise up” against the classified information case the government has brought against two former AIPAC employees, the lawyer for one of them said.

“The government has misbehaved in this case, but I have to tell you that AIPAC and the Jewish community have misbehaved,” Steve Rosen’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, said on a Washington-area radio program broadcast May 4.

Rosen, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s former foreign policy chief, and Keith Weissman, its former Iran analyst, were charged in 2005 with dealing in classified information. Their trial date has yet to be set.

The government recently filed a rare pretrial appeal to an appeals court after a number of rulings by federal Judge T.S. Ellis III, sitting in Arlington, Va., undercut much of the prosecution’s case.

“The government put a lot of pressure on AIPAC and basically misled AIPAC on what it was that Keith and Steve did,” Lowell said.

AIPAC fired Rosen and Weissman about nine months after the FBI first raided AIPAC’s offices in August 2004. Since then, the Jewish community has been mostly silent about the case, with the exception of a few protestations, including from the American Jewish Committee and Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive v/ice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

“I would like the community to rise up and, having seen all the public information, as a community start saying to the world, the Jewish world and the non-Jewish world, and the media, to the Justice Department and the attorney general: ‘Reconsider. This is wrong. You made a mistake,” Lowell said.

“AIPAC and other groups that got snookered, they should admit they got snookered, and they should both embrace these men.”