Comments on: Is an Israeli cover-up keeping Jonathan Pollard in prison?

By: Screwtape

Screwtape — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 12:20:22 +0000

The day Jonathan Pollard dies in an American prison will be a great day indeed. No mercy for traitors.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 14:18:20 +0000

This following article is helpful in understanding the reason why Mr. Pollard’s lengthy prison sentence bears scrutiny.

http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=277797

By: annie

annie — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 04:24:42 +0000

aaron, “Nobody is asking the obvious question – where did the documents end up?”…oh you would be very wrong there. personally, i think this is why pollard is still in jail. i would have to do some prowling around but off the top of my head i sort of recall the US government asking exactly that. and who did they ask? the israeli government. and the israeli government said…no, we won’t tell you…and given the nature of the theft, the US thought they had every right to know. so, my opinion (and only my opinion/hunch) this is a power play between the USgov and goi. goi wants to have their cake (stolen goods) and eat it 2 (release pollard). if the goi coughs up pollard could probably be freed.

By: XYZ

XYZ — Sun, 15 Apr 2012 04:23:58 +0000

Okay, I apologize. I made an overgeneralization about the Left. I have seen numerous Leftist attack Pollard, but many others say he should be released.

Regarding these new claims that he can’t be released because there is now something else in the case such as the “other spy” ….I think this is a lot of baloney. Many high ranking Americans such as former Vice President Dan Quayle, Senator Schumer, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Henry Kissinger and IIRC even former CIA Chief Woolsey and numerous others have called for Pollard to be released.

By: Arnon Schwanzinger

Arnon Schwanzinger — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:25:35 +0000

Nobody is asking the obvious question – where did the documents end up?
America may be lenient with some “friendly” spying, I guess.
However if Pollard was used to attain some key documents, that might have been requested by the Soviets, and if the Americans have reason to believe Pollard knew who these documents would be valuable for, then they may treat Pollard as a traitor.
Regardless of their relationship with Israel.
—
They might view Pollard as an internal matter.

By: Gerry

Gerry — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:06:30 +0000

you’ve got us XYZ. Good thing it’s so simple to categorize everyone as one big group. Us leftists all believe the same things in lockstep. Just don’t treat jews in the same hackney, that’s antisemitism.

Must be nice to have a bogeyman like that to blamed all your failings on!

By: max

max — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 19:20:55 +0000

Annie, I strongly doubt that you know more than I do, which isn’t much since – as the case wasn’t fully public – whatever I think I know I read or heard from people with interest.
So as is quite often the case, I’m left with judgement that American justice isn’t the worse you can find, and my ability to compare, to benchmark.
And this benchmarking seems to clearly indicate that Pollard’s treatment is worse than you’d expect – by far – and this very assessment is the reason for Larry’s article. However, his proposal doesn’t make the result look more humane or America look more Just.

By: annie

annie — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:37:55 +0000

i think some people are underestimating the long term damage pollard caused to our national security. it boggles my mind how anyone would think he should be released. “signals intelligence, or SIGINT, and their world is kept in order by an in-house manual known as the RASIN an acronym for radio-signal notations. The manual, which is classified “top-secret Umbra,” fills ten volumes, is constantly updated, and lists the physical parameters of every known signal. Pollard took it all. “It’s the Bible,” one former communications-intelligence officer told me. “It tells how we collect signals anywhere in the world…..IN the mid-nineteen-eighties, the daily report from the Navy’s Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, was one of America’s Cold War staples. A top-secret document filed every morning at 0800 Zulu time (Greenwich Mean Time), it reported all that had gone on in the Middle East during the previous twenty-four hours, as recorded by the N.S.A.’s most sophisticated monitoring devices. The reports were renowned inside Navy commands for their sophistication and their reliability; they were based.. on data supplied both by intelligence agents throughout the Middle East and by the most advanced technical means of intercepting Soviet military communications. The Navy’s intelligence facility at Rota shared space with a huge N.S.A. intercept station, occupied by more than seven hundred linguists and cryptographers, which was responsible for monitoring and decoding military and diplomatic communications all across North Africa. Many at Rota spent hundreds of hours a month listening while locked in top-secret compartments aboard American ships, aircraft, and submarines operating in the Mediterranean…. he had provided the Israelis with more than a year’s worth of the daily FOSIF reports… “Pollard gave them every message for a whole year,” the officer told me recently, referring to the Israelis. “They could analyze it” — the intelligence — “message by message, and correlate it. They could not only piece together our sources and methods but also learn how we think, and how we approach a problem. All of a sudden, there is no mystery. These are the things we can’t change. You got this, and you got us by the balls.”"

By: annie

annie — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 14:23:53 +0000

in 1999 seymour hersh wrote THE TRAITOR, The case against Jonathan Pollard. “During his year and a half of spying, his Israeli handlers requested specific documents, which were identified only by top-secret control numbers. After much internal assessment, the government’s intelligence experts concluded that it was “highly unlikely,” in the words of a Justice Department official, that any of the other American spies of the era would have had access to the specific control numbers. “There is only one conclusion,” the expert told me. The Israelis “got the numbers from somebody else in the U.S. government.” “

By: aristeides

aristeides — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:44:22 +0000

XYZ sez – “There is no question in my mind that the fact that they were Jews played a major role in the unjust penalty they were given”

.
The problem is in your mind.

.
The Rosenbergs were certainly punished unjustly, but because they were communists, not Jews, and because the secrets they stole were nuclear. The parallel is with Morchechai Vanunu, except that the Rosenbergs’ secrets were of greater significance.