I stole IDF documents to expose West Bank war crimes, Anat Kam says

[Scurrilous]

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"Classified documents reveal that the Israel Defense Forces had committed war crimes in the West Bank, Anat Kam, the former soldier indicted for espionage over an alleged theft of top secret material, told the court earlier in the year, according to police documents released allowed for publication Monday at the request of Haaretz.

In the newly released material documenting court hearings surrounding Kam's arrest, the journalist and former IDF soldier said that the motivation behind her removal of sensitive military material was to expose "certain aspects of the IDF's conduct in the West Bank that I thought were of interest to the public."

Kam added that her thinking behind taking the top secret papers was to ensure that "if and when the war crime the IDF was and is committing in the West Bank would be investigated, then I would have evidence to present."

Kam said that she didn?t think that transferring the documents would endanger the country, as she did not think "the journalist would focus on the details of the military actions, but rather on the principles and the policies that were behind the the top officers' decisions."

Kam also explained that she turned to Israeli journalists because she assumed that "the censorship would not allow the publication of information classified as top secret or that is dangerous for publication."

Referring to the possibility that she would be penalized for the theft, Kam said that when she "burned the material (onto a CD) I thought that in the test of history, people who warned of war crimes were forgiven."

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