Back in October, while Asif William Rahman was still a CIA analyst, he had access to highly classified information regarding Israel’s plans to retaliate against Iran for its Oct. 1 200-missile barrage against Israel. Why exactly Rahman had access to this information, which should have been available only to people with the highest possible security clearance, has never yet been explained. But he did have it, and he spread it far and wide, so that it ultimately came to the attention of the Islamic Republic, and Israel had to overhaul its plans. Now Rahman has pleaded guilty to leaking these documents and faces ten years in prison. The question remains, however: why did he do it?
ABC News reported Friday that Rahman “pleaded guilty to two counts of transmission of national defense information, according to court records.” He is looking at up to thirteen years in prison. He “admitted to accessing and printing out two documents regarding Israel's retaliatory strike plans on Oct. 17 and transporting them to his residence, where he later uploaded images of them and provided them to ‘multiple individuals he knew were not entitled to receive them.’”
AP reported in December that “official court documents are vague about what was leaked, but details discussed in open court make clear that it references an October disclosure of documents from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency noting that Israel was moving military assets into place to conduct a military strike on Iran after Iran launched its own missile attack on Israel.”
The New York Post noted in November that “the top secret files were only meant to be seen by those with proper clearance in the US and the ‘Five Eyes’ – Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.”
So how Rahman got hold of this material remains unclear, as does his exact motive. According to AP, “prosecutor Troy Edwards said Rahman was motivated by ideology, though he did not discuss what that ideology might be.” There are only a few likely candidates.
Rahman may, of course, be a Muslim whose loyalties lay more with the umma, the global Islamic community, than with the United States, and that may have motivated this leak: he wanted to protect the Islamic Republic of Iran from a strike by the hated Zionists.
However, his full name is Asif William Rahman, and William is not a name that Muslims give to their children. While Asif Rahman is an Arabic name that Muslim Arabs or non-Arabs could have, the “William” suggests that he is a Christian Arab.
If he is, however, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t act out of sympathy for the umma and hatred for Israel. Many Christian Arabs identify wholeheartedly with the Islamic perspective on global affairs. Whether or not they are aware that they’re aligning with a jihad force that doesn’t respect them as equals and would subjugate them is another matter. When the dhimmi laws were enforced, Christians had to affirm the Islamic perspective on various matters, or else their lives would have been in peril.
Not long after the Ottoman Empire abolished the dhimma (the legal system mandating and enforcing the subjugation of the “people of the book,” that is, primarily Jews and Christians) in the mid-nineteenth century, the Arab nationalist movement arose. This movement attempted to establish common ground between Muslims and Christians on the basis of a shared Arab identity. In practice, this meant that the Christians would identify with the Muslims so completely as to adopt the Islamic political agenda as their own. This was because, for Muslims, Islam was always the heart of the Arab identity anyway. The pioneering Arab nationalist Michel Aflaq summed this up succinctly: “Arab nationalism is Islam.”
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By now, identification with Islam’s views, pet causes, and goals has become a cultural habit among many Christian Arabs. Asif Rahman could have been acting out of that mentality.
Another possibility, which in the final analysis may be more likely, is that he is simply a leftist who hates Israel because he identifies it as a colonialist oppressor of the “Palestinians.” There are hordes of such people on university campuses today; why not also in the CIA?
