Israel's Spy Was Right About Saddam
August 6, 1998 - Angelo M. Codevilla - The Wall Street JournalFormer naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard confessed to passing classified documents to Israel without authorization between 1981 and 1985. For this, he was rightly sent to prison for espionage. People who spy for allied countries and who spare the U.S. government the revelations of a trial usually get sentences averaging four years. What extraordinary things, then, must Pollard have done to draw a life sentence?
Prison sentences are supposed to be proportional to the harm done. The preface to the still-secret memorandum filed with the court by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger states that "it is difficult to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by [Pollard]." But while Pollard's espionage subverted US policy in the Middle East, it barely hurt Washington's intelligence operations. [...]
The difference between the pictures the U.S. government was giving to Israel and the ones that it was withholding lay not in sources or methods, but in the subject. Some senior officials of the U.S. government had decided that Israel should not have certain information about Iraq and other Arab countries because the officials did not like what Israel was doing with it. [...]
Some senior U.S. officials were angry at Israel for getting in the way of their Middle East policy. In 1981, shortly after Israel had bombed the Osirak reactor that had been the centerpiece of Saddam Hussein's nuclear weapons program, Deputy Central Intelligence Agency Director Bobby Ray Inman went to Capitol Hill to criticize the Israelis, who had used U.S. satellite pictures to plan the bombing. Mr. Inman said they had harmed sophisticated U.S. efforts to build an important relationship with Saddam. Therefore he personally had just cut Israel off from satellite information about Iraq and later began to send satellite pictures to Saddam.
Mr. Inman was acting on behalf of many of the principal makers of U.S. foreign policy, including Mr. Weinberger and later Secretary of State George Shultz, who during the 1980s sacrificed much for their vision of a fruitful relationship with Saddam. Mr.Inman reported to incredulous senators in 1982 that U.S.intelligence no longer supported the conclusion that Iraq was a major sponsor of terrorism. High-level officials dismissed concerns about Baghdad's purchase of a chemical facility that became the centerpiece of Iraq's chemical and biological weapons program and during the 1980s these officials provided Saddam with U.S. weapons and intelligence. These officials also knew about--and failed to hinder--the transfer of German technology to the Saad 16 missile factory in northern Iraq.
This policy, vigorously pursued by Washington until the very eve of the Gulf War, turned Iraq into a danger to mankind. This policy helped supply the technologies that killed U.S. soldiers in the Gulf War--the technologies for which inspectors now are searching fruitlessly and that may well kill other Americans in the future.
Pollard's sin is blowing the whistle on an embarrassing policy--a sin for which he is serving a life sentence instead of four years. [..]
In the U.S., the penalty for subverting policy is being fired. For espionage on behalf of allies,the usual penalty is four years. Pollard has more than paid his debt.
Source: Wall Street Journal clipping from www.jonathanpollard.org
Pollard's mistake and violation of his oath was done to take out the killer Saddam, or at least to protect our ally, Israel, from harm by that murderer and his murderers.
As President George Bush said to Ilan Ramon's widow and family, "We are going to finish the job" that Israel's heros started on that day they took out Saddam's nuclear bomb making reactor.
Former naval intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard confessed to passing classified documents to Israel without authorization between 1981 and 1985. For this, he was rightly sent to prison for espionage. People who spy for allied countries and who spare the U.S. government the revelations of a trial usually get sentences averaging four years. What extraordinary things, then, must Pollard have done to draw a life sentence?Alger Hiss was right about Hitler, but he was still a treasonous SOB.
"For your information, the Israelis used Pollard to obtain our attack plan against the U.S.S.R. all of it. The coordinates, the firing locations, the sequences. And for guess who? The Soviets."
-CIA Director Wiilam Casey.
-Eric