Posted on 05/23/2003 8:58:26 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
When American intelligence broke the Soviet wartime code, we learned that the Soviets had infiltrated the American government. The American intelligence community’s penchant for secrecy and its refusal to admit that it had been infiltrated was so great that it failed to disclose this to President Harry S. Truman. This is how Daniel Patrick Moynihan described it:"The Soviets knew we knew they knew we knew. The only one who didn’t know was the President of the United States. Our politics was injured for 30 years by this."—Quoted in the New York Times, March 30, 2002
here is a good reason why neither Congress nor the American Jewish leadership supports the release of Jonathan Pollard from prison: They all were told a lie—a humongous Washington whopper of a lie. The lie was first whispered in the "bubble," the secret intelligence briefing room on Capitol Hill, but it quickly spread.
Just before Pollard’s sentencing, Senator Chic Hecht of Nevada, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, telephoned the leaders of every major Jewish organization to warn them not to support Pollard in any way. Pollard had done something so horrible that it could never be made public. Several senior intelligence sources confirmed the message: No matter how harsh the sentence, Jewish leaders had to keep their mouths shut; don’t make a martyr out of Jonathan Pollard.
Washington insiders thought they knew the big, dark secret. David Luchins, an aide to Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, announced to reporters that he had seen "secret documents confirming that Pollard’s spying had resulted in the loss of lives of U.S. intelligence agents." Luchins later recanted his statement, but not until the damage had already been done.
Pollard had supposedly given Israel a list of every American spy inside the Soviet Union. On several occasions Soviet agents in New York had posed as Israelis. The CIA reasoned that that was also true in Israel: The Mossad had been infiltrated by one or more Soviet spies. In the trade this is called a "false flag" operation: Your enemy poses as your ally and steals your secrets. In this case, the CIA reasoned in attempting to explain its horrendous losses, Pollard had passed the information to Israel he had stolen, which in turn fell victim to the "false flag" operation. Soviet agents in Israel, posing as Israeli intelligence agents, passed the information to Moscow, which then wiped out American human assets in the Soviet Union.
Pollard hadn’t meant for this to happen, but the result of the "false flag" mistake was mass murder. In a matter of months, every spy we had in Russia—more than 40 agents—had been captured or killed. At least that was the accusation, but the basis for it had been kept secret from Pollard and his defense counsel.
The public could not be told the horrifying truth: American intelligence had gone blind behind the Iron Curtain—we had lost all our networks, as the intelligence community publicly admitted more than a decade later. The Soviets could have attacked the United States without warning. Everyone who knew at the time (including me) blamed Pollard.
On March 5, 1987, at 2:22 p.m., the sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., began in Criminal Case No. 86-207, United States of America v. Jonathan Jay Pollard. The prosecutors produced a secret letter and memo from Secretary of Defense Caspar "Cap" Weinberger referring to the "enormous" harm that Pollard had done to our national security. In his memo, Weinberger directly accused Pollard of betraying America’s "sources and methods," which is to say, he had betrayed our spies in foreign countries.
Weinberger publicly stated that Pollard was the worst spy in American history: "It is difficult for me, even in the so-called year of the spy, to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant." Despite his plea agreement to the contrary with the government, Pollard was given the maximum sentence, life in prison. Weinberger later said that he wished Pollard had been shot.
A week after the sentencing, the Washington Times reported that the United States had identified Shabtai Kalmanovich as the Soviet spy in Israel who supposedly worked for the Mossad but was actually working for the KGB; he had betrayed American secrets to Moscow. Kalmanovich had been flying under a false flag. Washington insiders winked knowingly at one another: Pollard’s contact in Israel had been caught.
Just to make sure that Pollard was blamed, U.S. intelligence sources, several months later, leaked word to the press of the Kalmanovich connection. "A Russian mole has infiltrated the Mossad and is transmitting highly sensitive American intelligence information to the Russians," was the report flashed around the world by United Press International on Dec. 14, 1987. Citing "American intelligence sources," the UPI announced that the "sensitive intelligence material relayed to Israel by Jonathan Pollard had reached the KGB."
But it was all untrue. Every bit of it. Pollard wasn’t the serial killer. The Jew didn’t do it. It was one of their own WASPs—Aldrich Ames, a drunken senior CIA official who sold the names of America’s agents to the Russians for cash. Pollard was framed for Ames’s crime, while Ames kept on drinking and spying for the Soviets for several more years. In fact, Israeli intelligence later suspected that Ames played a direct role in framing Pollard. But no one in America then knew the truth.
Ames was arrested in February 1994, and confessed to selling out American agents in the Soviet Union, but not all of them. It was only logical to assume that Pollard had betrayed the rest of them, as one former CIA official admitted shortly after Ames’s arrest. Even one life lost was too many. So Pollard continued to rot in jail. No one dreamed that yet another high-level Washington insider had sold us out to Soviet intelligence. Years passed, and eventually a Russian defector told the truth. A senior FBI official—Special Agent Robert Hanssen—had betrayed the rest of our agents. Hanssen was arrested in February 2001, and soon confessed in order to avoid the death penalty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
Would the Americans now admit that they had been conned into blaming Pollard? Beltway bureaucrats do not readily admit to mistakes of this magnitude. Instead, they convinced themselves that Pollard might still be at least partly to blame for the worst debacle in U.S. intelligence history. One desperate analyst from the National Security Council, looking for something to pin on Pollard, had his own theory. Maybe the Russians didn’t initially believe that their own spies (Ames and Hanssen) had procured all the names of U.S. agents in the Soviet Union. Maybe Pollard’s list tipped the scales.
Such things had happened before. Once again, Washington insiders circled their alphabet agencies to fire back at the critics who dared to suggest that Pollard might have been innocent of the major charge against him.
Meanwhile, deep inside the Navy’s intelligence service, a low-level decision was made to re-examine the Pollard case in view of the convictions of Ames and Hanssen. With sickening chagrin, the Navy discovered that the evidence needed to clear Pollard had been under its nose all along.
As my source in Naval intelligence explained, the list of our secret agents inside Russia had been kept in a special safe in a special room with a special "blue stripe" clearance needed for access. When I was a lawyer in the Justice Department and would be sent over to the CIA to do research, I was permitted to use only a blue-striped, CIA-issue legal pad for note-taking. Nothing with a blue stripe could leave the building without being scrutinized by CIA security.
But Jonathan Pollard didn’t have "blue stripe" clearance, according to intelligence sources I spoke with. That was the bombshell that would clear him of any possible connection to the deaths of our Russian agents. [Emphasis added]
Just to make sure, I checked it out, even visiting Pollard in prison to confirm it. Sure enough, there is no way on earth Jonathan Pollard could have entered the file room, let alone the safe where the list was kept.
But the intelligence community’s failure to catch this and thereby discredit a critical piece of prosecutorial evidence was, to put it mildly, a bit of an oversight. Some would say it was an obscene blunder. I regard it as an understandable mistake that was overlooked in the avalanche of phony evidence the KGB was planting that pointed to Pollard and away from Ames and Hanssen, whom the Soviets wanted to protect. Both of them had "blue stripe" clearance, as was well documented in several books that have been written on each man and his exploits.
The lack of "blue stripe" clearance was the final proof that Pollard could not possibly have betrayed our Russian agents. It should certainly have gotten him a new hearing. As a former federal prosecutor, I can state that it would be hard to rebut this kind of evidence. [Emphasis added]
The Justice Department, in one of its briefs, had specifically mentioned the "false flag" theory as grounds to support Pollard’s heavy sentence, arguing in part, that spying even for friendly countries can be damaging if information ultimately falls into the wrong hands. In this, the Justice Department had unwittingly misled the judge. Weinberger also raised the "false flag" issue in his top-secret memorandum to the judge.
The only possible way to uphold the sentence might be the "harmless error" doctrine. The government could admit that Pollard had never stolen the Russian agent list, but so what? Maybe he had passed other information that was equally damaging, so he would still deserve to remain in prison for the rest of his life.
The problem with the "harmless error" strategy is that the rest of the material that Pollard gave the Israelis was itself pretty harmless.
In fact, the original damage assessment from the intelligence community confirmed that the impact on our national security—of the release of information other than the agent names—was not serious. This assessment came after Pollard’s initial grand jury appearance, but before the Soviets began to frame Pollard with the phony Kalmanovich connection. No less a figure than Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Leeper had characterized damage caused by the release of the information that Pollard actually gave Israel as "minimal."
The reason America suffered so little harm is simple: Pollard was stealing Soviet secrets for Israel, not American secrets for the Soviets. Before the fall of communism, the Soviets were shipping guns to nearly every terrorist group in the Middle East. Pollard knew that U.S. intelligence had been ordered to share this information with Israel—under an executive order signed by President Reagan—but had not done so. [Emphasis added]
In fact, as Pollard himself admitted in one of my three prison interviews, many, if not most, of the documents he handed over were cover sheets showing the titles of files that the U.S. was supposed to share with Israel, but were holding back. (The U.S government, according to Israeli intelligence sources, mistakenly counted the cover sheets as if they were full files and came up with the mythical "room full of stolen documents," instead of the small boxfulls or so that Pollard actually passed.) In the long run, though, the issue is not how many boxes Pollard passed, but whether anything he gave Israel did harm to America.
After the government’s "false flag" theory was blown up by the "blue stripe" discovery, the anti-Pollard members of the intelligence community had to come up with a new PR campaign for damage control. In order to justify Pollard’s life sentence, they had to show that he did do some potentially catastrophic damage to America. What they came up with was a bit of a stretch. Pollard had given Israel a set of radio frequency guidebooks, a worldwide listing of short-wave radio bands. It takes a lot of time and money to compile one of these guides, but essentially they are just publicly available information, openly deduced by listening to who is talking to whom on which radio bands.
Seymour Hersh is a famous reporter and long-time friend. (I was his secret source in his 1983 book The Price of Power—Kissinger in Nixon’s White House (Summit Books). But Sy had his leg pulled on Pollard by his CIA sources, as a result of which Sy published a story in the New Yorker in January 1999 claiming that these radio guides were just about the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence. The truth is that certain portions of the guide had already been sold to the Soviets by the Walker spy ring, according to courtroom testimony, which also revealed that the Soviets thought so little of the guides’ value that they did not even bother to ask their top spies, Ames and Hanssen, to steal the remainder of the set. Moreover, as previously noted, the government’s own damage assessment report originally concluded that the loss of the guides was a minor matter.
So much for the crown jewels. If that is the best spin the intelligence community can come up with, Pollard is probably entitled to immediate release for time served. The truth is that without the "false flag" theory, and the accompanying "worst spy in history" hysteria, Pollard would probably have been served no more than five years in prison. He has already served 18 years.
After 9/11, though, I began to realize that Pollard’s tale was only the beginning of a much bigger story about a major America intelligence scandal, which is the subject of a book I am now working on. Although Jonathan Pollard did not realize it, he had stumbled across the darkest secret in the Reagan administration’s closet. It is one of the reasons that I am serving as the intelligence advisor on a trillion-dollar federal lawsuit filed in August 2002 against the Saudis on behalf of the victims of 9/11.
Pollard in fact did steal something that the U.S. government never wishes to talk about. Several friends inside military intelligence have told me that Pollard gave the Israelis a roster that listed the identities of all the Saudi and other Arab intelligence agents we knew about as of 1984. (This has been corroborated by Israeli sources, as well.) At that time, this list, known in intelligence circles as the "blue book," would have been relatively unimportant to the United States—but not to Israel.
Since 9/11, however, Pollard’s "blue book" is of profound interest to everyone, including the U.S. These particular agents are now a major embarrassment to the Saudis and to the handful of American spy chiefs who had employed these Saudi intelligence agents on the sly. Some of the names on this list—such as Osama Bin Laden—turned out to be leaders of terrorist groups, including the Muslim Brotherhood and what we now call Al Qaeda.
In hindsight, we now know that Pollard stole the one book—that, incidentally, was alluded to in Weinberger’s secret memorandum—that unquestionably proves that the Americans knew as early as 1984 about the connection between the Saudis and terrorist groups. [Emphasis added]
How does this all fit together? During the Reagan-Bush administrations, the National Security Council wanted to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan using Arab soldiers instead of American. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but no one thought about the long-term consequences. In imitation of the Soviet strategy of hiring terrorists, we asked the Saudis to recruit a proxy army of Islamic terrorists whom we would supply with guns and pay indirectly, according to intelligence sources. By having the Saudis hire the "freedom fighters," we could avoid embarrassing questions in Congress about giving the taxpayers money to known Arab terrorists.
In 1982, I went on "60 Minutes" to expose Nazi war criminals I had been assigned to prosecute who were then working for the CIA. It was one of those Cold War blunders. The CIA didn’t have a clue it was dealing with Nazi war criminals. It thought they were "freedom ighters." In 1985, I ended up testifying before the U.S. House Judiciary Committee about Nazis on the intelligence payroll.
Sadly, the only lesson the intelligence bosses learned was to put the bad guys on someone else’s payroll (the Saudis for one), and then reimburse them under the table. Because of my whistle-blowing during the early 1980s, the CIA was still pretty sensitive about hiring Nazi "freedom fighters" without background checks, so they were mostly kept out of the loop about the Arab terrorists hired clandestinely by the Saudis to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The Soviets pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989. The naive Americans walked away from the Frankenstein monster they had created, but the cynical Saudis kept the terrorists on the payroll. From the Saudi perspective, it was safer to keep paying the terrorists groups to attack Israel, Bosnia or Chechnya rather than letting them all back into Saudi Arabia. As one U.S. intelligence bureaucrat cynically confided to me, "Sure we knew that the Saudis were giving money to terrorist groups, but they were only killing Jews, they weren’t killing Americans."
In this "Keystone Cops" affair, one wing of U.S. intelligence was hunting terrorists while another winked at the Saudis’ recruitment of them. I have spoken to numerous FBI and CIA counter-terrorist agents, all of whom tell a similar story. Whenever the FBI or CIA came close to uncovering the Saudi terrorist connection, their investigations were mysteriously terminated. In hindsight, I can only conclude that some of our own Washington bureaucrats have been protecting the Al Qaeda leadership and their oil-rich Saudi backers from investigation for more than a decade.
I am not the only one to reach this conclusion. In his autobiography, Oliver North confirmed that every time he wanted to do something about terrorism, Weinberger stopped him because it might upset the Saudis and jeopardize the flow of oil to the U.S. John O’Neill, a former FBI agent and our nation’s top Al Qaeda expert, stated in a 2001 book written by Jean Charles Brisard, a noted French intelligence analyst, that everything we wanted to know about terrorism could be found in Saudi Arabia. [Emphasis added]
O’Neill warned the Beltway bosses repeatedly that if the Saudis were to continue funding Al Qaeda, it would end up costing American lives, according to several intelligence sources. As long as the oil kept flowing, they just shrugged. Outraged by the Saudi cover-up, O’Neill quit the FBI and became the new chief of security at the World Trade Center. In a bitter irony, the man who could have exposed his bosses’ continuous cover-up of the Saudi-Al Qaeda link was himself killed by Al Qaeda on 9/11.
Congress has been told repeatedly that American intelligence never knew the identities of the Arabs who threw the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Inadvertently, Pollard stole the ultimate smoking gun that shows exactly what the leaders of our intelligence community knew and when they knew it [emphasis added]. The "blue book" Pollard stole flatly establishes that all the dots were connected many years before 9/11, and the only thing the intelligence chiefs did competently was cover up the fact that we had long known about the Saudi-terrorist link.
In the ultimate irony, Pollard may have to be let out of prison to testify before Congress about the negligence of his own superiors. Like O’Neill, Pollard had tried to warn his superiors that a wave of terrorism was coming out of the Middle East, but no one would listen. Pollard himself told me this. Pollard has admitted—to me and in writing to President Clinton—that he was wrong and stupid in passing the information to Israel on his own, but in the long run he may have committed the most unpardonable sin of all: He was right and the bureaucrats were wrong. [Emphasis added]
Pollard never thought he was betraying his country. And he never did, although he clearly violated its laws. He just wanted to help protect Israelis and Americans from terrorists. Now in prison for nearly two decades, Pollard, who is in his late 40s, grows more ill year by year. If, as seems likely, American bureaucrats choose to fight a prolonged delaying action over a new hearing, Pollard will probably die in prison. There are people in power inside the Beltway who have been playing for time. Time for them ran out on 9/11. Sooner or later, they are going to be held accountable. I hope that Pollard lives to see it.
Pollard was a spy. He should have been hung.
...find a conspiracy in a supermarkert barcode.
Hmmm, I thought it was the mark of the beast (666) secreted in barcodes.
Fact 2 - He betrayed information in his keeping. This is not conjecture, it is proven.
Fact 3 - He was sentenced in accordance with Fact 1.
I am sorry that his actions and their outcome has given his friends and supporters pain, but the bottom line is that there is absolutely nothing disproportionate or inappropriate in what is happening to him. If others have been sentenced to less that is irrelevant. If others have given information to different people that is irrelevant.
The lack of "blue stripe" clearance was the final proof that Pollard could not possibly have betrayed our Russian agents.
It is nothing of the sort. That is like saying that lack of a driver's license is "final proof" that somebody accused of speeding couldn't have done it.
It was however President Reagan's decision to make, regardless of wether Pollard's supperiors were obeying their orders. Or do CIA agents get to disregard Presidential orders?
Pollard knew that U.S. intelligence had been ordered to share this information with Israel—under an executive order signed by President Reagan—but had not done so.
Some of us care about our country and our biases in favor of Israel do not cloud our judgement when it comes to traitors.
That puzzles me as well. I'd be inclined to keep my eye on those people or groups who are sticking up for this guy. What exactly is their motivation to keep raising the issue that he should be released? I can certainly understand why the Israelis feel that way, but when an American does it I have to wonder why all the sympathy for this guy. He should just be thankfull that he wasn't given the death penalty.
The only thing I can concieve of that might free him is some sort of deal with Israel that is so important that he becomes a bargaining chip in it. This has been tried by other Israeli leaders but has up to this point failed.
You are of course taking Pollard's word for it that those were the only documents that he handed over. A traitor is not someone who I would generally trust.
If this statement is in fact true, then I suppose that it would constitute mitigating circumstances at the sentencing phase of his case. But the fact that the presiding Judge was provided with classified information in rendering his discision satisfies me that justice was done in this case.
It does need to be specifically addressed. However that statement was made in 1985, well before the discovery of Ames and Hanssen's activities. It needs to be examined in the light of those activities. Additionally you left off the next paragraph.
In subsequent interviews, former C.I.A. colleagues of Casey's were unable to advance his categorical assertion significantly. Duane Clarridge, then in charge of clandestine operations in Europe, recalled that the C.I.A. director had told him that the Pollard material "goes beyond just the receipt in Israel of this stuff." But Casey, who had many close ties to the Israeli intelligence community, hadn't told Clarridge how he knew what he knew. Robert Gates, who became deputy C.I.A. director in April, 1986, told me that Casey had never indicated to him that he had specific information about the Pollard material arriving in Moscow. "The notion that the Russians may have gotten some of the stuff has always been a viewpoint," Gates said, but not through the bartering of emigres. "The only view I heard expressed was that it was through intelligence operations" -- the K.G.B.
And those intelligence operations could very well have included Hannsen, Ames or others.
That said, Pollard does come off as a nutcase who the Navy should never have given security clearances to. But it does seem that some of the information upon which his sentencing was bases may have been false and his sentence should be re-examined on that basis. Perhaps a transfer from prison to a facility more in tune with his nutcase nature?
That is true, in that statement I was assuming that only that information was handed over. That is the thrust of the article, and the thing that needs to be known before any change to Pollard's sentence should be made. It's clear that at least some of the information upon which the sentence was based is now known to be incorrect, how much of the rest was also incorrect is unknown, and unknowable unless it is declassified since we don't even know what it all was. Was it just the agents stuff, was it the "attack plan" stuff? What else? Is there really information that shows he turned over anything besides that on the Soviets and Arabs? We just don't know. Even if everything in this article is correct, he still violated security and should be punished, but how much is the question. It's clearly not Treason, as some have stated, if the information was not provided to "enemies of the United States", as that is the Constitutional definition of treason.
I meant violated in a ethical rather than legal sense, a life sentence was certainly within the judges discretion.
Whether this was an injustice or not won’t be known until the Justice Dept. declassifies the letter to the judge, until then the nature of the crime Pollard was sentenced for isn’t really know. That’s really what his supporters should be asking for, not release I’ll add a couple articles to the thread.
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Pollard Has Been Punished Enough
March 8, 1994 - Theodore Olson, Esq. - The Wall St. Journal
It is plain than columnist Al Hunt and the anti-Pollard faction within the Clinton administration for whom he is giving voice do not like Jonathan Pollard (“President Clinton, Don’t Free the Traitor Pollard, February 24). But his rationale for opposing clemency is mostly misinformation and ignorance, and his conclusion implicitly concedes the shallowness of his convictions.
As Mr. Pollard’s attorney, I offer these counterbalancing facts:
First, the matter of motives and money. Mr. Hunt’s carefully chosen litany of phrases such as “big bucks,” “well-paid” and “well-heeled” produces a profoundly false impression. As Mr. Hunt knows, Mr. Pollard sought out the Israelis and volunteered to give, not sell, information to Israel about nuclear, chemical and biological weapons under construction by Iraq and others for use against Israel. Six months down the line, Pollard was persuaded to accept paltry sums - pocket change compared with what Washington journalists routinely receive for weekend television appearances. Intelligence services know that it is impossible to control idealists - and it is standard procedure to corrupt them with money. Mr. Pollard was wrong to acquiesce, but everyone who has studied the record objectively knows that he acted as he did because he could not stand the implications of silence in the face of another Holocaust, not for money.
Second, Mr. Hunt repeatedly uses the term “traitor.” That word describes one who commits treason, the only crime considered so egregious that is mentioned in our Constitution. It is defined by law as committing war against the U.S. or aiding its enemies. It is punishable by death. Mr. Pollard did not commit, nor was he charged with, treason. Even the government has admitted that is use of the word “treason” and “traitor” to describe Mr. Pollard was wrong and “regrettable.” The court that reviewed Mr. Pollard’s case, whose opinion Mr. Hunt quotes, said that the “traitor” could justifiably be called “rank hyperbole.”
Third, Mr. Hunt’s comparison of Mr. Pollard to the Aldrich Ames case is appalling. Mr. Ames allegedly aided the Soviet Union when they were implacable enemies of the U.S.: Mr. Pollard helped one of our closest allies. Mr. Ames is said to have betrayed American agents: Mr. Pollard told Israel about instruments of mass destruction against Jews. Mr. Ames purportedly took millions of dollars and was motivated by greed: Mr. Pollard gave defensive information to save a people that had been nearly exterminated 50 years ago. What can Mr. Hunt be thinking?
Fourth, Mr. Hunt has mischaracterized the court decision regarding the government’s violation of the Pollard plea bargain. Mr. Pollard’s appeal was rejected as untimely, not because it was lacking in merit. All three judges who considered the appeal expressed considerable skepticism concerning the government’s conduct. One of the three went so far as to call Mr. Pollard’s treatment “a fundamental miscarriage of justice.”
The fact is that the government blatantly betrayed Mr. Pollard and its written contract with him. It made three promises, and broke them all. It agreed to represent to the sentencing judge that Mr. Pollard’s cooperation had been of “considerable value” to “enforcement of the espionage laws,” but did precisely the opposite, denigrating the value and motivation for that compensation - listing it among factors “compelling a substantial sentence.” It promised to limit its sentencing argumentation to the “facts and circumstances” of Mr. Pollard’s offense, but instead heaped savage vituperation on his motives on his motives, character and “arrogance.” Finally, it agreed not to seek a sentence of life in prison, but obtained exactly such a sentence by, among other things, demanding a sentence commensurate with the crime of treason.
Fifth, Mr. Hunt rejects as “bogus and irrelevant” the assertion that Mr. Pollard’s sentence was excessive. He could not be more wrong. Mr. Pollard has served more than eight years, mostly in solitary confinement in the nation’s harshest prison. No one who gave defense information to an ally has ever been punished so severely. The government did not even charge him with harming or having reason to know that his actions would harm the U.S. Once again, Mr. Hunt has outpaces Mr. Pollard’s prosecutors by pressing to maintain a level of punishment that the prosecutors promised not to seek.
Sixth, it is curious that Mr. Hunt thinks that the information Mr. Pollard gave away “was so sensitive that officials still insist they can’t provide specifics.” What officials? The Office of Naval Intelligence has said that much of Mr. Pollard’s information “was declassified during the Gulf War.” Mr. Pollard’s chief prosecutor has urged publicly that it all be declassified.
Finally, after all of Mr. Hunt’s rhetoric, his main grievance seems to be that Israel has failed to “come clean and acknowledge what a despicable act Pollard performed.” If it did so, he concludes, then “clemency [would] be in order.” This is an amazing conclusion because Mr. Pollard himself has admitted that what he did was wrong and has expressed great remorse for his actions. And two successive Israeli prime ministers have put in writing formal requests for mercy - not forgiveness - for the Pollard affair. The significance of these extraordinary official requests cannot have been lost on President Clinton - who, incidentally, may not be anxious to acknowledge publicly that the U.S. has spied on Israel. What more does Mr. Hunt want? Some sort of Chinese Communist public act of self-abasement?
There is more, but too little space to say it all. Defense Secretary-nominee Bobby Inman has publicly admitted that he cut off Israel from promised defensive information as retaliation for Israel’s destruction of Iraq’s nuclear reactors. (Maybe Mr. Hunt can tell us how many America soldiers would have died in the Persian Gulf had Israel not taken that action.) Mr. Pollard stepped into the breach and opened the spigot that Mr. Inman had closed. He had no right to do so, but voices as diverse as Cardinal Law, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, Benjamin Hooks, Father Drinan, Sen. Carol Mosely-Braun, Pat Robertson, dozens of Members of Congress, the city councils of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and two Israeli prime ministers have pleaded for an end to his punishment. Apparently many officials at State, Justice and the White House now agree.
The fundamental issue is when we can stop punishing a man who broke the law to expose a massive, malignant and malicious arms buildup so that a beleaguered people could defend themselves from weapons of terror and mass destruction. It might take some courage from President Clinton to do the right thing, but Mr. Pollard has been punished enough.
Theodore B. Olson is the former lead attorney for Jonathan Pollard.
Theodore B. Olsen Esq.
The document below was written by a former Pollard attorney, Theodore Olsen, to counter a 1993 NJCRAC position paper on the Pollard case. The document is as relevant today as when it was originally written. Many of the old lies that it deals with are still being circulated today by the same Jewish sources.
Mr. Lawrence Rubin
Executive Vice Chairman – NJCRAC
National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council
443 Park Avenue South
New York New York 10016-7322
April 9, 1993
RE: Jonathan J. Pollard
Dear Mr. Rubin:
As you know, we represent Jonathan J. Pollard. We have received a copy of the Jerome Chanes NJCRAC memorandum of March 23, 1993 disseminated to NJCRAC and CJF member agencies entitled "The Pollard Case: Myths and Facts." The Chanes memorandum states that it is intended to "provide accurate information" about the "substantive issues" involved in the Pollard case. However, it contains many materially inaccurate and damaging statements concerning Mr. Pollard and his case. We therefore request that you circulate this letter as soon as possible to all of the member agencies that received the Chanes memorandum
1. Pattern of Misrepresentation
The "Myths and Facts" memorandum states that there has been an "unfortunate pattern of misrepresentation" concerning the Pollard case. This regrettable and entirely gratuitous innuendo is apparently intended to accuse Mr. Pollard's supporters of misrepresentations. It is not true. Naturally, in any highly visible case such as this involving many people working to achieve a common objective, there may be misconceptions that develop. But the Pollard supporters have made every effort to supply scrupulously accurate information concerning his case. In fact, the NJCRAC memorandum contains more errors and misleading perceptions than anything we have seen. That is why it is so important for you to correct it by distributing this response.
2. Disproportionality of sentence
Mr. Pollard's sentence of life in prison is grossly disproportionate to punishments in comparable cases. Your wholly inaccurate and distorted rejection of this fact ignores both the facts and fundamental principles of our criminal justice system.
You assert that "comparisons between Pollard's sentence and sentences meted out to others . . . are inappropriate," and that such an analysis of the proportionality of Mr. Pollard's sentence is improper as a jurisprudential matter. That, of course, is nonsense It is a fundamental principle of justice and jurisprudence that the law should treat similarly situated individuals similarly and that punishments, insofar as possible, should be relatively equal and proportionate. The fact that Mr. Pollard's sentence is completely out of scale with those imposed for comparable offenses is a highly salient consideration in his efforts to seek a commutation of his sentence.
Moreover, the Supreme court of the United States has held as a matter of constitutional "principle that a criminal sentence must be proportional to the crime for which the defendant has been convicted-" Solem V. Helm, 463 U.S. 277, 290 (1983) (emphasis added) . The Court has struck down as unconstitutional punishments that are "significantly disproportionate to [the] crime," id. at 303, based on a comparison "with sentences imposed on other criminals" Id. At 292; see also Harmelin V. Michigan, 111 S. Ct. 2680, 2702-05 (1991) (Kennedy, J., concurring) (reiterating that the constitution forbids "extreme sentences that are 'grossly disproportionate' to the crime") - It is well recognized that disproportionality in sentencing when compared to others convicted of similar crimes is "fundamentally unfair," and accordingly, it "has also been a fundamental part of . . . the clemency philosophy." Kobil, The Quality of Mercy Strained: Wrestling the Pardoning Power from the King, 69 Tex. L. R. S69, 627 (1991).*
[*NOTE: For example: President Carter commuted the 20 year sentence of Watergate conspirator G. Gordon Liddy after 4 years and 3 months because Liddy had served much more time than the other Watergate participants. Id. The reason given by the White House Counsel was that "[it] was a clear case of unfair disparity." Id. (citations omitted).]
You also argue that Mr. Pollard's sentence was not disproportionate. But that is clearly incorrect. As thoroughly documented in Mr. Pollard's commutation application, his sentence was manifestly inconsistent with the punishment historically imposed for disclosing intelligence information to an ally of the United States. Indeed, the more than seven-year period that Mr. Pollard has already served is much closer to the typical sentence for comparable offenses. The only other life sentences imposed for espionage in the United States of which we are aware -- including each of the instances cited in your memorandum -- involved individuals who spied for the Soviet Union (or Eastern block countries that were under its control) during the Cold War. We believe that Mr. Pollard is the only person in the history of our Nation to receive a life sentence for giving information to an ally.
3. The Pertinence of the Fact that Mr. Pollard Spied for a Close Ally
Your memorandum asserts that it is irrelevant that Mr. Pollard provided intelligence information to Israel, one of the United States closest allies, as opposed to a country that is hostile to the United States. That assertion is legally incorrect and morally perplexing. While it may be a crime to disclose any classified information to anyone, both the law and society recognize the difference between efforts to harm the United States by giving information to its enemies and supplying data to an ally to help save the lives of victims of aggression.
You contend that "as a legal matter, the law on espionage does not distinguish between allies and enemies. . . ." But the law, including the Constitution of the United States most certainly does make such a distinction. The most serious espionage crime is treason, which, unlike Mr. Pollard's offense, is punishable by death, and is defined explicitly in the Constitution as consisting "only in levying war against [the United States), or in adhering to their Enemies [or] giving them Aid and Comfort." (emphasis added) . The statutes on espionage also recognize that providing information to an enemy is different in kind from and more reprehensible than supplying information to a country that is an ally of the United States, explicitly singling out the former for special treatment. Compare 18 U.S.C. 794(b) and 794(a); 18 U.S.C. 2382. The law distinguishes between those whose conduct occurred with reason to believe it may harm the United States. Mr. Pollard was not charged with that offense.
Moreover, the vastly harsher sentences imposed on individuals who have committed espionage against the United States an behalf of hostile nations demonstrate the obvious and fundamental principle that spying for an enemy is a far more egregious offense that deserves more severe punishment than providing intelligence data to an ally. As discussed above, life sentence have historically been reserved exclusively for individuals who have spied for countries that are hostile to the United States, while persons who, like Mr. Pollard, assisted allies have been subjected to far less severe punishments that more closely approximate the time that Mr. Pollard has already served in prison.
Your memorandum also misleadingly suggests that Mr. Pollard's reliance on the hostile nation/ally dichotomy is an attempt by him to excuse or justify his conduct. But that is not Mr. Pollard's point at all. Mr. Pollard acknowledges that he violated an important law of the United States. He pleaded guilty to that offense and agreed to cooperate fully with the government's investigation of his conduct. He has repeatedly expressed regret and remorse for his conduct and for any and all harm that his offense may have caused. Mr. Pollard is not arguing that his unlawful conduct in justified because he was motivated only by a desire to save lives.
But those who ask for an humanitarian commutation of Mr. Pollard's sentence to a severe punishment equivalent to the punishment already imposed are surely entitled to emphasize that Mr. Pollard's actions, admittedly wrong, was inspired by the desire to protect against violent aggression, to prevent a holocaust and to allow the people of Israel to defend themselves. This is a legitimate and important basis for the sentence commutation being sought from President Clinton.
4. Conditions of Incarceration
The fact that Mr. Pollard has been in solitary confinement for several years is not a "myth." And it is not a "myth" that Mr. Pollard has been incarcerated in the nation's harshest maximum security prison. Mr. Pollard did not ask to be placed in Marion prison -- where security measures are necessary to protect him from anti-Semitic prison gangs. Moreover, NJCRAC should understand that it is exceedingly difficult for Mr. Pollard to chronicle his specific, day-to-day prison experiences without exposing himself to repercussions. It should be obvious to anyone that solitary confinement in a prison containing the most violent and vicious criminals in the nation is not a circumstance that should be ignored or labeled as a "myth."
5. Parole
As a technical matter, Mr. Pollard was not sentenced to "life without possibility of parole," and parole may legally be considered in 1995. But your implication that the possibility of parole makes commutation unnecessary - is incorrect and misguided. The law enforcement and intelligence agency officials who will be given the opportunity to express themselves on the subject have indicated that they will oppose parole. Immediately following sentencing, the U.S. Attorney said that Mr. Pollard would "never see the light of day." Parole is a virtual impossibility under these circumstances. Your emphasis on the highly unlikely theoretical possibility of parole avoids addressing the circumstances and fairness of Mr. Pollard's incarceration. The fact is that he has been punished enough already.
6. The Government's Breach of the Plea Agreement
You agree in your memorandum that there are "legitimate questions" regarding the government's conduct at the time of sentencing in conjunction with its plea bargain.
However, you selectively omit a full discussion of the issue and the pertinence of it to Mr. Pollard's request for a commutation of his sentence.
The fact is that the government violated its plea bargain with Mr. Pollard in several fundamental respects. Nearly everyone who has examined the circumstances agrees with that conclusion. Indeed, this situation was severely questioned by the federal appellate court that reviewed Mr. Pollard's sentence. Despite the government's agreement in exchange for Mr. Pollard's plea of guilty to temper its rhetoric at the tide of sentencing, not to seek a life sentence, and to point out that Pollard's cooperation with the government had been valuable, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found that the government had engaged in "hard-nosed dealings," Pollard v. United States, 939 F.2d 10110, 1030, cert. denied, 113 S. Ct. 322 (1992), and that the government's conduct was "problematic" and "troublesome." Id. at 1026. Dissenting Judge Stephen Williams concluded that the government violated material terms of Mr. Pollard's plea agreement, resulting in a "fundamental miscarriage of justice." Id. at 1032. And the government's forceful, bitter and antagonistic rhetoric produced the very life sentence it had agreed not to seek. Although the courts declined for technical reasons to set aside Mr. Pollard's sentence, there are no such constraints on the President's constitutional power to commute Mr. Pollard's sentence and thereby to redress the injustice of a sentence of life in prison despite the government's promise not to seek such a sentence.
NJCRAC's characterization of the facts is revealing. It says that Pollard's claim of a government breach of the plea bargain is "not entirely a myth". This is a very peculiar choice of words to describe an audacious, deliberate and manifest injustice.
7. The Secretary of Defense's Submission of a Memoranda During the Sentencing Process and Use of the Word "Treason"
Your brief discussion of the memoranda submitted by Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during the sentencing proceedings and your astonishing efforts to rationalize Secretary Weinberger's use of the word "treason" to describe Mr. Pollard's conduct overlooks completely the improper nature and devastating impact that that submission had on Mr. Pollard's case.
The Secretary of Defense was not "obliged to submit a pre-sentencing memorandum." No law or custom requires it. It was an entirely gratuitous and intentionally forceful symbolic act by the nation's highest national security official.
The Secretary of Defense's memoranda did not relay objective facts about possible damage to national security caused by Mr. Pollard. Rather, the Secretary went to extraordinary and unprecedented lengths to volunteer extremely prejudicial and unjustified statements unjustified statements of opinion such as Pollard's "loyalty to Israel transcended his loyalty to the United States," and "the punishment imposed should reflect the perfidy of [his] actions (and) the magnitude of the treason committed," (emphasis added).
Judge Williams found that these statements amounted to a call for a life sentence in "all but name", and constituted a
"flagrant violation of the (plea) agreement's spirit . . . . [T]he repeated use of superlatives implied an appeal for the maximum (sentence). Weinberger's reference to treason took the point further. Whereas treason carries the death penalty, and involves aiding the nation's enemies, Pollard was charged with espionage, carrying a maximum of life imprisonment and encompassing aid even to friendly nations - here, Israel . . . Weinberger's subtext was that the heaviest possible sentence was the lightest that was just."
Mr. Pollard did not commit treason, was not accused of treason and did not plead guilty to treason, and even the Government has now acknowledged that use of that terminology was both unwarranted and "regrettable". In fact, Mr. Pollard pleaded guilty to one count of violating 1a U.S.C. S 794, the transmission of national security information to a foreign government. Mr. Pollard's conviction was not even based upon that portion of # 794 that is predicated on an intent or reason to believe that harm to the United States would result from his conduct.
The Chanes memorandum's explanation that Secretary Weinberger was not using the word "treason" in its "formal and legal sense", is nothing short of outrageous. The Secretary was one of the nation's top officials, filing a formal legal document in the name of the United States under the supervision of the United States Attorney in a formal and extremely serious legal proceeding in a proceeding in a case that he, himself, characterized as very important. The word "treason" was intentionally used, as evidenced by the simultaneous use of the term "traitorously" by the Assistant United States Attorney. The assertion that the Secretary and the Government did not know the meaning of the word "treason" in that context is absurd. It was intended to secure a life sentence for Jonathan Pollard and it worked.
We will not comment an the remainder of the memorandum or the NJCRAC process. Those are matters for NJCRAC and its CJF member agencies. However, we do expect that NJCRAC will feel obliged to disseminate only accurate information concerning the Pollard case in the future.
In sum, your March 23 memorandum does not "provide accurate information" about the Pollard case. Rather, it either inaccurately portrays or omits entirely facts that we believe are vitally important and that would be of great interest to the NJCRAC and CJF member agencies. Your memorandum does not even mention that the government of Israel has specifically requested the President to grant Mr. Pollard's request for commutation. Such omissions seriously call into question the objectivity of your "fact-finding" efforts.
Very truly yours,
signed
Theodore B. Olsen
But that is exactly what the article is alleging, that the loss of those Humint assets had nothing to do with Pollard, directly or indirectly, rather with Ames and Hannsen.
Well maybe, but maybe he was sentenced incorrectly based on wrong information. The penalties for revealing classified information are not all or nothing, there is a graduation, dependent upon circumstances, the amount of damage, and yes, to whom the information was revealed. No one is arguing that he should not have been punished, the question is one of the appropriateness of the punishment. Consider if he had been an Irish American turing over information on the IRA to the Brits. Would that be grounds for a life sentence. Probably not, but it would be the same sort of violation. The appropriatness of the sentence depends upon exactly what information was turned over, what sort of damage that caused (or could be expected to cause) and to whom it was turned over. Those all seem to be facts still somewhat in question, outside of those who have seen the actual information provided to the judge who sentenced him.
Just because it was classifed doesn't mean it was correct. The correctness of it is the issue, the classification of it is actually the problem, not that it should not have been classified, but rather that means we can't know what it was, even in a general way. We might be able to get a general notion, if it was "redacted", that is the classifed portions removed, and then released.
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