The source of my information is Former SecDef Caspar Weinberger. Who you got?
At the time of the incident Weinberger stated for the record, that in his opinion Pollard's treachery was the worst intelligence disaster the U.S. had ever experienced (up to that time, that was before Aldrich Aimes and the Walkers and Hanson--all of whom did their share right along with Pollard).
From a 1999 interview with "Middle East Quarterly":
MEQ: You have been quoted saying that Jonathan Pollard "should have been shot." Is this accurate?And if you do a search you'll find a hundred websites dedicated to "bringing Jonathan home" (by which they mean "to Israel"; kind of an odd thing, since he never lived there but is American. Like many here, his first allegiance was to Israel, not to his own nation. What do we call that?)Weinberger: Any traitor who did what he did should be shot.
MEQ: You describe him as a traitor.
Weinberger: I thought Pollard did a very great deal of damage to the United States. The Walkers and others also did a very great deal of damage. My views here have nothing to do with his religion or his beliefs or anything of that kind. [ILLBAY NOTE: That's because, just as I've experienced here on these threads, you are not allowed to criticize Israel even when they stab you in the back. If you do, you're "anti-Semitic," as Sec. Weinberger also learned. There are many here whose major allegiance is to Israel, FIRST. They simply won't admit it; they throw up the "anti-Semitism" chaff instead of answering the charge]. There are some lawyers who have been paid to say, "Yes, but it wasn't treason." But avoiding all the technical definitions, I would simply say that his paid spying caused us a very great deal of additional problems in a difficult situation.
I said everything I knew about Pollard at the request of the United States District Court. I gave the judge an affidavit that was classified because it went into great detail about the extent of the damage that was done and the number of lives of our people that were endangered. That covered a lot of sources and methods at the court's request. Others seem to have seen it and talk about it very freely; I don't. I'm sort of an anachronism because I still respect classified documents.
MEQ: You are saying that calling Pollard a "traitor" is in the general sense, not in a lawyerly sense.
Weinberger: Whatever it is, that is only the smallest kind of footnote, if anything. How you define it technically is not as important as the fact that he did tremendous damage to us; how you want to define it technically doesn't really make any difference.
MEQ: Some people have become quite fixated on the word "traitor."
Weinberger: The rule is, I don't talk about this matter at all. What I had to say, I said at the court's request in the classified affidavit. I have nothing else to say. It's the damage that he did that counts. It wasn't just Pollard—Aldrich Ames and the Walkers and others also did tremendous damage. They all should be punished.
So you figure it out, "pal." And may I say that I'm sick to death of you people who put Israel's interests before our own. You won't emigrate there, because you're too cowardly to live someplace where you might get hurt. But you have no problem with defending or at least downplaying the traitorous acts of a man who did, as Sec. Weinberger (not Illbay) said: "a great deal of damage to us, and endangered the lives of our people."
All so Israel could get a few Russian Jews out of the Soviet Union--MANY OF WHOM TURNED OUT NOT EVEN TO BE JEWS.
Never mind. You most certainly are not worth the trouble. You are not only clueless, you may very well be hopeless.
Friendly fire my ass. Israel knew damn well what they were doing. They were looking out for their national interest and if ours got in the way, so be it.
You neglected to mention that creep Pollard. Do you deny he was a traitor and that the Israelis traded our secrets to the Russians?