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Nahum Barnea

Hungry for headlines

Police recommendation to indict Olmert on bribery charges is mostly about PR

In the history of Israeli governments, this will be recorded as a sad day. Indeed, the police recommendation to indict Olmert is far from being a done deal, yet Olmert too knows that later on he can expect an indictment approved by the attorney general. He may be able to delete clauses, correct, and mitigate, but would not be able to prevent the decision on filing an indictment.

 

This is a sad day, because nobody is excited about entrusting his children’s fate in the hands of a man facing a cloud of criminal suspicion. This is a sad day because we are not only talking about people, but rather, institutions without which we have no state.

 

The wave of investigations against Olmert opened with the affair involving his home in Jerusalem and the Bank Leumi affair. Both probes faced difficulties and in the view of police and Prosecutor’s Office sources have reached a dead-end. Still, the Prosecutor’s Office finds it difficult to close the cases – too many elements invested too much time and prestige in them.

 

The move to advance the decision in the two less serious probes was logical: If, as far as police investigators understand, Olmert committed acts that justify an indictment, it’s better to go with what they have. They claim that they have enough material in the affair involving Olmert’s overseas trips, and they still have the leftovers from the Talansky testimony. This may be boosted by the testimony of Uri Messer, whose statements are mostly needed for establishing an indictment in the affair involving the investment center.

 

The problem with the police recommendation is the very existence of the move known as “police recommendation.” The police recommended indicting Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon in the past. The publication of the recommendation created unfair pressure on the attorney generals: When they decided against the police recommendation they were accused of showing forgiveness to powerful figures suspected of criminal wrongdoing. The police looked good publicly, as undaunted fighters against corruption. Meanwhile, the attorney general would come across as scared and weak.

 

When Menachem Mazuz sought, at the start of his term, to annul the move called police recommendation, police officials adamantly refused. They argued that this tool is important for boosting investigators’ morale. This is the only way they would know they haven’t worked for nothing.

 

In practice, the police recommendation is a way to prepare excuses- it features plenty of PR and zero responsibility. When the State Prosecutor, attorney general and their aides discuss the filing of an indictment, they look into the entire probe materials. The only paper they can allow themselves to skip is the document known as the “police recommendation.

 

The most impressive clause in the police recommendation is bribery. On television it sounds huge, almost like the rape clause in President Katsav’s affair. In practice, we are talking about three polite letters of recommendation written by Olmert, three out of the hundreds or thousands he wrote during his life. If this is what Olmert gave in exchange for the hundreds of thousands of dollars he allegedly got through Talansky, we can accuse the PM of being cheap and ungrateful – but bribery? Anyone who wrote a recommendation letter in his life knows how exaggerated this charge is.

 

Police investigators are aiming so high not because they have a political conspiracy against someone. Just like many others, they’re hungry for a headline. They satisfied this hunger Sunday, and still have some food left over for the coming days.

 


פרסום ראשון: 09.08.08, 13:04
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