Posted on 12/27/2013 11:47:49 AM PST by cll
United States Secretary of State John Kerry has offered Israel the release of Jonathan Pollard, Channel 10 News reported on Friday.
According to the report, Kerry’s offer was made as part of the discussions surrounding the upcoming planned release of 26 terrorists from Israeli jails as a “gesture” to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
Kol Yisrael radio, which also reported about Kerry’s offer, said it relates to the fourth stage of the terrorist release and is conditional upon Israel agreeing to release Israeli Arabs who have committed acts of terrorism.
Israeli officials were quoted by both outlets as having said that they believe the idea has not been cleared with President Barack Obama and as such were doubtful that the offer would actually be implemented.
Pollard’s release has been tied in the past week with recent revelations by documents leaked by Edward Snowden that the United States conducted surveillance on Israeli leaders.
(Excerpt) Read more at israelnationalnews.com ...
Under this Obama regime, Treason is barely a misdemeanor, and certainly oh-so-chic.
For President Chaos, the more terrorists loose in the world, the better.....
Officially the reason we have not done this in the past is that it would destroy morale within the intelligence agencies.
Some combination of Ed Snowden leaks and having Obama as their boss has already taken care of that.
Let Pollard rot in prison.
I have no problem sending Pollard to Israel. In a box.
On the other hand, when they’re hanged, they stay hanged.
The deal for the release of the terrorists was already made earlier, in order to “get the negotiations going”. In fact there was a earlier release. So, this release was already “in the works” without anything to do with Pollard.
Why does Israel ALWAYS have to give 100 to 1, in every negotiation?
It’s about time that Pollard was released. Former CIA Director, James Woolsey, has been saying for years now (and very much in public) that there is no good reason to keep pollard and that he has done far more time than others who have done much, much worse.
Former CIA director renews call for Pollard’s release
http://www.jpost.com/International/Former-CIA-director-renews-call-for-Pollards-release-330831
Pollard passed classified information about enemy states to the Israeli government during the 1980s, and has been in jail serving a life sentence for espionage since 1985.
In a two-minute video, recorded on Monday at a conference in Manhattan in which Woolsey took part, Woolsey said: “If you look at other allies of the United States, such as South Korea and the Philippines, where we have caught spies, the sentence that they had has been light, not like Pollard’s; it’s been about six or seven years. What I said in The Wall Street Journal essentially was that if anybody is hung up over the fact that he’s an American Jew or that he’s Israeli, just pretend that he’s a South Korean and set him free.”
In response to a question from the cameraman about what may or may not have happened during the administration of former US president Bill Clinton, under whom Woolsey was CIA director, he said, “At the beginning… they asked us all – top-level people who dealt with defense and foreign policy, including me – and I opposed clemency at that point. He’d been in prison about seven or eight years, and I went through the material that he took, and it is very serious, it was very sensitive. So I did not support clemency that time around. But the next time it came up, several years later, I was asked what I thought, and what I said is essentially what I’ve said ever since.”
When asked what he would tell current US President Barack Obama, Woolsey said “I would say [to President Obama] what I said in The Wall Street Journal: If you’re hung up on this for any reason, pretend Pollard is a South Korean or Filipino-American or an ally from someplace else, and free him. He’s been in prison a long time now, and the only people who are in prison that long are people like [convicted CIA spy Aldrich] Ames and [convicted FBI spy Robert] Hanssen who got people killed, and Pollard didn’t do that.”
The Wall Street Journal piece to which Woolsey was referring was a letter to the editor Woolsey wrote that was published on July 4, 2012, in which he called for Pollard to be released. Woolsey wrote the letter in response to an opinion piece by Martin Peretz, the publisher of the New Republic, in which Peretz criticized top US officials for calling for Pollard’s release.
Calls To Free Spy Jonathan Pollard Grow Louder
http://www.npr.org/2013/03/20/174867727/calls-to-free-spy-jonathan-pollard-grow-louder
ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
Free Jonathan Pollard - that’s something President Obama is expected to hear in Israel. In the 1980s, Pollard was a young, Jewish-American intelligence analyst who spied for Israel. He pleaded guilty; and after an alarming victim-impact statement from then-Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger, claiming how much damage Pollard’s spying had done, he was sentenced to life in prison.
Calls for Pollard’s release are not new. What is new is how many Israelis and Americans have joined in the call, including people who used to oppose any leniency or early release for Jonathan Pollard. One such person joins us now. R. James Woolsey was director of Central Intelligence in the Clinton administration. He’s in New York, and joins us now. Welcome to the program.
R. JAMES WOOLSEY: Good to be with you.
SIEGEL: You opposed - or used to oppose Pollard’s release. What’s different now?
WOOLSEY: Passage of time. In - 20 years ago, when I’d just taken over as director of Central Intelligence in the Clinton administration, the White House asked several of us what we thought about clemency for Pollard. And I said I thought he had not been in prison long enough for the seriousness of what he had done. It had been about eight years, at that point.
But now, 20 years later, he’s been in prison solidly over a quarter of a century. And the only spies who are sentenced to - that way are basically, people like Ames and Hanssen, who got Americans killed and spied for an enemy. We’ve had several spies for friendly countries - we’ve had a Greek-American spy; we’ve had a Filipino-American spy; we had a South Korean-American spy - and they get sentenced to four to five years, six - seven, in one case - but not 28.
SIEGEL: Since prosecutors in the Pollard case claimed that he spied not just out of love of Israel, but for money; and that he was willing to sell things, they said, to Pakistan and to South Africa; does that put him in a different category from spies for friendly nations, and into the category of mercenaries who might have sold anything?
WOOLSEY: Well, most spies, there’s a mixture. Sometimes, the notion of allegiance is overriding and sometimes, money is; and sometimes, it’s a mixture. But whatever his motivation and however it mixed, Pollard didn’t end up getting - as far as I know - American agents killed the way Ames and Hanssen did, and the way people who’ve been sentenced to life in prison.
SIEGEL: We should say he was - Pollard was delivering classified documents by the valise load, every couple of weeks.
WOOLSEY: Yes, it was a lot of material. It was a serious spy case; there’s no doubt about that. I don’t mean to diminish that at all by saying that 28 years is enough.
SIEGEL: One thing that’s different about the Pollard case from either the Hanssen case or the Aldrich Ames case - or the other friendly nation spying cases - is, it relates to the special relationship between the U.S. and Israel. And for some American Jews, Jonathan Pollard was a poster child for everything that they do not want to be thought of the American Jewish community - that it tolerates dual loyalties, and doing things for Israel that are contrary to U.S. interests. You’ve encountered this argument, making the case...
WOOLSEY: Well, yes. Israel’s on the front lines and - whereas we’ve had a formal alliance with Greece since NATO was formed; we’ve had one with the Philippines for 60-some years, and with South Korea for 50, 60 years; formal alliances, and we don’t really have one of those with Israel. We just have a great deal of ties and close feeling, and strong sense of support. I really take the view now that if someone says he should not be released after 28 years, just pretend that he’s a Filipino-American or a Greek-American and pardon him. I see no reason why people should treat a Jewish-American who spied for Israel on those grounds, more harshly than they treat a Filipino-American who spied for the Philippines, or a South Korean-American who spied for South Korea.
SIEGEL: Mr. Woolsey, thank you very much for talking with us today.
WOOLSEY: Thank you.
SIEGEL: That’s R. James Woolsey, who is the former director of Central Intelligence in the Clinton administration. He was talking about the case of Jonathan Pollard.
They don’t have the death penalty in Israel. There was a death ordered a while back and that was for Eichmann when he was captured by Israel. That was in May 1962! There have been none since then. The religious community in Israel is strongly against it. So ... you won’t get that in Israel.
Because one Israeli life is worth hundreds or thousands of times more (or more) of each terrorist dirtbag life
Respectfully, while Pollard may have been a spy, he was a traitor.
They don’t have the death penalty in Israel. There was a death ordered a while back and that was for Eichmann when he was captured by Israel. That was in May 1962! There have been none since then. The religious community in Israel is strongly against it. So ... you won’t get that in Israel.
At least Israel often uses the information gained for the benefit of the US.
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