Posted on 03/20/2006 7:56:46 AM PST by SmithL
WASHINGTON -- The Supreme Court refused Monday to give Jonathan Pollard, now serving a life sentence for spying for Israel, access to records that could bolster his case for a presidential clemency.
Pollard's lawyers wanted the justices to reopen his case, so that they could pursue secret documents the government submitted to the judge who sentenced Pollard in 1987.
Pollard sold military secrets to Israel while he worked at the Defense Department's Pentagon headquarters. He was arrested in 1985 and pleaded guilty. The Supreme Court had already refused to let the former Navy intelligence analyst withdraw the guilty plea.
The latest Supreme Court case was not about spying, but about government authority to keep records used in court sealed from the public.
A federal appeals court said last summer that it had no authority to review requests for the documents which Pollard contends will help his bid for presidential clemency.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Obviously you're asking a non-trivial question... but there's one thing we do know for sure: Pollard did not take the information that Weinberger thought he had. Sabramerican also posted a relevant Weinberger quote.
What American blood?
Clinton handed out pardons to tax-cheats Mark Rich and his pal Pincus Green, after receivng pressure from then-Israeli-PM Ehud Barak----after efforts by ADL Abe----and after getting a letter expressing support for Rich from many Israeli officials, and from others around the world.
Then when the firestorm broke, when he got lacerated for the Rich pardon, Clinton whined that "Israel made me do it."
Welfare to Israel (as well as EVERY other country) should end as well.
My point is a simple one. You might think you are "just helping our allies" when in fact you are not. Spook101 stuff - but you apparently didn't get my point.
I have a hard time believing that the U.S. Secretary of Defense submitted a secret legal brief to the Federal court in the Pollard case based on what he "thought" Pollard had given to Israel.
And if Weinberger eventually concluded that this was all a mistake, then why was he never called as a witness for Pollard in any of these subsequent appeals?
Here's a nice review on Pollard, suprisingly good considering it
was put out by PBS's "American Experience":
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_pollard.html
My guess is that aside from the sheer volume of material he compromised,
Pollard is locked up for life...to keep him from blabbing on evening
TV about how he easily duped his bosses for so long.
Ah, I see. You mean that the Joos are the ones behind the WoT. All righty then. Have a nice day. Buh-bye.
I did; you're merely wrong. The reason the intelligence community came down on Pollard like a ton of bricks was their fury over Aldritch Ames getting Americans killed--except they didn't know it was Ames.
Believe what you want; the fact is that Weinburger knew someone has betrayed important intelligence to Russia, getting agents killed--but he didn't know that that was Aldritch Ames and Robert Hanssen. He thought it was Pollard.
Well, I'm not an Israeli.
That's why they are they.
The interesting thing isn't your choice of pronoun; it's that you clearly believe that the Israelis are manipulating the US to serve her interests by conducting the "war on terror". You lost me as soon as you decided to blame the Joos.
Once again, buh bye.
Uh, I think you're paranoid. When did I say anyone was manipulating anyone else?
I didn't "blame" anybody.
Settle down.
Do you think the Supreme Court always gets the law right, I'm wondering.
I'm also wondering if you can read. I said I agreed that Pollard (and spies generally) should be executed, but that that is not the law. Do you think the Supreme Court disagreed with my position here? My understanding is that Pollard entered into a plea agreement with the government in exchange for a ten year sentence, and this was about 20 years ago. Do you have other information?
ML/NJ
[i]Pollard should rot in prison....Israel SHOULD have apologized, we are NOT pure as the driven snow in the espionage arena and suggesting that we are is ridiculous...and those that see this as a "semitic" issue, are indeed "anti-semitic".[/i]
I do believe that Israel should have apologized, or somehow made some explanation but, as you say, the U.S. is not lily white in this arena either.
Israel is our ally. Why would the U.S. not share the information with the Israelis in the first place? I think that if Pollard seems unrepentant it's because he doesn't think he really did anything wrong.
[i]Now Pollard whined that he----and his ex-wife Anne who was in on the conspiracy----were altruists, motivated to spy by the purest intentions.
Yet, Pollard pocketed money, and the wife received expensive jewelry...[/i]
Come on! Even altruists need to eat. Just because someone was paid doesn't necessarily mean they weren't acting from good motives, and there would be darned few altruists around if you had to be poor to be one.
Why isn't this traitor fried so the taxpayer doesn't have to keep feeding him?
The pollard spying incident tends to bring out the Israeli firsters.....ignore them....just like the mods do.
Er... who makes that decision, under the MOU -- hint: it's wasn't Jonathan Pollard, exactly once.
You're lying. Try this, from Time: "one document Pollard is believed to have slipped to the Israelis -- thought to have landed in Soviet hands, albeit unintentionally -- was a huge National Security Agency compendium of frequencies used by foreign military and intelligence services. Gathering this information cost the U.S. billions of dollars, but Pollard rendered it useless."
How about this, from a pro-Pollard Jewish writer: "His guilt is not in doubt.... He checked 7 brief-cases of documents out of a a Pentagon library, brought them to a safe house to be photographed by his Israeli case officers and then returned them."
From further down in the above-cited Epstein document: "one target of Pollard espionage was the data that the US had obtained about Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capability."
Via Epstein, the prosecutor, DiGenova, speaks: "It is absolutely indefensible from either a legal or humanitarian standpoint to grant clemency to him".
A series of reports by Stephen Green in the Christian Science Monitor are not available without paying the CSM archive. Here's a sample of one.
SOON after Pollard's arrest in November 1985, his Defense Investigative Service and FBI interrogators became convinced that much if not most of the "take" in fact had nothing to do with Israel's essential national security interests. This worried the US government even more than the incredible amount of documents involved, approximately 850,O0O pages - or even the classification level, well over half of it was TOP SECRET or higher. The problem was essentially this, The Defense Investigative Service and the FBI knew from lists hidden in Pollard's desk that he had been very specifically tasked. That is, his Israeli handlers had developed intelligence requirements for particular documents, by name and number. Initially, this indicated the possibility of another agent - the infamous "Mr. X" - who was pointing the operation toward the documents Pollard was to steal. In a polygraph interrogation, however, Pollard confirmed what US defense officials already suspected: One of the first documents he'd been asked to take was a huge compendium of current classified military documents which is updated every three months. This lists and describes tens of thousands of documents - a virtual road map for Pollard's handlers. No need for Mr. X.The FBI's own investigation concluded that Pollard was not acting for profitSo what Pollard took was exactly what the Israelis wanted. But what did they want? The initial shock came when the FBI analyzed the 25 documents found in a suitcase Anne Pollard had removed from their apartment on her husband's instructions, after he was first questioned at the Pentagon. Many of them were classified TOP SECRET, and virtually all dealt with US weapons and military capabilities. The question "Is there a Mr. X?" had pretty well been answered. Now there was a new question: "Why do the Israelis want this stuff"
Senior defense officials and FBI counterespionage agents who have reviewed the Pollard debriefing transcripts confirm this is still a major focus of the investigation. The transcripts, together with computer records at the Defense Intelligence Agency (and within the agency, at the Defense Intelligence College), where Pollard gained access to many of the stolen documents, have subsequently revealed that much of the operation's take had nothing to do with the Middle East at all - it contained details of US and Soviet intelligence, communications and military capabilities. This included, according to the government's Memorandum in Aid of Sentencing, "details about US ship positions, aircraft stations, tactics, and training operations." Much of this material could have been of interest to only one country - the Soviet Union.
This concern was heightened when, during the Pollard investigation, a Soviet defector in US hands revealed that in addition to the two Soviet spies serving prison terms in Israel (Shabtai Kalmanovitch and Marcus Klingberg), there was a third who had not been caught. He was well placed in the Defense Ministry, and still "active." Quite possibly, secrets Pollard sent to Israel were passed on to Moscow, whether or not that had been intended.
That's a complete fabrication on your part, and you won't get away with it here. Pollard had shopped his access to two other foreign powers that he thought would pay him more, before trying the Israelis. Both turned him down, fearing a walk-in like Pollard would be a trap. This "great Jewish patriot" was actually a traitor to his own nation, and Israel was only his third choice!
His only motivation (Of course, since then, he and Anne have been made wealthy by the support of the Israeli government -- no doubt, to encourage other traitors still working against the USA).
In the sentencing memorandum at Pollard's trial, AUSA Leeper "said that Pollard was known to have received fifty thousand dollars in cash from his Israeli handlers and to have been told that thirty thousand more would be deposited annually in a foreign bank account. Pollard had made a commitment to spy for at least ten years, the memorandum alleged, and "stood to receive an additional five hundred and forty thousand dollars ($540,000) over the expected life of the conspiracy." source.
One more source, again from a generally pro-Israeli Jewish author, who concludes: "Pollard is no Jewish patriot. He is a traitor who sold out his country, and fellow intelligence officers, for money, then claimed he was being persecuted by anti-Semites.
Victim he is not. To the contrary, Pollard is a poster boy for anti-Semitism. His treason unfairly exposes all American Jews to hate, and accusations of doubtful loyalty.
Jonathan Pollard is a traitor of the worst kind - not a second Dreyfus - and should stay in prison."
I really can't add to that. A lot of well-meaning people have been misled by the lies and spin emanating from the Pollard camp. Once in crowbar motel, Pollard reinvented himself as this great Jew, ditched the goyische wife that he sucked into his spy world (she was serving her own sentence at the time), and married an Orthodox woman, Esther, who's now his conduit to his paymasters in Jerusalem. But when he went to prison, Pollard didn't stand for anything but Jonathan Pollard.
His case officers are gonna have to wait to see him in hell for that final debriefing that they want so badly. Cause he's going to die in prison.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F
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