Last December, a 23 year old woman by the name of Anat Kam, a journalist for Israel's popular internet portal "Walla!", was made to disappear by judicial order. That she was placed under house arrest was not unusual. What was is the fact that the very fact of her house arrest, or anything at all relating to the why and wherefors of the case, were placed under a sweeping gag order. Media in Israel were forbidden from even saying that there was a case with a gag order on it.

Kam is being charged with having copied sensitive documents from the office of the Israeli military's CentCom General, where she was serving as a forced conscript. We don't know exactly how many documents, but if rumors are true, at least two of them proved that the IDF was flouting Israel's high court's decision, which banned the practice of extrajudicial assassinations of suspected terrorists - at least when there was any kind of possibillity of arresting them. In the documents, IDF brass discusses how to dress up a "targeted killing" like an arrest attempt gone bad, and even specifying the maximum number of innocent bystanders the assassins may kill in the process.

This story was published in Israel's Haaretz daily, which means it cleared Israel's military censor. Despite this, a year after the story was published, Kam was arrested and placed in secret house arrest. The same day, journalist Uri Blau of Haaretz, who wrote the original news report and supposedly received the documents proving it from Kam, left the country. He is currently writing for Haaretz from London, while the paper negotiates his safe return with the authorities.

So to recap: We have a legitimate story, about top military brass acting in direct countervention of the explicit decision of the highest court in the land. The story was cleared by military censors for publication, and then the military-industrial complex turns around and begins persecuting the people involved in this vital public disclosure, while attempting to hide the very fact that they are so doing.

This is not the behavior of "The Only Democracy In The Middle East" [TM]. This is not the behavior of any democracy. This is the behavior of a military junta, circa 1985 in South America.

For three and a half months, this writer and others have respected the desperate pleas of Anat Kam, a brave young woman terrified of the consequences of her courage and looking at 14 years in prison, not to violate this ludicrous order. However, foreign media not being subject to the Israeli judiciary and its gag orders, the cat eventually got out of the bag ^{(speaking of gag, yes, that is Judith "Little Miss Run Amok" Miller, and yes, I did just link to Faux news...)}.

Israel's leading newspaper launched a campaign to mock and overturn the gag order, replete with instructions to its readers to google "Israeli journalist gag" so that they can learn from foreign media what their country is trying to hide, and when a well-known Israeli radio personality violated the gag order live on the air on Tuesday, April 6, even this writer decided that Kam's pleas aside, enough is enough.

So now the story's in the open, and that guarantees the trial won't be held in secret either, and that the state's attempt to keep this whole affair under wraps until it could expose it at its own convenience, painting Ms. Kam as some horrible threat to national security ike it has done with others in the past, such as Brigadier General Yitzhak Yaacov, who was portrayed as an enemy of the people and eventually given two years, suspended sentence - that won't work quite as well now.

The forces of military authoritarianism may yet get their revenge on Ms. Kam for revealing their dirty secrets, and the rest of us may be powerless to stop them (especially since the judge presiding in the case is a former Chief Military Prosecutor, who in that capacity once tried to cover up the murder of an 11 year-old Palestinian) - but they won't get to do it in secret.

(P.S. Newspaper and websites were informed this evening that the securitate and the prosecutor's office have withdrawn their objection to lifting the gag order and that the actual lifting is imminent. Nice of them to reconcile to reality.)