Anat Kamm, the former IDF OC Central Command secretary convicted of serious
espionage crimes, including passing classified documents to journalist Uri Blau,
appealed to the Supreme Court against her sentence on Wednesday.
In
October, 22-year-old Kamm was sentenced to four-and- a-half years in
prison. That sentence is due to begin on Sunday, and Kamm has been
ordered to present herself at the Tel Aviv District Court on that day to be
taken to prison.
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Anat Kamm gets 4.5 years for stealing military documents
Sides argue over Kamm sentencing behind closed doors Kamm’s attorneys have asked the Supreme Court to reduce
her prison term to either a suspended sentence or to six months of community
service on the grounds that it is too harsh. They have also asked for the start
of Kamm’s sentence to be delayed while the appeal process is
heard.
Justice Miriam Naor will convene a preliminary hearing in the
Supreme Court at 11 a.m. on Thursday to determine whether Kamm will begin her
sentence on Sunday, as ordered by the district court.
Kamm was convicted
in February under a plea bargain under which she pleaded guilty to gathering and
storing classified military documents during her mandatory army service and
transferring them to Blau, a political affairs reporter for left-leaning Hebrew
daily
Haaretz.However, and significantly, the amended indictment dropped
two far more severe charges of deliberately intending to harm state security, an
offense which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
The
prosecution had originally requested a far harsher punishment of 15 years
imprisonment, the maximum penalty for the offenses for which Kamm was
convicted.
But in October’s sentencing hearing, Judges Nurit Ahituv,
Miriam Diskin and Ra’anan Ben-Yosef said they had taken into account the
mitigating circumstances of Kamm’s young age, her lack of criminal record and
that she had complied readily with the investigation including giving a full
confession.
However, the judges also said Kamm had “cynically exploited
her position” during her army service as a clerk in the office of Maj.-Gen. Yair
Naveh to steal 2,085 IDF documents – over 700 of which were highly classified –
and to transfer them to Blau.
In September 2008, after her discharge from
the army, Kamm intended to give the files to
Yediot Aharonot journalist Yossi
Yehoshua, but when that failed, she handed a disk containing 1,500 documents,
150 of them highly classified and 330 classified, to Blau.
The
Haaretz
reporter used classified material from those documents as the basis for two
newspaper articles. In the first, published in late October 2008, Blau reported
that senior IDF and Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) officials had approved the
terms of a targeted killing of a terrorist in violation of a landmark ruling by
the High Court of Justice. A few weeks later, another
Haaretz story intimated
that the IDF had earmarked Palestinian terrorists for targeted
killings.
Blau had received from Kamm a copy of the targeted-killing
order; a photocopy was published by
Haaretz.
Ahituv said the number of
classified documents Kamm stole from the IDF was “almost unimaginable” and dealt
with ‘the most vital issues in the defense and the military,” which could since
have been transferred to other, unknown protagonists.