Doing the dirty work of careerists at the State Department and CIA, the Washington Post has used its respected platform to besmirch the names of both public and private figures at the Pentagon and tar them with the implication of harboring dual loyalties for Israel?or worse, that they possibly acted on those supposed impulses.

What did the five individuals named by the Post on September 4?who were a mix of low-level bureaucrats, high-ranking officials, and one former advisor on the Defense Policy Board?have in common?  They were all Jews.

That?s not all.  The Post piece further explains that all ?have strong ties to Israel,? and that three of them were ?co-authors of a 1996 policy paper for then-Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.?  (Not mentioned was that the piece was neither commissioned nor funded nor sanctioned by Netanyahu or the Israeli government.)

Lest anyone still might not get that the five named Jews are possibly involved with dual loyalties to the Jewish state, the Post quoted ?one source interviewed by the FBI about the defense officials? explaining the origins of the investigation: ??The initial interest was: Do you believe certain people would spy for Israel and pass secret information???

What was the news value of such a story?  It was supposedly a follow-up to previous recent stories about an actual FBI investigation into low-level Pentagon Iran analyst Larry Franklin, who is reportedly suspected of passing classified information to a pro-Israel U.S. lobbying group.  But there was no story, at least not one with any news value.

Reading the piece closely, none of the five is actually a target of any investigation.  The actual language is: ?Investigators have specifically asked about a group of neoconservatives involved in defense issues.?

To a casual reader, however, such a distinction might not be apparent.  Why else, after all, would a nationally-esteemed news organization name names of low-level bureaucrats with no public profiles unless they had been convicted, indicted, or at least on the verge of one or the other?

An investigation alone is hardly newsworthy.

Buried nine paragraphs into the 1100 word article is an insistence from ?Pentagon officials? that the five named Jews were not ?the subjects of the intelligence leak investigation.?  The Post knew full well that they were not targets of any investigation, otherwise they would have written that they were.

It is hard to imagine that exclusion of an explicit statement that the men were not formally under investigation was a mere oversight.  Rather, it appears part of a pattern where the Post has advanced the political cause of careerists at the State Department and the CIA.

For all the media coverage of a divide between the Pentagon and the State Department?true to a certain extent?the real rift is between careerist diplomats and intelligence officials and the political appointees in the foreign policy team, the latter of which are largely based at the Pentagon, though a handful are at State or at the Office of the Vice President. Continued...