By Jay D. Homnick on 10.21.09 @ 6:07AM
Entrapment and the arrest of Stewart David Nozette.
Jews who follow the traditional prayer book say a little rhyming
couplet each morning:
Al teviaini lo liday nisayon
Velo liday bizayon…
A fair translation, mimicking the meter, would be:
Lord, let me not be tested
And let me not be detested…
The way to succeed as a moral person is not by thinking yourself
impervious to temptation. If you do not recognize the weakness of
your power, you will likely succumb to the power of your
weakness. "Do not be sure of yourself until the day of your
death," the Mishna warns.
In consequence, there is no more illegitimate investigatory
enterprise than entrapment. To approach a person and offer him
unethical or illegal goodies, then to accuse him of criminality
if he accedes, is corruption of law rather than enforcement. No
one needs to prove to me -- to grab a handy candidate -- that I
can be moved to behave beneath my standard. Perhaps when I am too
up, perhaps when I am too down, perhaps by flattery, perhaps by
intimidation, perhaps by offers, perhaps by threats. Constant
vigilance is required to avoid the occasions of sin, but the
battle rages within, day in, day out.
What is my/your price? What would it take for me/you to sell
my/your soul? Better we should never find out, never even see
that borderline on the horizon.
WHICH BRINGS US to the grim tale of Stewart David Nozette.
Nozette was employed until 1998 by various agencies of our
federal government, among them NASA and the Department of
Defense. In the course of his distinguished career, he is said to
have memorized some information classified as… er, classified.
How vital this eleven-year-old undocumented data might be we can
only imagine.
From 1998 until 2008 Nozette worked as a consultant for an
aeronautics company under Israeli ownership. This firm won
Pentagon contracts, in the course of which Nozette came under
suspicion for padding expense sheets. His financial documents
were subpoenaed but he was never charged. Presumably this history
afforded the FBI an inkling of Nozette's need or desire for ready
cash and his willingness to take unwholesome steps towards its
acquisition.
The FBI decided to play Cupid to his cupidity, sending an
undercover agent to approach him in the guise of a Mossad
spymaster. Nozette took the bait and agreed to sell his
knowledge, again all from memory with no substantiating
paperwork. The Feds closed in and charged him with espionage.
To sum up, this man was never suspected of spying in the past. He
never approached any agency of any foreign government to offer
his services or resources. If he ever committed a crime, it was
ordering a hamburger and billing Uncle Sam for a steak. Forces of
law enforcement detected in him an impulse toward gain that could
accommodate even the ill-gotten. They manufactured a fictional
crime and demonstrated that he was corruptible.
Where does this road lead? Should we send drug dealers past the
home of everyone with a history of using illegal drugs, to see if
they could be prompted to buy? Here is a scenario: this man will
be tried before a judge, but if that judge has never been offered
a sizeable bribe in an FBI sting, the verdict will be tainted. No
one in society may be deemed a legitimate practitioner of a
position of trust until the police have engaged to test his
mettle by offering him a chance to steal. Baloney! This is a
truly contemptible process.
MORE SHOCKING YET is choosing to induce a Jew to spy for Israel.
The message sent by the current administration in targeting
Nozette is that Israel is viewed as a hostile entity and every
Jew is seen as harboring dual loyalty. Scratch the surface of
every Jewish-American and there is a greedy spy just beneath.
Maybe the next step is to collect all of them into internment
camps where they can be observed more closely.
How is this different from the FBI offering to sell explosives to
some angry Muslims who wanted to bomb a synagogue? In a number of
ways. First, those guys were looking to make a buy. Then, similar
to a spouse making inquiries about a hit man, it is legitimate to
entrap and record. (Jewish law has this exception as well.) In
this instance an actual criminal solicitation is intercepted
before it can claim victims.
Second, the Muslims were willing to bomb a random place of
worship, killing and destroying the innocent for malice without
gain. Do you think Stewart David Nozette would have responded if
the faux Mossad guy tried to enlist him in bombing a local
mosque? And third, those people were out there loudly proclaiming
their other loyalties to all who would listen.
This is a sad day in the history of American law enforcement and
a slap in the face for Jews and Israel.
topics:
Israel, Espionage, FBI
