US Supreme Court refuses to take up case of the “Cuban 5”

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The US Supreme Court on Monday refused to consider the case of five Cubans arrested on espionage charges in 1998.

Attorneys for the five, who were charged with spying on Cuban exile groups implicated in acts of terrorism against Cuba, had appealed their 2001 conviction, arguing, among other things, that they had been denied a fair trial because of the trial judge's refusal to move the proceedings out of Miami.

The city has a population of 700,000 Cuban-Americans and is the base of numerous right-wing anti-Castro exile groups.

The Supreme Court did not feel itself obliged to justify its decision, despite the fact that the conviction and prolonged imprisonment of the five Cubans has been condemned by the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the petition for the court to consider the case had been supported by amicus briefs from a dozen different countries and 10 Nobel Prize winners.

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One law for Cubans and a different law for Israelis. These Cubans are in prison for over 10 years, not for spying on the United States, but for spying on anti-Castro terrorist groups in Miami, and yet...

Spy for Israel gets fine

An 85-year-old former army employee was fined for passing military secrets to Israel in the 80s, but a U.S. federal judge questioned the government's handling of the case.

Ben-Ami Kadish appeared May 29 in U.S. federal district court in Manhattan, where he was fined $50,000 by Judge William H. Pauley III, but avoided a prison sentence.

The judge cited Kadish's age and infirmity as reasons for not requiring a prison sentence, but also questioned why it took the government 23 years to charge the retiree and then only indicted him on one count of conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of Israel, The New York Times reported.

Kadish, who was a civilian employee of the U.S. Army, passed classified documents between 1980 and1985 to an Israeli agent, the same handler as Jonathan Pollard, according to reports.

“I’m sorry I made a mistake,” Kadish said before sentencing. “It was a misjudgment. I thought I was helping the State of Israel without harming the United States.”

Kadish was born in Connecticut and moved to what was then Palestine. He returned to the United States after World War II. He was employed by the army for 27 years after serving in the U.S. Air Force and had security clearance. He lives with his wife of 57 years in a New Jersey retirement community.

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