Posted on 05/21/2007 4:13:41 PM PDT by Nachum
(IsraelNN.com) Pollard supporters are enraged at US Ambassador to Israel Richard Jones for his remarks Monday morning, implying that Jonathan Pollard committed treason or sold US secrets to Israel.
Speaking at a conference at Bar Ilan University on Israeli-American relations, Jones said, "Pollard took money and sold out his country... The fact that he wasn't executed shows that he was treated mercifully."
"Malicious incitement against both Jonathan and Israel" is how an infuriated Esther Pollard, Jonathan's wife, described it.
"For one thing," she told Arutz-7, "the U.S. has no death penalty for the charge on which Jonathan was accused or convicted. It has a death penalty only for treason - and Jones knows that Jonathan was never accused of treason. It is merely because Israel seems to have abandoned its agent in the field that the American Ambassador feels he can get away with talking like this."
"And where is Israel?!" she asked. "How can it be that the US Ambassador says that an Israeli agent deserved to be executed, and Israel is silent?!"
Arutz-7 contacted the Foreign Ministry for its response, and was told that the matter would be checked. The Ministry later issued a statement to the effect that Ambassador Yoram Ben-Ze'ev, the head of the North American Division of the Foreign Ministry, had asked for a meeting with Jones, "in which Ben-Ze'ev reiterated the Ministry's well-known policy on Pollard." Asked to elaborate on the details of this policy, the Ministry spokesman told Arutz-7, "It is well-known."
Such a reaction did not mollify MK Uri Ariel, the head of the Knesset lobby for Pollard. MK Ariel demanded that Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni herself demand an immediate apology from Jones. "For spying for a friendly country," Ariel wrote to Livni, "no one has ever received a sentence even close to the sentence that Pollard has served thus far - 22 years! ... The remarks by Jones border on anti-Semitism and a hostile attitude towards Israel..."
"Israel was forced to employ Pollard as its agent," Ariel continued, "only because America betrayed our trust and hid critical information from us regarding chemical weapons and anti-Israeli terrorist plots in Arab nations, in blatant violation of agreements we had with the US which we kept in full... The fact that Israel does not demand his release even after 22 years is endangering an agent that Israel sent on a mission - and also paves the way for statements like those made by Jones."
Mrs. Pollard said, "The remarks by Ambassador Jones fly in the face of former CIA director James Woolsey's opinion that Jonathan should be released already. He is also contradicting former Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who said that the charges against him were inflated to begin with."
New Bumper Sticker Campaign
At the same time, a new grassroots campaign is underway to "express the nation's desire" to see Jonathan Pollard home - via bumper stickers. The organizers hope to "stick" 100,000 cars.
Eliana, a 19-year-old from Be'er Sheva doing a year of national service in Raanana, is one of the driving forces behind the new campaign. "It's only been about a week, and we estimate that some 5,000 cars already have the new sticker. We have been shocked at the amount of people calling in or emailing us, asking for the stickers. And it's not just high schoolers who have free time and can give them out at intersections - there have also been many office workers asking us for 50 or more that they can give out to their fellow employees. People really want Pollard home already!"
The campaign comes on the heels of reports that Pollard's health, long impaired, has deteriorated severely in recent weeks. He is simply "living on miracles," his wife summed up.
The bumper sticker campaign organizers explain that given the fact that the Israeli government shows no sign of taking any initiative to seek Pollard's release, "we ask: How can we express in the fastest, strongest, and most effective way, the will of the nation to free Jonathan Pollard?" Their answer was to "very quickly distribute and post 100,000 or more bumper stickers on cars throughout the country. With this many bumper stickers on cars traveling the length and breadth of the country, it will be impossible to ignore the message: We Want Pollard Home Now!"
A few years ago, Jesse Jackson got into a rut where everything that displeased him was a reminder of Selma.
This was the rumor. It’s not clear to me that either Clinton wanted this or Bibi for that matter. I’d certainly think that if pro-Pollard forces had decided to “leak” this information, Bibi wouldn’t have wanted to deal with a political backlash if he downplayed how important it was to him.
So, Pollard would not have to have been changed with treason to be subject to death, or have the sentences changed since then?
Apparently the deal is that after the death penalty was revived in the late 1970s, espionage convictions weren't just automtically subject to it in the way they'd been before. I found something showing James Trafficant trying to get it passed in 1989--probably in the wake of Pollard. It's definitely on the table today--here's the DOJ worksheet to decide.
Of course, the other problem with a treason charge is that what it is is very explicitly spelled out in the Constitution."Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." Did Pollard levy war against the US? Is Israel our enemy? The latter, at least, is a question that I can't see any administration wanting to get into.
I thought Denise jumped in the sack with Willie...
Right. For that reason, it would be almost impossible for Pollard to be charged with Treason and the only way is if they could argue that an enemy managed to get the information second-hand. Not only is that a stretch, but it’s hard to argue this because there wasn’t a state of war with virtually anyone at the time.
Come to think of it, I don’t know that any of the Soviet spies were charged with treason. A half-decent lawyer could easily argue that there was no state of war.
Jon Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst in the Navy, wanted to be a spy so badly that he even seemed to think he was a spy long before he actually was. As a college student at Stanford he boasted that he had contacts in the Israeli intelligence services and that his father was a CIA agent who worked in Prague. Both claims were false. He entered phoney education and employment information on job applications and mailed himself telegrams under aliases he made up for himself. Strangely, none of the odd details about Pollard’s personality were noted on his Navy background check report.
Pollard became a Navy analyst in 1979, after leaving a graduate program in law at Tufts University. Initially, he was given an unusually high level of security clearance, but it was revoked within a few months after Pollard made unauthorized and suspicious contact with an attaché from the South African Embassy. It is unclear what business Pollard had with the embassy official, and it was never investigated.
In 1984 Pollard was promoted to a position as an analyst in the Naval Criminal Investigation Service (NIS), and his security clearances were reinstated. He was placed in a new, high-priority unit, the Anti-Terrorism Alert Center, where he gained access to satellite photographs and CIA reports. At least three of Pollard’s acquaintances recall that within months of his assuming his new post he mailed them unsolicited collections of classified information for no apparent reason.
Shortly after he began working at the NIS Pollard met an Israeli intelligence officer in New York named Avi Sella, who was posing as a graduate student at New York University. Sella requested classified information from Pollard — any information he could deliver — and told him that he would be paid for whatever he could provide.
A few days later, Sella and Pollard met in Washington. Pollard provided detailed information on chemical warfare manufacturing plants in Iraq. For this initial transaction Pollard was given a $10,000 diamond and sapphire ring for his fiancée, Anne Henderson, and paid over $10,000 in cash. Sella also agreed to pay Pollard $1,500 a month for his espionage activities as long as they continued.
For about a year after the time Pollard met Avi Sella, he gathered computer printouts, satellite photographs, and classified documents from his department three times a week and brought them to various Washington apartments. There, they were copied and returned to Pollard, who restored them to the Navy the following day. In exchange for his services Pollard received, in addition to the agreed salary, a lavish collection of gifts for himself and his wife, including a honeymoon in a private compartment aboard the Orient Express.
By his own estimates Pollard passed to his Israeli handlers more than 800 classified publications and more than 1,000 cables, probably the largest cache of materials ever passed through espionage. At one point, when Pollard’s new wife was hoping to clinch a job interview at an international public relations firm with branches in China, he brought home five secret studies on China. Her presentation was assessed as brilliant.
Pollard was eventually captured on November 18, 1985, rather unceremoniously, walking out of his office with 60 top-secret documents in his briefcase. His supervisors had become suspicious of his voracious consumption of materials. Commenting not as much on the massive loss of classified documents to Israel and elsewhere but more on the extraordinary lack of security surrounding Pollard’s carefree espionage activities, then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger said, “It is difficult for me...to conceive of greater harm done to national security.”
Pollard pleaded guilty to espionage and was sentenced to prison for life. His wife served a five-year sentence for unauthorized possession of government documents. Upon her release, Anne Henderson Pollard divorced her husband. In 1993 Secretary of Defense Les Aspin reported that Pollard had tried 14 times to disclose classified information in letters written to various recipients from his prison cell.
Source: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/venona/dece_pollard.html
That's not true. We allow the death penalty for other crimes. Murder is the most obvious one.
It is merely because Israel seems to have abandoned its agent in the field that the American Ambassador feels he can get away with talking like this... And where is Israel?!" she asked. "How can it be that the US Ambassador says that an Israeli agent deserved to be executed, and Israel is silent?!"
If you don't understand the reactions of either side, maybe it's because your perspective is a bit off.
Thank you. He sounds like a real winner. /sarc
Oh, I don't think Clinton cared one way or the other. It was merely a bargaining chip to him. I think that Netanyahu had little power to ask much of anything in the end.
Very astute. I think that was very much the case on both sides.
Gee. Imagine that. You answer questions you write for yourself.
There's the spirit of inquiry that separates the sage from the chauvinist!
As to you, you are at best ajerk and a bully and I have had it with your invective, abusive language and cherry-picking.
Oh cry me a river, Petunia. If you wanted someone to powder your bum, you should have been hanging out at pampers.com.
You're the one twisting quotes and making false accusations: not me. Furthermore, you've made it excrutiatingly obvious your "research" is intended to do nothing more than confirm your own prejudices. Every single point you've raised on this thread is ostensibly refuted on Pollard's own website.
Now might not the entire site be some kind of disinformation apparatus? Sure, it might be, but you demonstrate that by disproving their contentions: not pretending they didn't answer you.
Even more damning in your case, you weren't even aware they answered you, so what was your "analysis" worth?
Actually, you never addressed the point that I was making, that the country for which one is supposed to be spying for is irrelevant in sentencing. There's no correlation at all. But that’s good lawyering, change the subject.
Forgive me for just being a cynical guy asking a few questions, not someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of the case. Of course, if I were carrying water for a loser like that, I’d be much more concerned with post #48.
Apparently you not only want someone to powder your bum, you want them to spoon feed you, too! Have you never heard of Google? Or are you scared you might have to follow more than one page of hits?
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that just like FreeRepublic is a clearinghouse for news items, a good place to find items the Pollard side thinks is relevant to the Pollard case is the Pollard site. Or could it be that lurking around that tiny mind of yours is the absurd notion that people who believe they are being mistreated should recuse themselves from providing information that tends to support that belief?
Actually, you never addressed the point that I was making, that the country for which one is supposed to be spying for is irrelevant in sentencing.
And you never addressed my point that if Bobby Ray Inman hadn't gone rogue there would have been no spying in the first place...so we're even.
Forgive me for just being a cynical guy asking a few questions...
I didn't jump into this thread because you were just asking a few questions. I jumped into this thread because you were giving analysis on an issue you don't know enough about to even have an opinion.
if I were carrying water for a loser like that, I’d be much more concerned with post #48.
And if I didn't know the PBS recounting of events won't stand up to even the minimum amount of scrutiny, I would be too.
No, that was just a distraction. And, according to post #48, Pollard was trying to give away any information he could, including the CIA cafeteria menu.
You're using an old debating tactic called "changing the subject and waiting a few millenia between posts.
Who are you, the Debate Fairy? Wave your magic wand and mitigating circumstances just disappear?
News Flash, sport...you don't get to define reality from your ivory tower. The fact you don't seem to know that makes me wonder if handling you with a butterfly net is more appropriate than a computer.
And, according to post #48, Pollard was trying to give away any information he could, including the CIA cafeteria menu.
I notice post #48 makes no mention of Pollard being arrested after he was turned away from the Israeli embassy, either. So what else do you think PBS might have missed?
You really should think twice before using them as a primary source.
You're using an old debating tactic called "changing the subject and waiting a few millenia between posts.
The only debating tactic I need is called "being informed." As I've alread said, it's excruciatingly obvious you'll only investigate a matter until you can support what you wanted to believe in the first place.
Instead of whining about me living a life instead of mopping the rhetorical floor with you, why don't you use that time to actually read some opposing viewpoints instead of hiding behind any flack that will tell you what you want to hear?
It’s a short article.
And yet, you’ve only picked at irrelevant points that PBS seemed to have left out, without addressing the points that are actually there.
Brevity being the soul of wit, I note that your posts themselves are getting longer.
I’m not trying to be witty...I’m also not trying to withdraw because I’m getting my rhetorical butt kicked.
Then why are you trying to withdraw?
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