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| Israel-Palestine-Jordan |
| 'Pollard alive because of US mercy' |
| 2007-05-22 |
| US Ambassador Richard Jones said on Monday it is unlikely that convicted Pentagon spy Jonathan Pollard will ever be released and that the fact that the US did not execute him should be seen as an act of clemency. Responding to audience questions during an academic conference at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Jones said Pollard's crimes appear especially heinous to many Americans because he was caught spying for a friendly power. Pollard, a US Navy civilian intelligence analyst, sold military secrets to Israel while working at the Pentagon. He was arrested in 1985 and pleaded guilty at his trial. He is serving a life sentence in a US federal prison. "It came out in the trial very clearly, Jonathan Pollard took money for what he did, he sold out his country," Jones said. "The fact that he wasn't executed is the [only] mercy that Jonathan Pollard will receive. This is a very emotional issue in the United States. I know he was helping a friend, but that's what makes it even more emotional for Americans, if a friend would cooperate in aiding and abetting someone who is committing treason against his own country." Pollard's wife, Esther, slammed the ambassador's remarks as "malicious incitement" and "gross slander" and urged Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to send Jones home for his "lies and slander." Esther Pollard also said that Jones's claim that her husband took money and sold out his country was baseless. "Most important of all, Israel formally admitted in 1998 that Jonathan Pollard was a bona fide Israeli agent. The formal recognition of Jonathan as an Israeli agent puts the lie to any claims that Jonathan spied out of mercenary motives," she said. The Prime Minister's Office had no response to Jones's comments. The government has traditionally shied away from publicly trading brickbats with the US over the issue. Despite calls by some politicians and pro-Pollard activists here for Jones to be recalled for his statements, his comments were likely to be received well in Washington, where the State Department, Justice Department and intelligence community like US government officials to talk very tough on Pollard, officials in Jerusalem said. US government officials, who almost never bring up the issue on their own, are consistently very tough when discussing Pollard in order - it is widely believed - that no one get the impression there is any "wiggle room" on the issue of his release. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #15 apologize for the vitriol, but it makes it hard to defend an "ally" like that, and I have.... I feel personally screwed by their perfidy on certain issues |
| Posted by: Frank G 2007-05-22 21:56 |
| #14 my 2 cents - Pollard was spying for an ally (understandable). On we defend even when it harms our interests (also understandable, but now one side owes more). One who has tried to transfer technology developments to our "purported "(Chinese, et al) enemies(not understandable and NOT forgiven). Who the fuck made THAT decision, and why are they still alive? Israel can blame Pollard's life sentence on their own perfidy, sorry TW, but heads should've publicly rolled and Pollard's wife told to "STFU or be stateless". Fuck her....just my HO |
| Posted by: Frank G 2007-05-22 21:54 |
| #13 TW, Mrs Skolaut. I think you're missing a point. The reasons for Polard's continued incarceration are not emotional but practical. To wit, if he were free he'd be able to tell what made him so unhappy with the information US intelligence were transferring to Israel. OldSpook I think you know that I'm talking about. |
| Posted by: gromgoru 2007-05-22 21:11 |
| #12 Yep, Pollard really hurt us - for about five years. It took that long to reconfigure everything, come up with a new set of specifications, and re-establish links and services. It taught us a great lesson - everything, everyone, everywhere, is a potential threat. A LOT of security codes were changed in 1985-89, quite a few activities were reviewed and revised, and the US reconfigured a large number of strategic assets. We would have been stupid not to have. We did it again in 2001-2002. We need to do it every ten years or upon compromise, whichever happens first. That costs a lot of money. Pollard and Clinton were both good reasons to spend that money. US security benefitted in the end, but we lost a lot in the process. Pollard needs to remain in jail so people like me who were caught up in cleaning up after him don't hunt him down and justifiably beat his head in with a dull axe. |
| Posted by: Old Patriot 2007-05-22 20:20 |
| #11 High-level suspicions about Israeli-Soviet collusion were expressed as early as December, 1985, a month after Pollard's arrest, when William J. Casey, the late C.I.A. director, who was known for his close ties to the Israeli leadership, stunned one of his station chiefs by suddenly complaining about the Israelis breaking the "ground rules." The issue arose when Casey urged increased monitoring of the Israelis during an otherwise routine visit, I was told by the station chief, who is now retired. "He asked if I knew anything about the Pollard case," the station chief recalled, and he said that Casey had added, "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." Casey had then explained that the Israelis had traded the Pollard data for Soviet emigres. "How's that for cheating?" he had asked. |
| Posted by: ed 2007-05-22 18:25 |
| #10 Why Pollard Should Never Be Released (The Traitor) The documents that Pollard turned over to Israel were not focussed exclusively on the product of American intelligence -- its analytical reports and estimates. They also revealed how America was able to learn what it did -- a most sensitive area of intelligence defined as "sources and methods." Pollard gave the Israelis vast amounts of data dealing with specific American intelligence systems and how they worked. For example, he betrayed details of an exotic capability that American satellites have of taking off-axis photographs from high in space. While orbiting the earth in one direction, the satellites could photograph areas that were seemingly far out of range. Israeli nuclear-missile sites and the like, which would normally be shielded from American satellites, would thus be left exposed, and could be photographed. "We monitor the Israelis," one intelligence expert told me, "and there's no doubt the Israelis want to prevent us from being able to surveil their country." The data passed along by Pollard included detailed information on the various platforms -- in the air, on land, and at sea -- used by military components of the National Security Agency to intercept Israeli military, commercial, and diplomatic communications. At the time of Pollard's spying, select groups of American sailors and soldiers trained in Hebrew were stationed at an N.S.A. listening post near Harrogate, England, and at a specially constructed facility inside the American Embassy in Tel Aviv, where they intercepted and translated Israeli signals. Other interceptions came from an unmanned N.S.A. listening post in Cyprus. Pollard's handing over of the data had a clear impact, the expert told me, for "we could see the whole process" -- of intelligence collection -- "slowing down." It also hindered the United States' ability to recruit foreign agents. Another senior official commented, with bitterness, "The level of penetration would convince any self-respecting human source to look for other kinds of work." A number of officials strongly suspect that the Israelis repackaged much of Pollard's material and provided it to the Soviet Union in exchange for continued Soviet permission for Jews to emigrate to Israel. Other officials go further, and say there was reason to believe that secret information was exchanged for Jews working in highly sensitive positions in the Soviet Union. A significant percentage of Pollard's documents, including some that described the techniques the American Navy used to track Soviet submarines around the world, was of practical importance only to the Soviet Union. One longtime C.I.A. officer who worked as a station chief in the Middle East said he understood that "certain elements in the Israeli military had used it" -- Pollard's material -- "to trade for people they wanted to get out," including Jewish scientists working in missile technology and on nuclear issues. Pollard's spying came at a time when the Israeli government was publicly committed to the free flow of Jewish emigres from the Soviet Union. The officials stressed the fact that they had no hard evidence -- no "smoking gun," in the form of a document from an Israeli or a Soviet archive -- to demonstrate the link between Pollard, Israel, and the Soviet Union, but they also said that the documents that Pollard had been directed by his Israeli handlers to betray led them to no other conclusion. It's a Seymour Hersh article, but if half of it true, Pollard and his wife should have been executed. The Israelis selling US secrets to curry favors with America's main enemy. Where have we heard of this happening recently with some inscrutable eastern power? |
| Posted by: ed 2007-05-22 18:13 |
| #9 /why, #8 tw, you know the answer to that! It's because they're Joooooooooooooos, silly. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2007-05-22 17:52 |
| #8 As Jack is Back! pointed out, Mac, everybody spies on us, friends and enemies alike. But only the one who spied for Israel gets a life sentence in solitary confinement. Why is it always Israel that must be angel-pure, and no one else? |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-05-22 17:41 |
| #7 TW, your points are all valid ones. What I'm saying is that whoever authorized this didn't give enough thought to the potential fallout from the worst-case scenario, which is exactly what Israel now has. Was there ANYTHING Pollard was going to give Israel that was worth the blowback his capture/trial/imprisonment has caused? I'm not an intel type but, offhand, I can't think of anything important enough to risk alienating Israel's only real ally. Mossad has a great track record but this intelligence op was NOT a smart move. Hey! Olmert never headed Mossad, did he? |
| Posted by: Mac 2007-05-22 17:31 |
| #6 especially heinous to many Americans because he was caught spying for a friendly power Seriously? More heinous than betraying American secrets to an enemy power actively working toward our destruction? Just about as bad as the Rosenbergs, who gave the secret of the atom bomb to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War? From the same America that tried to frame the AIPAC people just a few months ago, merely because someone was in a snit about neocons and Likudniks? The same America that one presidency ago gave our secrets to Communist China wholesale? That one presidency ago counted Yasser Arafat as the most frequent guest to the White House? No, Mr. Pollard should not have spied for Israel. But can you blame Israel for not completely trusting America, given the cross currents within its government, some of which are actively inimical to Israel's very survival. Even those on her side force Israel to do things contra-survival, like stopping short of wiping out Hizb'allah last summer, or engaging once again in a peace process designed to erase Israel by differential amounts. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2007-05-22 14:36 |
| #5 The birds do it, the bees do it, they all do it - the UK, the French, even the Canadians when they can put down their Molson. Everyone spies on us because we have so much more to spy on and we are pretty easy the way our defense/industrial/technology infrastructure is spread out and so diverse. |
| Posted by: Jack is Back! 2007-05-22 10:55 |
| #4 The only time I wanna hear about this guy is when he's taken out of prison in a bag... |
| Posted by: tu3031 2007-05-22 09:31 |
| #3 Life sentence = life sentence. The Isrealis spy on the US all the time. I'd hardly call them reliable allies. They were perfectly willing to sell AWACS technology to the Chinese until Uncle Sam got really mad. The Chinese new modern jet fighter is a copy of the Isreali one. Allies, indeed. |
| Posted by: gromky 2007-05-22 07:33 |
| #2 Bottom line, don't get caught. Pollard should have hung. If one of ours gets caught in the IDF establishment I'd expect the same. |
| Posted by: Shipman 2007-05-22 02:17 |
| #1 Nothing Israel has ever done, including the USS Liberty, has been as damaging to their cause in the U.S. as the Pollard incident. Whoever was in charge of that one for Mossad should be booked for treason against Israel. Dumb, dumb, dumb!. |
| Posted by: Mac 2007-05-22 01:41 |