Pollard Seeking Appeal of Life Sentence

[LoneStarLiberal]

<http://www.cnn.com/2003/LAW/09/01/pollard/index.html>

First off, I really don't want this thread to degenerate into a name-calling contest like most of them seem to do on this board. It is my hope that we can constructively discuss the issues surrounding the Pollard case and whether or not he should be granted an appeal or be pardoned.

My belief is that a spy is a spy is a spy. If anything the fact that he was caught spying for a country that is usually America's staunchest friend necessitates the harsh sentence he received.

I do believe Pollard should be allowed to appeal his sentence, but only for symbolic purposes. He is a spy. He deserves to be imprisoned for his treason for a long, long time. Perhaps a life sentence is not necessary; I do believe a 99 year sentence is, though. I don't think it's necessary to call it life, but I do think it is necessary for him to serve the remainder of his life in prison.

The government of Israel is quite in the wrong to ask for his pardon. Unless they capture an American spy at a similar depth of penetration in their intelligence community and we could then swap as was practice between the Soviet Union and the West. But simply letting this traitor off the hook would be a monumentally bad decision by this administration or any other.

Thoughts?

[atreides1]

1. Israel Is Only A Friend, Sometimes

I agree, a spy is a spy. It does not matter who he was spying for, what matters is that his allegiance was to a foreign country and not
to the United States.

He therefore in my opinion should spend the rest of his life behind bars. The appeal of a sentence is something that all Americans are entitled to, but once the process is exhausted, as in the case of treason, it should be over.

Personally I don't believe that Israel is a "friend", in the true definition of the word. They, like the US have always, and will always
put their survival above all.

[Turbulence]

2. Pollard should not be allowed to be used as a barter tool!

It is that simple. The last country that should be spy in the US is Israel. Afterall they remain the superpower they are at US expense. How is it that they should function automonously to the degree that they would spy on the hand that feeds them. How exactly does that work?

[Devils Advocate NZ]

3. The Israeli government don't give a shit about Pollard.

The only reason they changed their tune in public is so as to placate other Jews around the world and in America who may be considering or actually commiting espionage on behalf of Israel.

Before he was caught Pollard tried to "defect" and was rebuffed. After he was caught Israel denied he was theirs, and it was only in 1995 (a decade later) that they admitted he was spying for them and granted him citizenship.

In my opinion, the Israelis don't want Pollard freed, they just have to make it seem that way otherwise no-one would spy for them. It could even be as simple as them not wanting to have to pay him enough money to start a new life in Israel, and even suspicion that they couldn't trust him either.

[bemildred]

4. That works for me.

[bloom]

5. I don't think all spying is the same -

"No one convicted of spying for a U.S. ally had ever been given a life sentence.

<snip>

Pollard's lawyers and supporters argue that the punishment far exceeds the crime...."

[mmm]

6. Israel is no friend of any country

that aside, this guy, like any spy caught by any country,
should rot in prison for the rest of his life.
a spy is a spy

[Gimel]

7. Pollard was an opportunist

I think he acted as a free-lance spy. He made a big mistake. That's why Israel has been slow to act advocate his freedom.

However, he has served more time than spies who were actually doing it as mercenaries. Pollard was doing it for Israel. Misguided altruism.

Probably his case serves as a warning to other would-be American Jews who might sell steal some interesting data to give to Israeli intelligence.

I wish he was free. Free Pollard Now!

[Tinoire]

8. Pollard will never be freed and should never be freed

Pollard got Americans KILLED and single-handedly did more damage to US intelligence than any other spy in history. This guy deliberately copied the entire massive 10 volume RASIN manual that detailed ALL our SIGINT operations and methods FOR another country that has had its share of under-handed dealings with countries against us.

Warning, shmarning... As a Jew you should be outraged that he not only betrayed secrets so sensitive that FEW have access to (and by the way, the manner in which he got his hands on all the manuals was down-right vile and cause enough for imprisonment) but that he betrayed EVERY SINGLE American Jew working in intelligence. It's people like him who add fuel to the claims that certain loyalties lie with the Israel and not with the US.

Next time someone talks about divided loyalties and it outrages you, remember Jonathan Pollard.

He will never be forgiven by the intelligence community and most Americans nor should he be forgiven by US Jews who that opportunist ran to for support after he betrayed them too.


--------------------------------------

<snip>

Washington feared that Israel could have traded the secret materials with other intelligence services. The information could have even ended up in Moscow, perhaps as a bargaining chip at a time when Israel was trying to free Soviet Jews. Numerous intelligence reports about Soviet missile systems, delivered by Pollard, exposed the way America analyzed Soviet weapons.

He transmitted regional surveillance data from the VQ-2 reconnaissance squadron in Spain, thereby enabling Israel to virtually track America's own intelligence capability in the Mediterranean and even over Israel itself. This was crucial in Israel's 1985 bombing of the Palestine Liberation Organization headquarters in Tunis, which depended upon Israeli F-15s evading both American and Arab listening posts over North Africa.

But all of this was dwarfed, according to a principal author of the Weinberger declaration, by photocopying for Israel the massive 10-volume RASIN manual. An acronym for Radio and Signal Intelligence, the precious RASIN manual is known as "the Bible," according to the intelligence officer. The RASIN manual details America's global listening profile, frequency-by-frequency, source-by-source, geographic slice by geographic slice. RASIN was, in effect, a complete roadmap to American signal intelligence

Some estimate the loss of the RASIN manual cost America billions of dollars and many years in completely restructuring America's worldwide eavesdropping operation. Though Pollard has sought to downplay the consequences to the United States of his actions, his crime was lasting and devastating to the U.S. intelligence community.

<snip>

But the Pollards tried to outsmart mercy. They decided to rally the American Jewish community and massage public opinion, hoping to create outside pressure on the judge and prosecutors to dispense a reduced sentence. Without the knowledge of his attorney, Pollard granted two exclusive prison interviews to Blitzer, the CNN journalist who was then Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post. In these interviews, Pollard presented himself as a highly motivated Jew determined to help Israel in the face of an intransigent American intelligence community that was endangering the Jewish state.

<snip>

http://www.jewishsf.com/bk020621/1a.shtml

[Gimel]

9. Where do you surmise

...that the Pollards got Americans killed? I don't see anything like that in the article you've posted. A lot of damage was also done by the American spy in Moscow: Aldrich Ames.

This case is post Pollard, but actually did put lives in danger.
http://www.crimelibrary.com/terrorists_spies/spies/ames/1.html?sect=23

According to reports, Ames claimed that Pollard put the spies at risk, the very ones Ames had exposed.
http://www.jonathanpollard.org/1994/031894.htm

[Tinoire]

11. Gimel- Read up

Read girl! Pollard will rot in jail and all the spin in the world won't free him. Pointing to his own web-links as proof is as ludicrous as it gets. Aldrich Ames didn't do 1/4 of the damage Pollard did! Not one fourth!

[Gimel]

12. Are you all that sure?

And please don't tell me that the web sites I posted are all Pollard sites. I posted the Pollard site to give the Pollard position. The site on Ames described the deaths that his activities caused, and did not blame Pollard. Nowhere is Pollard accused of causing more than financial damage and time, to redo the codes, which was probably long overdue anyway.

[Tinoire]

13. Financial damage and time? Bwahahaha!

Is that what Pollard's supporters are saying now? Like I said Gimel, read up. Ask yourself seriously why not even Clinton would release him.

While you're at it,

There was once a Jewish scientist of Yemeni background who was working on Israel's then-secret atomic bomb project. He merely released 20 or so photos of his work to a London newspaper:

The outraged Israelis kidnapped him back to Israel and he's been rotting away in jail ever since.

Mordechai Vanunu. Hero of Israeli progressives and progressives around the world.

... Now that's a man who should be freed and unlike Pollard, he wasn't spying for another country...

-------------

Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician, is serving an 18-year sentence in an Israeli prison for blowing the whistle on his government's secret nuclear weapons program. Captured by Israeli agents on September 30, 1986, he spent more than 11 1/2 years in solitary confinement. One of 11 children of Moroccan Jewish parents who emigrated to Israel in 1963, when he was aged 9, Vanunu served in the Israeli army and then went to work as a young man in the Dimona nuclear "research center" in the Negev Desert near his home at Beersheba. The facility harbored an underground plutonium separation plant operated in strictest secrecy. As the years went by he grew increasingly troubled about his work in the nuclear bomb program. In 1985, before leaving Dimona, he took extensive photographs inside the factory in order to document the truth for his countrymen and the entire world.

Traveling through Asia with the film in his backpack, Vanunu made his way to Sydney, Australia, where he found companionship in an Anglican church social justice community with whom he shared the story of his nuclear background. In Sydney he also converted to Christianity and was baptized in July, 1986. A British newspaper, the London Sunday Times, learned of his story and sent a reporter to Sydney to check it out. The newspaper then flew Vanunu to England, where his photos and facts were further checked by British scientists familiar with nuclear weapons. Vanunu's story, published October 5, 1986, gave the world its first authoritative confirmation that tiny Israel had become a major nuclear weapons power, with material for as many as 200 nuclear warheads of advanced design.

Israeli agents got early wind of Vanunu's intentions. Even before publication of the story they had lured him from Britain, abducted him in Italy, and dumped his drugged body onto an Israeli cargo vessel bound for Israel. In the following months he was charged with espionage and treason and convicted at a closed-door trial. All legal appeals have been exhausted.

For the first 11 1/2 years of his imprisonment Vanunu was held in solitary confinement, denied human contact except with his guards, a lawyer, a priest, and the occasional visits of his siblings. This treatment was condemned by Amnesty International as "cruel, inhuman, and degrading."

<snip>

FREE MORDECHAI VANUNU!>

[Gimel]

14. Vanunu is not Pollard

This thread is about Pollard. I have some contacts with an attorney in Chicago who works on this case.

I have known about Vanunu since the first news releases. Thanks all the same, but you're off topic.

[Jim Sagle]

16. So a spy for Israel did 4 times the damage as a spy for Russia?

Where are YOUR loyalties?

[cantwealljustgetalong]

24. Next time...

"Next time someone talks about divided loyalties and it outrages you, remember Jonathan Pollard."

Got it.
Remember Jonathan Pollard first...
And then tell them to kiss my ass...

[chapter32]

25. Kiss your ass?

For a person whose nature is not to agree with other comrades here, and who BTW is raging or on the verge of raging, there seems to be a lot of kissing going on tonight...

[cantwealljustgetalong]

26. good thing that you have no canards...

regarding your dual loyalties to deal with, eh?...

now that you mention it, the kiss thing is way too mild, so after the obligatory remembrance of Jonathan Pollard, I would say something more along the lines of:

Dayus e Madar Gaveh...be jahanam...cheshmet kur...zabunet maar-o aqrab begaze...baabaat be kunet...bemir taa kasi namorde...ridam be gur-e pedaret...Jadh Bodet Dozde...

[chapter32]

28. Beautifully expressed,

Thanks for the lovely words.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

31. not applicable to you of course...

kheili ba hali...
(since you have not expressed the dual loyalty canard as in post # 8...)

[SOS]

17. The last time this issue came up

George Tenet said he would resign immediately as CIA director if Pollard was freed. Freeing Pollard would cause a serious revolt in the American intelligence community. That's something the idiot Bush can't afford right now. Pollard is not going anywhere.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

19. George Tenet...

"George Tenet said he would resign immediately as CIA director if Pollard was freed."...

there you have it - the best reason to free Pollard...

[Darranar]

20. LOL...

but I assume you get the point?

[cantwealljustgetalong]

29. here is the point I get...

anyone that believes anything that George Tenet (CIA overlord before, during, and after 9/11), or Caspar Weinberger (pardoned, by G.BUSH SR., felon for perjury and obstruction of justice - Iran Contra), have to say, must have just fallen off the turnip truck...

[SOS]

30. Your points make no

relevant connection to a simple fact. If Pollard is freed, the CIA and other intelligence service leaders will resign in protest. Only one point was made, that Tenet would resign if Pollard is freed and Shrub can't afford the CIA Dir. resigning in protest over an Israeli spy.
As far as believing "anything" Tenet says, your point is irreleveant.
Believing what Weinberger says may or may not qualify someone as a hayseed, but please keep in mind that Weinberger resigned 16 years ago.

[cantwealljustgetalong]

33. well, now that I know that there is one and only one point here...

and it must be limited to the simple fact that Pollard won't be freed, I not only get that point, I also agree with it...

I am just not as agreeable to the rest of the conventional wisdom, and, speaking of irrelevant points, how many years ago Weinberger resigned, is definitely one of them...

[Gimel]

10. Humanitarian assistance

Israel has provided humanitarian assistance to many countries, including the US (the LA earthquake). I don't know how you define "friend" but some arrogant US actions make the "friendship" with Israel doubtful.

[Violet_Crumble]

32. There's nothing unusual about that...

Australia provides assistance to the US when it deals with some of the big forest or bush or wild or whatever they call fires over there. And they'll send firefighters here at times when there's a really bad bushfire season...

I'm not really sure how yr defining "friend", but I hope it's not meant to mean that any country that dares to criticise Israel's actions in the Occupied Territories isn't a friend. Personally, I'd be much more inclined to say that the US is no friend of any country, rather than Israel, which does have cordial relations with some countries that I can't imagine would get too strained even if there was more criticism than there is...

Violet...

[rini]

15. I don't

know all the details of the case but I agree, a spy, is a spy, is a spy. My only question is; is his sentence comparable to say Hanson, or others who have been directly responsible for Americans dying? If not why not? If so, let it stand.

[Name removed]

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[Name removed]

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[rini]

23. I looked him up

First, yes he was a spy and the 20 years he spent in jail is about right.
Second: he was not the one who is responsible for Americans dying, that was Hanson and Ames.
3rd. this sentence of life is too harsh for the crime, the real reason he is in jail is he sold (yes sold, let's not make a hero out of him) to Israel the proof that the US was funneling money to Bin Ladin through the Saudis.

His sentence is not commensorate with others spys who sold secrets to allies.

[Gimel]

27. Thanks Rini

good research and nice post.