After 22 Years, It's Only Right To Free Jonathan Pollard [View All]

[Purveyor]

President Bush's visit to Israel this week, like all top-level US-Israel summits since the end of the first Gulf War, raises hopes that the United States will finally put an end to Jonathan Pollard's imprisonment.

"When can we 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?" That is how Ted Olson, Mr. Bush's solicitor general between 2001 and 2004, summed up the Pollard affair nearly 14 years ago when he was Jonathan's counsel.

Jonathan, a former civilian naval intelligence officer, is now in the 23rd year of a life sentence for passing to Israel classified data about the weapons systems and capabilities of Iraq, Syria and other Arab states, including evidence of Iraq's development of chemical weapons. Just a few years before Jonathan's arrest in November of 1985, the US routinely shared such information with Israel. Ironically, this vital intelligence flow was severely curtailed following Israel's destruction of Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981.

OVER THE years, prominent Americans from across the political spectrum have decried the US government's conduct in the Pollard case.

In June of 1992, Pat Robertson, speaking of the Pollard case, declared: "Every time there is a miscarriage of justice in our system, it will eat like a cancer at the credibility of the rest of the system of justice we love in this country." Similarly, in a 1993 letter to President Clinton about the Pollard affair, Benjamin Hooks wrote, "As a lawyer and a minister, as well as a former judge and CEO of the NAACP, I have rarely encountered a case in which government arbitrariness was so clear-cut and inexcusable."

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