Public trust suffers when the State Prosecution dithers
The indictment against Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman will be announced today. This and similar sentences fill the media archives, but not once have they been correct. One can say with a high probability that today, for the first time, the expectation in this sentence will finally become a fact.
Lieberman apparently thinks so, too. This explains why he went on a tirade against the EU's treatment of Israel on Wednesday. Israel can rightly feel disappointed by Europe's lackluster response to Hamas' recent threats to annihilate the Jewish state and by the Palestinian Authority's silence, but Israel, with its Dimona reactor and with the Israel Defence Forces deployed along its borders, will never be Czechoslovakia of 1938.
Are Lieberman's attacks related to the impending indictment? It is unclear. In the past, Lieberman knew how to resign from the government with his head held up high and his political stature intact. But on Monday he maintained radio silence about his future. Even if he decides to resign or is forced to step down as foreign minister because of the indictment, he could still serve as a Knesset member and lead the Yisrael Beytenu ticket in the upcoming elections as he awaits a conviction or an acquittal. If he is found guilty of a crime that carries moral turpitude, he might have to leave politics for good.
If he is indicted for breach of trust, or alternatively for fraud and breach of trust [thus having the most serious allegations of money laundering and witness tampering dropped], the State Prosecution will have proven that it mishandled his case and somehow got lost on the way to the indictment. Even if the revised indictment is a product of Lieberman's trickery which brings back memories of the way police investigator Maj. Gen. Moshe Mizrahi had to quit for his alleged overeagerness to use wiretaps in his pursuit of corrupt officials it would still be worth determining what led the prosecution to shift its positions back and forth on the scope and nature of Lieberman's indictment.
All those involved in the drafting of the indictment must come under scrutiny; the period in question dates back to the day Attorney-General Yehuda Weinstein took control of the case. I am not calling for a statutory investigative committee that would have real legal powers, because such a panel would produce unhelpful conclusions that would only lead us further from the truth. Instead, a professional body should be established to look at all the various deliberations and developments leading to the Lieberman indictment, not unlike what the IDF does to investigate botched operations or training accidents. Such a lesson-learning process should not culminate in heads rolling or officials being censured; rather, it should allow the law enforcement apparatus to draw the right conclusions in the wake of the Lieberman ordeal.
The results should shed light on the manic-depressive, hyperactive nature of the investigation; it is a case study of how something can go both extremely well and terribly wrong. All those involved in preparing the indictment were convinced there was a "100 percent chance that the court will convict Lieberman" and that this was a "slam dunk." But on the other hand, quite a few of those of people were equally convinced that "we have a weak case on our hands."
This explains the big discrepancy between the draft indictment that was produced in the run-up to Lieberman's pretrial hearing and the final wording of the allegations, which are likely to be disclosed today. It is hard to believe that the two documents refer to the same case, the same person and the same witnesses.
This process denies suspects of their right for a speedy trial and may have an adverse effect on their blood pressure and overall health. But what's more critical is that it erodes the State Prosecution's most valuable asset the public's trust.
To avoid future cases of prosecutorial misconduct, a new public commission must be formed. It shall comprise only a handful of people: former Supreme Court justices, top State Prosecution officials and police officers, and a representative of the Movement for Quality Government in Israel. Its task would be to use the past as way of shaping a better future.
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