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Union-Tribune Editorial
Convicted spy

Pollard violated trust, must serve sentence

September 5, 2003

Jonathan Pollard spied for Israel, supplying it with stacks of top-secret documents when he was a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. He was convicted 16 years ago and sentenced to life, the maximum sentence he faced and the toughest sentence anyone who has spied for an ally has received. Deservedly so.

Now, Pollard's newest lawyers want the court to decide that he can appeal that sentence, a step they say his trial attorneys neglected to ensure. These attorneys claim that they need to see the documents filed with the court before his sentencing, documents they say may have overstated the actual impact of his crime. They say, too, that federal prosecutors reneged on a deal that would have incarcerated Pollard but not for life.

Such claims have been heard since Pollard went to prison, as has this one: He spied for an ally, which should mitigate his punishment.

Courts have repeatedly rejected similar legal claims, beginning with the judge who lawfully imposed the life sentence – on his own, not at prosecutors' request. At the time, Pollard acknowledged that he himself had broken the terms of the deal with the prosecution by granting interviews to reporters. Since then, he has repeatedly contended that prosecutors broke the deal, which they did not and which given his breach of it, they needn't have.

The assessment of the damage Pollard did to United States security is itself important to U.S. security. Maintaining its secrecy is therefore important as well. Pollard's attorneys' request to peruse that information to find – or just to claim – a weakness in it seems more a ploy to force the government to free Pollard in lieu of facing an order to disclose.

The federal courts will decide those legal issues. But the issue of whether Pollard's betraying the United States for its ally Israel should mitigate his punishment is a non-starter, however hard he and his supporters in the United States and in the Israeli government press it.

For whom he spied is beside the point. That he did spy is the point. He spied for years, and for money. He spied, having had to have known that the information he told and sold could possibly be learned by nations that were not U.S. allies, and that the same information could endanger U.S. sources abroad at that time and in the future.

No American employed to protect the nation's security may take it upon himself to decide when, or for whom, or why a breach of that security is OK.

Israel, which has long sought his release, to the point of jeopardizing a peace agreement, may decide who its heroes are, to whom it owes a debt for assistance, how to reassure its other spies that they won't be left out in the cold.

Israeli officials and American supporters can press to the hilt for his release, if only by trying to wear down America's legal and psychological defenses.

But Jonathan Pollard is as opposite of an American hero as it is possible to be. That's why presidents have refused to pardon him. That's why he remains in federal prison. For life.