By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Published: April 6, 2010
The journalist, Anat Kamm, 23, is accused of having copied Israeli military documents concerning the premeditated killing of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and of leaking them to a reporter. She apparently had access to the documents during her compulsory military service.
Observers have speculated that the recipient was Uri Blau from the liberal newspaper Haaretz, and that he used the documents as the basis for a 2008 exposé.
Ms. Kamm has been held secretly under house arrest for more than three months. After leaving the military, she had been working for Walla!, a Hebrew Web site partly owned by Haaretz.
Constrained by the gag order, the Israeli news media have so far made only cryptic references to the case. On March 9, for example, The Seventh Eye, an electronic journal of media affairs published by the Israel Democracy Institute, an independent research body in Jerusalem, ran an item saying simply that Ms. Kamm was about to go on unpaid leave from Walla!, but not why.
The popular Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot suggested in its April 1 issue that readers searched the Internet with the keywords “Israeli journalist gag” in order to learn about an affair of interest to Israelis that could only be reported on abroad. And on Tuesday the same newspaper ran a translation of an article by Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, on the case, with all the details that would have violated the gag order literally blacked out.
If Ms. Kamm is found guilty, informed observers said she could face up to 15 years in jail.
The case has already received extensive coverage abroad. Details began to emerge in mid-March on a blog called Tikun Olam, or Repairing the World, by an American writer, Richard Silverstein. The New York-based Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the British newspapers The Guardian and The Independent and The Associated Press have also written about the affair.
According to The Independent, Mr. Blau, the Haaretz reporter suspected of having used the confidential military documents, is currently “hiding in Britain.”
The article by Mr. Blau at the center of the storm was published in November 2008. It focused on an episode in June 2007 in which two Palestinian militants belonging to the Islamic Jihad group were killed by Israeli security forces in the West Bank. The military said at the time that the two were killed in an exchange of fire with Israeli forces.
Mr. Blau noted that months before, one of the militants, Ziad Subhi Muhammad Malaisha, had been marked as a target for assassination by the Israeli Army’s Central Command, which is responsible for the West Bank.
Mr. Blau’s article suggested that Mr. Malaisha’s killing contravened an Israeli Supreme Court ruling from December 2006 that strictly limited the circumstances in which the military can to carry out pre-emptive strikes. Haaretz printed copies of Central Command documents stating that Mr. Malaisha and two other Islamic Jihad leaders were eligible targets alongside the report.
Israeli news media were not even allowed to mention that there was a gag order in place, according to Uzi Benziman, the chief editor of The Seventh Eye. But in a Tuesday morning interview with Army Radio, Dalia Dorner, the retired Supreme Court judge who is now the president of the Israeli Press Council, said the gag order by a magistrate’s court should be fought all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Ms. Dorner’s comments opened the floodgates to Israeli debate about such gag orders, though the ruling still prevented any discussion of the actual case.
Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at Hebrew University and a senior fellow of the Israel Democracy Institute, said that Israel’s treatment of suspected criminal offenses in the security realm was “draconian.” By isolating the suspect and preventing any public debate, he said, the authorities could more easily press the suspect to arrive at a plea bargain.
Mr. Kremnitzer also criticized the ease with which courts in Israel hand out gag orders.
“Only the poor Hebrew readers do not know what is going on,” he said of Israelis unable to read foreign reports about the case in English.
Haaretz and Israel’s Channel 10 are fighting to lift the gag order. Mibi Moser, the lawyer representing Haaretz, said there would be a court hearing on the matter on April 12, if the gag order was not lifted before.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/07/world/middleeast/07israel.html
Israeli gagging order on ex-soldier case condemned
A media report claims Israeli forces in the West Bank have breached laws
Anat Kam, 23, is said to be under investigation for various security offences, including leaking classified military information.
Ms Kam is alleged to have obtained documents concerning apparently extra-judicial killings of Palestinian militants.
She has reportedly been under house arrest since December.
In Israel - as a result of the court-ordered gag - it has become known only as "the security case".
According to the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), the Israeli public are being denied their basic right to information on trials and events taking place in their midst.
"Whatever the rationale for the order...it seems its only purpose is to violate Israelis' right to information, hinder freedom of the press and stymie public debate on the case" ACRI's Chief Legal Counsel, Dan Yakir, said.
"Defence of national security is a legitimate objective but censorship must not be used to prevent the Israeli defence forces from being held responsible if they broke the law," the Paris-based media freedom organisation Reporters Without Borders said.
Trial expected
Anat Kam has worked for the Israeli news website Walla.
Reports that have already been published outside Israel say that while she was a soldier doing her national service she is alleged to have obtained classified military documents and leaked them to an Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.
Speculation has focused around an investigative report in Haaretz in November 2008.
This claimed that Israeli forces in the West Bank had breached new rules on the targeting of suspected Palestinian militants, which required that efforts should be made first to arrest rather than kill them.
Some of the reports circulating outside Israel say that Anat Kam is expected to go on trial later this month.
Haaretz and an Israeli television channel are planning to challenge the gag on Israeli media coverage of Anat Kam's case in court.
Dalia Dorner, a former Supreme Court judge who now heads Israel's Press Council, said it seemed ridiculous to persist with a gag order when the case was being openly discussed in global media outlets.
Legal restrictions have been imposed on journalists reporting this story from Israel, so this article has been compiled from London.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8608227.stm
The case we're forbidden to report on
The president of the Israel Press Council, retired Supreme Court justice Dalia Dorner, has said in a radio interview that it is "regrettable" that a court gag order on a certain security case remains in force, even though the foreign news media has reported on it in detail. Along with the regret over the government's stupidity in not quickly asking for the gag order to be lifted, the silence that the court has imposed on the Israeli media is ludicrous. It infringes on the right of the Israeli public to know, a right acknowledged in the Freedom of Information Law. It feeds the rumors that are floating around under judicial auspices, and it makes a mockery of Israeli democracy.
It has been made clear that this is a judicial ruling, handed down at the request of the State Prosecutor's Office. Thus it counters criticism of the military censorship in the media of democratic countries, which have gleefully blamed the censor for this latest classified-unclassified tale.
Israel's military censorship is subject to principles that restrict it, as laid down in a 1989 Supreme Court ruling. These limitations made the military censor a liberal institution that respects the freedom of publication and the public's right to know.
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These restrictions were recently endorsed by another Supreme Court ruling concerning the negotiations on a deal for the release of captured soldier Gilad Shalit. That ruling rejected a petition for declassifying the details of a prisoner-exchange deal after the court was persuaded that there were "clear security considerations" that justified the prevention of publication. In principle, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch ruled that free discourse, even on the most sensitive security subjects, can be restricted only "if there is immediate certainty of actual damage to security."
During the hearing, the Attorney General's Office made it clear, with the agreement of the chief military censor, that censorship would not be imposed on items originating in foreign publications (the High Court of Justice's decision 9446/09 of December 1, 2009). This should be taken into account.
This balancing formulation that honors the freedom of information even when security interests are at play should obligate all courts hearing gag-order applications for similar reasons. But astoundingly, many magistrate's and district court judges, who are authorized to issue such orders, have for years ignored the basic principles set in the Supreme Court ruling. This is true in security cases - which particularly impress magistrate's court judges - as well as gag orders in other areas.
The principle many of these judges hold to is not usually appealed to the Supreme Court. They believe it's possible to bar the publication of the very fact of an investigation (not only the identity of those being investigated), and that it's possible to ban the publication of the fact that a certain matter has been barred from publication.
The court orders are lifted after a time, generally too long a time, and the Supreme Court does not get the chance to express its opinion on many matters related to gag orders. Even though it has interpreted in principle that only in exceptional cases may the publication of the names of suspects be barred because of a fear that they will suffer "grave damage," the lower courts carry on, with an itchy finger on the gag-order trigger.
For a number of years the Press Council has put together various proposals meant to ensure the media's standing regarding gag orders. Recently, Dorner announced that there is a possibility that only senior judges will be empowered to issue gag orders, and only after hearing the position of the media, which the Supreme Court has defined as "the public's emissary on the matter of information."
In the current case, it's doubtful that the media should wait for the judge who issued the gag order to cancel it, in view of the many reports in the foreign media and possible new circumstances. In exceptional cases, Israeli law permits petitions to the Supreme Court against decisions by lower courts.
The fact that the affair has been published abroad has created exceptional circumstances that justify publication of the details. It has also justified a decision in principle that would take into account the realities of the Internet age and the international media. This decision would obligate all courts.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1161363.html
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