 JERUSALEM - Israel denied any involvement on Thursday after a Pentagon expert was arrested by the FBI on charges of disclosing top secret information about Iraq to a prominent pro-Israel lobby group. "Israel considers this arrest as a non-issue. We have no involvement and we have not received any document from this person," a senior foreign ministry official told AFP.
| "We know no-fink! Tell them, Hogan!" |
Lawrence Franklin, who served on the Iran desk in the office of Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington on Wednesday after the charges were unsealed. Franklin, 58, is alleged to have revealed classified information about potential attacks on US forces in Iraq to two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee at a restaurant in Arlington, Virginia in June 2003.
Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom was also quoted by the Yediot Aharonot daily as denying any Israeli involvement. "Israel has intimate strategic relations with the United States, which include exchanges of classified information," Shalom said. "Israel will not do anything to harm those relations. Anyone who imagines that we were involved in this affair is mistaken."
Israel pledged not to spy on the United States after the case of Jonathan Pollard, an intelligence analyst for the US Navy, who passed on thousands of secret documents in 18 months before his arrest in November 1985. Pollard was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987, but Israel only admitted that he was one of its spies 11 years later. It has since lobbied Washington to grant him a pardon.
"We have excellent cooperation with the Americans at all levels and we have no need of documents of the sort that were in this person's field," the foreign ministry official said. "It is possible that he has passed on a document of which we are ignorant to other Americans," he added. "In any case this is not the Pollard affair."| Damned well better not be. Give Franklin a fair trial, and if he's guilty, a life sentence in a cell next to Pollard. |
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