MORE ON THE SPY ALLEGATIONS

This whole thing is beginning to look, as Maariv puts it, like 'a surfeit of hype forced into bed with a paucity of fact.' The suspected Pentagon figure, Larry Franklin, is not a 'high level' operative (as CBS originally reported), but rather a desk officer in the Defense Department's Near East and South Asia Bureau. (Franklin also is not Jewish.) A senior Bush administration figure told the press that:

from what we know, Larry Franklin looks more like an incompetent fool way out of his depth than a spy. He apparently passed on some papers to Israel without realizing the ramifications of his actions... Another senior source said that
Israel did not need Franklin's information. Israel's contacts with high-level officials are such that a phone call to the US would have been sufficient to elicit the information.

Given the fact that the FBI investigation into Franklin has been underway for over a year, one wonders why the leak to the press at this time, before even any formal charges have been made? The Jerusalem Council for Public Affairs noted today an altogether plausible reason ― internal US conflicts:

Both the CIA and the FBI are fighting a "battle for survival" after repeated U.S. commissions have attacked them for failing to prevent 9/11. Israel, according to Amir Oren (Ha'aretz), has been caught in a crossfire between these agencies and their Pentagon rivals. [Natan Sharansky argees]

It should be recalled that following a similar accusation in the late 1990s, CIA Director George Tenet found the charges baseless and wrote Israel a letter of apology.

The Jerusalem Post reports that, "[w]hile CBS news first reported on Sunday that the FBI was getting ready to indict a suspected Israeli mole in the Pentagon for espionage, it now seems that Franklin, if charged at all, could be accused of mishandling classified information, a much lesser offense." .... Speaking to The Jerusalem Post, Malcolm Hoenlein, executive director of the conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said the case "doesn't make sense on a lot of levels. This investigation has been going on for 18 months. They [leak it] before there are any arrests. The allegations already have changed from espionage to mishandling of information. Knowing the people involved, they are certainly loyal, patriotic Americans who would not fall into this kind of trap," he said.
"I think there will be a lot of questions afterwards as to why it was raised now, how it was leaked, but first we have to see if anyone is charged."

Finally, the Jerusalem Post sees election year politics and anti-Semitism at work:

The AIPAC kerfuffle
Let us not, as the media, be naïve. There are two parallel and bitter struggles raging in Washington, now reaching a crescendo. One is between Democrats and Republicans over control of the White House. A spy scandal at this time obviously harms the incumbent’s chances of getting his message out in the main week set aside for doing so, the week of the Republican convention.

At the same time, there is an equally passionate and closely related struggle within the Bush Administration and outside over the president’s post-9/11 foreign policy. Was ousting Saddam Hussein a critical centerpiece of the wider war or a festering mistake? Should Iran’s nuclear weapons program be stopped and if so how? These debates have swirled around a handful of officials, all of whom are “pro-Israel” and some of whom are Jews.

It should not be surprising that the greatest overhaul in American foreign policy thinking since Harry Truman introduced containment after World War II would meet with resistance. There is ample room for debate over how aggressively and by what means the new doctrine of preemption and the new focus against state support for terrorism and for democratization should be implemented. But rather than fight these issues on the merits, the other side has at times stooped to conspiracy theories that are, let’s face it — anti-Semitic.