CIA game changer

JPOST EDITORIAL

Now is the time for President Obama, finally, to respond to all the official requests for Pollard’s release by commuting his

sentence to time served.

.Photo: Courtesy J4JP

The newly declassified 1987 CIA damage assessment bolsters official calls for the immediate release of Jonathan Pollard. While portions of the CIA document remain redacted, the disclosures officially confirm that Pollard spied for Israel, not against the United States.

Moreover, the document puts the lie to American allegations that have been used for over a quarter of a century to justify Pollard’s continued incarceration. For example, Pollard’s full cooperation with the prosecution was one of the welcome admissions in this document, as was the confirmation that the volume of information Pollard transferred to Israel was far less than claimed.

The CIA document also reveals the subterfuge used by the US government to breach its plea agreement with Pollard.


The report brazenly states that Pollard was jailed for life because of an “unauthorized” interview he gave to The Jerusalem Post. This is preposterous. No reporter, much less one carrying a camera and a tape recorder, could possibly gain access to a prisoner in a US federal prison without authorization.

Another canard used to justify Pollard’s life sentence is the claim that he did enormous damage to US national security. While the declassified CIA document does not deal with the damage done by Pollard, this issue is fully addressed in a concurrent damage assessment known as The Victim Impact Statement (VIS), written by the US Department of Justice.

The VIS, now a matter of public record, was submitted to the sentencing judge in 1987 as an aid in determining Pollard’s sentence. After a few introductory sentences about the “scope and breadth” of Pollard’s disclosures to Israel, the VIS describes the actual damage to the US as follows: “Mr. Pollard’s unauthorized disclosures have threatened the US [sic] relations with numerous Middle East Arab allies, many of whom question the extent to which Mr. Pollard’s disclosures of classified information have skewed the balance of power in the Middle East. Moreover, because Mr. Pollard provided the Israelis virtually any classified document requested by Mr. Pollard’s coconspirators, the US has been deprived of the quid pro quo routinely received during authorized and official intelligence exchanges with Israel, and Israel has received information classified at a level far in excess of that ever contemplated by the National Security Council. The obvious result of Mr. Pollard’s largesse is that US bargaining leverage with the Israeli government in any further intelligence exchanges has been undermined. In short, Mr. Pollard’s activities have adversely affected US relations with both its Middle East Arab allies and the Government of Israel.”

The US government’s own words in the VIS, carefully scripted to present the most compelling case for the harshest possible sentence, reflect the damage as being nothing more than short-term friction between the US and unnamed Arab countries and a temporary reduction in bargaining leverage held by the US over Israel. Not the kind of permanent, irreversible, and overwhelming harm to US national security that some have claimed.

Pollard has repeatedly expressed remorse and was not charged with intent to harm the US. He is the only person in American history to receive a life sentence for spying for an ally. His continued incarceration is jarringly inconsistent with American claims of close friendship and security cooperation with Israel.

The US administration has repeatedly demonstrated remarkable flexibility towards other allies, downgrading charges and dealing leniently with spies from China, the Philippines, Greece and Saudi Arabia, among others. No such consideration has been extended to Israel in Pollard’s case, despite overwhelming evidence that he is being punished far beyond the severity of the offense he committed.

Many senior US officials, including those with firsthand knowledge of the classified file, are openly calling for Pollard’s release. They say his sentence is “grossly disproportionate” and that keeping him in prison is “a travesty of justice.”

Both the prime minister and president of Israel have issued official requests for the Israeli agent’s release on humanitarian grounds because his health is failing. He has served 28 years in prison, seven of them in solitary confinement.

The newly declassified CIA damage assessment has again focused public attention on the injustice of keeping Pollard in prison. Now is the time for President Barack Obama, finally, to respond to all the official requests for Pollard’s release by commuting his sentence to time served. There are no more excuses. It is time to send Pollard home.

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 http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=296217

 CIA: Pollard's life sentence due to ‘Post’ interview

By GIL HOFFMAN

12/17/2012

Declassified CIA damage assessment of Jonathan Pollard case says he violated plea bargain terms by giving interview to 'Post.'

Photo: Courtesy

Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard received a life sentence because he violated a plea agreement he had signed, by giving an unauthorized interview to The Jerusalem Post, according to the newly declassified 1987 CIA damage assessment of the Pollard case, published Friday by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

Judge Aubrey Robinson sentenced Pollard to life in prison in March 1987 despite a plea agreement in which Pollard agreed to cooperate with the investigation against him, in return for a promise that he would not receive such a sentence.

The CIA document surmised that Robinson delivered the sentence because of the plea bargain violation, along with his perception of the severity of the espionage offense.

“Pollard’s willingness to grant an interview to journalist Wolf Blitzer for The Jerusalem Post without obtaining advance approval of the resulting text from the Justice Department violated the terms of his plea bargain,” the document said.

“In the Blitzer interview, which was held on November 20, 1986, at Petersberg Federal Penitentiary, Pollard provided extensive information on his motives and objectives in conducting espionage for Israel. He also provided Blitzer a general account with important examples of intelligence he passed to the Israelis, and emphasized that the Israeli government must have been aware of and approved of his activities.”

The interview was first published over several months in the Post and was then reprinted in The Washington Post and The New York Times. Pollard’s then-wife Anne also angered the judge, according to the document, by giving an unauthorized interview to CBS’s news magazine 60 Minutes on March 1, 1987, three days before Pollard was sentenced.

The CIA speculated in the damage assessment that by giving the interviews, the Pollards were trying to mobilize support among American Jews and the Israeli government, but that strategy backfired.

Pollard’s current wife Esther responded that neither Robinson nor the government had barred her husband from talking to the press. She said that if he wanted to meet with a reporter, all he had to do was obtain written permission from the Bureau of Prisons and restrict his comments to guidelines established for such interviews, which she said he did with Blitzer.

“The government did something highly suspicious by forgetting to send anyone to monitor these interviews,” Esther Pollard said. “Later, at sentencing, the prosecutor successfully inflamed the judge against Jonathan by falsely claiming that not only had the interviews been secretly arranged behind their backs, but that Jonathan had also disclosed highly classified material to Blitzer that compromised the intelligence community’s sources and methods.”

Esther Pollard pointed out that several years later, Blitzer said it appeared to him that the approval for the interview was “part of a calculated scheme” by the prosecutors designed to justify their planned violation of the plea agreement. She said government prosecutor Joseph diGenova later confirmed this by telling The Village Voice that he had hoped the interview would be the “rope” with which Pollard would hang himself.

Pollard's attorneys, Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman, responded that the government's claim that Pollard gave an unauthorized interview is baseless.

"The government approved Mr. Pollard's application, and two interviews took place inside the prison with government approval," the lawyers said. "Under the plea agreement, any interviews had to be approved by the Director of Naval Intelligence. Mr. Pollard had been led to believe that his written requests for authorization had received all necessary approvals within the government. Indeed, it would not have been possible for Mr. Blitzer to enter the prison at all, much less equipped with tape recorder and camera, without government approval."

Lawrence Korb, former US assistant secretary of defense at the time of Pollard’s arrest, said that the release of the CIA damage assessment which indicated that Pollard sought information on Israel’s Arab adversaries and not the US was a “fortuitous development” that “underscores the case for Pollard’s immediate release.” He urged Israeli officials to use this development to press for Pollard’s release without delay.

“We knew all along that the information that Pollard passed concerned Arab countries, and not the US, but the release of this official document confirming the facts makes it much easier to bring a speedy end to this tragedy,” Korb said. “After 28 years it is time for Pollard to be released and to go home now."

Guest Comment:

Not only that Wolf Blitzer needs to be informed, but like Shimon Peres who will never admit his Oslo concoction debacle, it is the Jew-Am that need to point out that it is US politics, and nothing more, that has kept Pollard in jail for 27 years of a life sentence with no parole. For what he did he was supposed to get a sentence in the SINGLE DIGITS (4 years). That is why he opted a plea bargain. Instead, the temporary displeasure of Arab countries was used as one of the two other excuses for a life sentence. The so-called unauthorized J-Post interview is one of the other two.

Here are the Jew-Am leaders, the three most powerful in the US. Now that the evidence is clear, they need to demand that Jonathan Pollard be released NOW! afoxman@adl.org, harrisd@ajc.org, william.daroff@jewishfederations.org

No more excuses.

Dear Friends,

I am circulating these 2 articles and I am asking you to send them with 'what is on your mind' to Wolf Blitzer at his e-mail address: Wolf.Blitzer@turner.com.

This is an important news story, as a man's life was ruined because of the evil that guides way too many human beings. Because Wolf Blitzer is personally involved in the unfathomable injustice that was done to Jonathan Pollard. Wolf Blitzer needs to receive this breaking news item from as many people as possible, from anyone who sees, now so very clear, the injustice and deception perpetrated in Pollard's case. Sickening is rather a mild expression.

What happened to our society? We have ancient laws; it is called the Ten Commandments ... thy shall not lie, thy shall not, not,… and we are told to obey them and we do not!

Nurit Greenger

Please circulate this article, because everybody has the right to know the truth.      

Dear Friends!

This is so astonishing that I thought you should know this.

A newly released CIA damage assessment demonstrates unequivocally that the US government has brazenly lied to the public about key issues in the Pollard case for years.According to two of the U.S. government’s own damage assessments cited in this ground-breaking Jerusalem Post editorial, Jonathan Pollard was put away for life, for 3 reasons: firstly because of an alleged “unauthorized” interview with the Jerusalem Post; and secondly because he irritated certain Arab allies who felt that Israel had been too strengthened, altering the balance of power in the Middle East; and thirdly because Pollard made Israel temporarily impervious to American pressure. Astonishingly, as the JPost editorial reveals, this was the actual damage done by Pollard, quoted exactly as it was presented to the sentencing judge in 1987.

Eleonora Shifrin