November 23, 2011
Ex-soldier Anat Kamm enters prison for stealing classified documents
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Anat Kamm stands inside a courtroom in Tel Aviv District Court Oct. 30, 2011. Photo by REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Former Israeli soldier Anat Kamm, who turned classified military documents over to a reporter, entered jail to begin her 4 1/2-year sentence.
Kamm reported to the Neve Tirza prison in Ramle on Tuesday morning. The Israeli Supreme Court denied her appeal last week to delay the sentence until her appeal of its length was completed.
The sentence and 18-month probation meted out last month in Tel Aviv District Court was well below the 15 years requested by prosecutors. Her two-year house arrest will not be counted as time served.
Kamm was convicted in February of collecting, holding and passing on classified information without authorization. She had been charged originally with espionage, but the charge was dropped as part of a plea bargain. Kamm was arrested in late 2009 or early 2010.
Kamm admitted to stealing about 2,000 documents, hundreds identified as classified or top secret, which she downloaded on to two discs, while serving her mandatory military service in the Israeli army’s Central Command. She turned the information over to Haaretz reporter Uri Blau, who wrote stories based on the information that were approved by the military censor. The stories led to a search for Blau’s source
Following her military service, Kamm was a media reporter for Walla, an online news site that at the time was partly owned by Haaretz.
“I didn’t have the chance to change some of the things that I found important to change during my military service, and I thought that by exposing these [materials] I would make a change,” Kamm is quoted as saying in the police documents. “It was important for me to bring the IDF’s policy to public knowledge.”
