Posted on 01/05/2014 9:39:03 PM PST by tedbel
I have chosen a provocative title for this article because nearing his fourth decade in prison for a crime all others similarly charged see freedom within four years, Jonathan Pollard is no more likely to be freed under Barak Obama than under George W. Bush before him or Bill Clinton before him. From today it seems no exaggeration that, barring a miracle, a young and idealistic American Jew who chose to spy for Israel will be forced to pay the ultimate price for his decision.
Jonathan Pollard had serious medical conditions at the time of his arrest in his twenties. He remains seriously ill in his fifties. And, as I suggested above, barring Divine Intervention or Israel agreeing to some extreme presidential demands bordering on extortion, Jonathan Pollard will die in prison.
Why Jonathan Pollard will die in prison
“The punishment imposed,” wrote Weinberger, “should reflect the perfidy of the individual’s actions, the magnitude of the treason committed...”
"As I say, the Pollard matter was comparatively minor. It was made far bigger than its actual importance." Pressed on why the case was made far bigger than its actual importance, Weinberger replied, "I don't know why-it just was." (Weinberger interview with Edwin Black, 2002)
I. The Legend begins
In a recent article appearing on-line Prof. Angelo Codevilla, a staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time Jonathan Pollard was arrested is quoted:
“Having been intimately acquainted with the materials that Pollard passed and with the sources and methods by which they were gathered, I would be willing to give expert testimony that Pollard is guilty of neither more nor less than what the indictment alleges.”
The allegation of “treason” which is represented as having influenced DC Circuit Judge Robinson to impose the life sentence was included in Weinberger’s unclassified “supplemental” memo:
(Excerpt) Read more at israpundit.com ...
Did they make war against the United States?
If so, it wasn’t much of a war, as I seem to have missed it.
There is a difference between bad policy and treason.
All you guys who are quacking about Snowden committing "treason": I just realized who you remind me of.
You remind me of the British loyalists in the American colonies and the extremists back in England in the 1770s who were always quacking about "treason" and "traitors" when it came to the men who acted to end the Despotism.
And so the Great Wheel has turned full circle again...
Woolsey and Clinton, rather famously, didn’t have a relationship. Woolsey never had a 1 on 1 meeting with Clinton throughout his tenure as CIA director.
You know, you are right, it isn’t treason. It is revealing classified information, which has felony penalty, but not treason unless making war, or supporting US enemies.
If he gave the information to ‘al Queda’, then it would count as treason.
Fanmously, national security was not a subject of Bill's interest...
Let's see: Eric Snowden hasn't levied War against the United States, nor has he adhered to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort - well, unless you consider the ordinary American peasant an Enemy of the United States (which I do)...
He just spilled the beans about extremely unconstitutional acts of aggression by the True Enemy (see above picture, wherein George Washington hath figured out who the real enemy is).
We're agreed. I shall step away from the cudgels, if you do the same.
Who is John Huang? ;-)
From there, several high-ranking officials sought to have Pollard dismissed but their efforts were stymied by bureaucracy. Meanwhile, Pollard was shuffled from one department to another where he exhibited increasingly bizarre behavior - such as attempting to vomit in order to invalidate a polygraph test.
Read the entire article, I'm not inclined to have much sympathy for his predicament.
“Arguably, every member of CONgress is a treasonous piece of dog dung.”
As is every American President since Reagan.
Your claim is NOT at all backed up by Woolsey’s writings and by those very strong supporters of Israel who know him and his writings (are you claiming Woolsey has changed his stripes?), See below:
ZOA Agrees With Former CIA Head James Woolsey – Israel’s Unilateral Concessions Have “Failed Utterly”
New York – The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) has strongly supported the analysis by R. James Woolsey, who served under President Clinton as Director of the CIA, that Israel’s policy of making unilateral concessions to its enemies has “failed utterly.” Mr. Woolsey is now a Distinguished Advisor at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a Trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a recent op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, Mr. Woolsey exposed the fallacies that underlie arguments for further, unilateral Israel concessions and the dire consequences of such concessions.
Excerpts from Mr. Woolsey’s article:
• “It is … widely assumed that Palestinian hostility to Israel is fueled by despair that can only be reduced by Israeli concessions … [this assumption is] fundamentally flawed. The approach Israel is preparing to take in the West Bank was tried in Gaza and has failed utterly. The Israeli withdrawal of last year has produced the worst set of results imaginable: a heavy presence by al Qaeda, Hezbollah and even some Iranian Revolutionary Guard units … Hamas assassination attempts against … Jordan’s ambassador; rocket and mortar attacks against nearby towns inside Israel; and a perceived vindication for Hamas, which took credit for the withdrawal. This latter almost certainly contributed substantially to Hamas’s victory in the Palestinian elections.”
• “Ariel Sharon repeatedly said he would not replay the Gaza retreat in the West Bank . With good reason: Creating a West Bank that looks like today’s Gaza would be many times the nightmare. How would one deal with continuing launches of rockets and mortars from the West Bank into virtually all of Israel? … A security barrier does no good against such bombardment. The experience in Gaza, further, has shown the difficulty of defending against such attacks after the IDF boots on the ground have departed. Effective, prompt retaliation from the air is hard to imagine if the mortar rounds and Katyushas are being launched, as they will be, from schools, hospitals and mosques.”
• “Israeli concessions will also make the U.S. look weak because it will be inferred that we have urged them, and will suggest that we are reverting to earlier behavior patterns — fleeing Lebanon in 1983, acquiescing in Saddam’s destruction of the Kurdish and Shiite rebels in 1991, fleeing Somalia in 1993, etc.”
• “Israel is not the only pro-Western country that would be threatened. How does moderate Jordan, with its Palestinian majority, survive if bordered by a West Bank terrorist state?”
• “Three major Israeli efforts at accommodation in the last 13 years have not worked. Oslo and the 1993 handshake in the Rose Garden between Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat produced only Arafat’s rejection in 2000 of Ehud Barak’s extremely generous settlement offer and the beginning of the Second Intifada. The Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000 has enhanced Hezbollah’s prestige and control there; and the withdrawal from Gaza has unleashed madness. These three accommodations have been based on the premise that only Israeli concessions can displace Palestinian despair. But it seems increasingly clear that the Palestinian cause is fueled by hatred and contempt.”
• “Israeli concessions indeed enhance Palestinian hope … a hope that they will actually be able to destroy Israel.”
• “The Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah-Hamas axis is quite explicit about a genocidal objective. When they speak of “ending Israeli occupation” they mean of Tel Aviv.”
• “Under these circumstances it is time to recognize that, sadly, the Israeli-Palestinian issue will likely not be the first matter settled in the decades-long war that radical Islam has declared on the U.S., Israel, the West and moderate Muslims — it will more likely be one of the last.”
• “… three failures in 13 years should permit us to evaluate the wisdom of further concessions” ( Wall Street Journal, May 23).
ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, “James Woolsey has pointed out many of the dangers and consequences of a policy of Israeli unilateral retreats, to which could also be added that since last year’s Gaza withdrawal, Palestinian bombings and attempted attacks have increased, from 48 in October last year to 277 in December. Smuggling of weaponry into Gaza has also increased by 300 percent, according to Yuval Diskin, the head of Israel’s security service, Shin Bet. As he put it in January, ‘If before the disengagement they smuggled in 200 to 300 rifles a month, they are now smuggling in close to 3,000.
“Woolsey is right to point out the dangers of further Israeli unilateral withdrawals for the US. As Caroline Glick, the Managing Editor of the Jerusalem Post, has observed, the Olmert plan will provide ‘a strategic victory to the forces of global jihad in a war they wage not only against Israel but against the US and the Western world as a whole because they will see Israel destroying itself under the gun of their terror and enabling the establishment of yet another base for global terrorists.’ Glick, in a major research piece for the highly respected Washington-based Center for Security Policy, has shown that implementing Olmert’s plan will endanger US military assets in Israel and Jordan and allow Iranian and Al-Qaeda forces to establish themselves in Judea and Samaria.
“It is also noteworthy that the distinguished Israeli journalist for Israel’s left-wing Haaretz newspaper, Ari Shavit, has written of the plan that, ‘It is not just the stability of Israel that Olmert is endangering. He is also endangering the regional stability. A Hamas state will accelerate Jordan’s collapse… Egypt will also be threatened… Olmert’s plan will be supporting not only anti-Israel terror, but also the anti-Western revolutionary movement. [Olmert’s] radical unilateral process will disrupt the American strategy in the area and will bury U.S. President George W. Bush’s dream of stability and democracy in the Middle East. … The history books will record Olmert’s unconditional withdrawal as the unconditional surrender of Zionism.’
“It needs to be widely known that Ariel Sharon stated that he was opposed to making any further unilateral withdrawals and that he intended making no concessions until the Palestinian fully complied with their Roadmap obligations to fight terror and end incitement to hatred and murder within the PA that feeds it. As he told Jewish leaders at Blair House in Washington D. C., on April 13, 2005, “No serious steps have been taken by [the PA to stop terrorism] and we can’t get to the Roadmap plan until the PA fully implements its obligations.”
“The ZOA concludes, as has former Israeli Defense Force (IDF) Chief-of-Staff, Moshe Yaalon that, in the absence of “any prospect for peace and reconciliation on the Palestinian side … Under no circumstances should [ Israel] surrender to terror. As long as they see our appeasement policy, they will continue.”
* * *
The Zionist Organization of America, founded in 1897, is the oldest pro-Israel organization in the United States. The ZOA works to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations, educates the American public and Congress about the dangers that Israel faces, and combats anti-Israel bias in the media and on college campuses. Its past presidents have included Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis and Rabbi Dr. Abba Hillel Silver.
As I said earlier when I was criticized for linking to Wiki, I included the Wiki article, because it included a wide amount of information about this unfortunate railroading a man who was doublecrossed by the prosecution, which explicitly promised a light sentence in exchange for a plea. This would be an injustice no matter what the religion of the person. Evidence was hidden from the defense. All in all the whole prosecution process should have been done again, given how botched it was.
I'll have to read the supporting information, but there's little doubt that American federal prosecutors have been nothing but a lawless bunch of thugs for many years now.
An example of this is that the Department of "Justice" REFUSES to go after JP Morgan, Bernie Madoff's bankers - even though there's clear evidence that they knew EXACTLY what was going on for MANY years.
JP Morgan had Madoff's bank records in hand, and knew that the account wasn't transferring funds to buy stocks.
When subpoenaed for the records, JP Morgan flipped off the regulator, and was backed up by the DeptJusticeThugs.
Why Did the Justice Department Kill the Madoff Subpoena Against JPMorgan?
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2013/12/why-did-the-justice-department-kill-the-madoff-subpoena-against-jpmorgan/
The only reason that the peasants follow the law is because the GovThugs have them outgunned...
There was a determination on the part of Casper Weinberger to go after Pollard not with law and precedent, but with some motivation about which we can only guess or speculate. How frightening it is if federal prosecutors are guided by motivations other than law and precedent.
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