Today's Top Story Today's top story, as you know, is that a verdict of "not guilty" was rendered in California, wrapping up pop star Michael Jackson's child molestation trial. He (this is already old, folks) moonwalked out of the courtroom a free man, thanks to a jury of his peers, none of whom were African-American, by the way. The media appreciates the bone, and the citizens of Santa Maria get to pay for it all. But they're rich; they got a big tax break this year. Sound familiar? It does to me, too. There's always a diversion, probably not intentional but constant nonetheless, that grabs our attention (the national span of which is often vast and deep), some incessant red herring that keeps the more important news from emerging out from the muck of journalism. Kobe Bryant was a rather mild example of a celebrity trial that wound up being much ado about nothing. O.J. Simpson is indelibly inked into the books of our times because of his legal battles in Los Angeles. At the time, that gas giant of a distraction almost completely obscured our nation's dealings with a potentially nuclear North Korea in 1994, when the Clinton White House hammered out a deal to provide the DPRK with power-producing light-water reactors. Negotiating with psychotic, hard-line Communists worked for a time. Some people claim Clinton was duped, while others say he stabilized a very dangerous part of the world. However you look at it (or don't), North Korea - with assistance from China and Pakistan - tore up the Clinton deal on the Bush administration's watch. Now they're back to building plutonium bombs, and may even be on their way to testing one. So thank God for celebrity trials. If we were to notice the stuff that goes on in the real world, we might go into a shell and not come out, and that would tweak the numbers on the economy. Can't have that. So as we all start picking apart the carcass of the King of Pop, let's try and not take our eye off the ball for a moment. The story is a simple one: Someone in the employ of the president has been charged as a spy. Lawrence Franklin, described loosely as a Pentagon analyst, faces six counts of disclosing secret information to unauthorized sources - specifically, to Steven Roseman and Keith Weissman, members of a powerful lobby called the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). They, of course, passed it along the line to Ariel Sharon's people. Franklin takes the fall for this, winding up a Defense Department career that began in 1976, but he was just carrying the black bag. The real crook is most likely Douglas Feith, a man so entangled in Middle Eastern strategy that he has all but forgotten that he works for the United States. These guys are from the old PNAC crowd that chafed so during the peaceful Clinton era, like John Bolton, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and others who today run around telling George W. Bush what to say and do in matters of foreign policy. So Israel probably knows the United States' plans with regard to Iran and other conundrums better than do the American people, their representatives and the press. They probably read the war-room minutes for Iraq, too, and Afghanistan, before those conflicts began. However one feels about such a clandestine - and, according to a grand jury, illegal - transfer of national secrets, a crime for which quite a few people have been put to death over the years, one must admit this sort of thing can only undermine America's relationship with Arab regimes. They probably see this as another example of America saying one thing (like touting liberty) and doing another (such as imprisoning people for years without access to the legal system). Now comes the sticky question: Has America not done enough for Israel already? Since its birth, the Jewish state has received nearly a hundred billion dollars from U.S. taxpayers, if you throw in the interest on the cash that was borrowed for the effort. Whenever they get into it with the Palestinians, those tanks and helicopters and war planes all came from us. This is part of what so inflames many Muslims when it comes to the way they view America. To ignore that is an irreperable act of irresponsibility by the administration, more so by this time than it was for those who preceded Bush. The need to "prop up" Israel at this point does not exist, and has not existed for quite some time now. This was amply demonstrated in 1968 (when the Israeli military engaged and defeated a U.S. Navy destroyer). In the 1970s, when the entire Middle East attacked simultaneously, Israel crushed them all, seizing considerable real estate in the process. In 1981, an Israeli strike force (flying American planes) bombed out Saddam Hussein's Osiric nuclear reactor. Today, Israel is an unofficial nuclear power - not a bad thing, given their geopolitical circumstances. They've established as decent a democracy as ever seen in that troubled region, with so many Israeli Arabs enjoying freedoms they would have never known in surrounding states. Israel's economy flourishes today, and would be even better off in an environment of lessened tensions. Knowing that, the Sharon government chooses to build fences rather than mend them. Faced with the utter horror and evil of suicide bombings, it is just about the only short-term solution they have. Reeling in Jewish settlers from outlying areas at the same time is a sensible thing to do. But what is our part in all of this, and how genuine are our stated intentions when we hand things over to men like Douglas Feith, on record as having opposed both the Oslo and Camp David accords? As it turns out, Feith was also a White House source for false information about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, their pipeline to the now-discredited Ahmad Chalabi. For pure incompetence alone, resulting in such a great cost to our nation, Feith should be fired even if he's never indicted. If his underling gets stuck with this case of espionage, that's fine. At least it's a legacy. This much is clear: We can't really leave the kind of footprints that others in the world will want to follow with these people stuck to the bottoms of our shoes. And nobody in charge is willing to change the way things work in Washington... Anyway. That's probably enough (maybe too much). Now you can get on with your life. Somewhere out there is a Runaway Bride just begging for your attention. Paul Heller 6/14/05 << back to the archives
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