WASHINGTON — For decades he has been both a cause celebre for many Israelis, as well as an emblem of treachery for many Americans: Jonathan J. Pollard, the former US Navy analyst and convicted spy.
Now, as Secretary of State John F. Kerry prepares to return Wednesday to Jerusalem to prevent peace talks from unraveling, the confinement of Pollard for passing military secrets to Israel in the 1980s has been thrust center stage once again — this time over whether his freedom should be part of a controversial prisoner release deal.
And right onto the front page of my agenda-pushing paper!
On Tuesday, Israel released the third of four groups of Palestinian prisoners as part of an interim agreement Kerry reached in August to restart negotiations over the creation of an independent Palestinian state.
But top Israeli officials are reportedly refusing to let go a number of jailed Arabs who held Israeli ID cards — so-called Israeli Arabs — unless the United States releases the 59-year-old Pollard. Pollard was sentenced in 1987 to life in prison, where many US officials believe he should stay for betraying his country. He is being heldin a federal penitentiary in North Carolina.
This is BLACKMAIL!
Related:
U.S. and U.K. Spied on Israel
Globe Not on Guardian
Good thing I am.
Quoting unnamed officials in the office of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Hebrew language Ma’ariv newspaper reported Tuesday that the Israeli government has relayed a clear demand for Pollard’s release to US officials on the eve of Kerry’s visit.
So not only did they announce settlement expansion they put this out.
“We will release Israeli Arabs only in exchange for Pollard,” an official is quoted as telling the paper.
In response, Palestinian officials are accusing Israel of introducing an outlandish demand as a means of torpedoing the talks.
Other Israeli media have also reported that US officials have indicated they would be willing to discuss the Pollard case, though the Obama administration has declined to address publicly whether Pollard’s imprisonment is being reviewed as part of the broader negotiations.
Un-flipping-real!
Release Pollard and there will be calls for impeachment.
“I know there have been a lot of rumors out there, and I’m just not going to get into the details of fact-checking whether those are true or not,” State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf told reporters Monday.
Yeah, since when did the State Department ever care about checking for facts and the truth?
The White House on Dec. 24 said its position remained unchanged from when President Obama visited Israel in March and said he had “no plans for releasing Jonathan Pollard immediately.’’ Obama added at the time: “What I am going to be doing is to make sure that he is accorded the same kinds of review as others.”
See: Obama's Trip to Israel
The reported Pollard demand complicates Kerry’s mission this week.
And Israel is supposed to be our friend.
The secretary is making his 10th trip to the region in less than a year, hoping to convince the two parties by April to reach an agreement on “final status” issues. Those include the status of Jerusalem in any future Palestinian state, permanent borders, and security guarantees, possibly including foreign peacekeepers.
Like a framework?
A number of circumstances are imperiling the talks, including the continued construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967, and a new round of Palestinian violence.
Pollard, a civilian intelligence analyst, was convicted for sharing satellite photos and other intelligence information with Israel over a period of several years. He was first enlisted by Israel after the United States officially curtailed some intelligence sharing with its longtime ally in the wake of the Israeli Air Force’s bombing of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981.
And it was only for nuclear power, folks? Are we seeing a possible repeat with Iran?
When he was caught, Pollard agreed to plead guilty in return for a lighter sentence. But the judge in the case intervened and handed down a life sentence, which some legal experts considered unfairly harsh given that the type of information he shared was previously made available to the longtime American ally through official channels.
I think he is lucky he is still alive.
Supporters of Pollard’s suspect it was a secret affidavit from then-Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger that prompted the judge to overturn the plea agreement and hand down the maximum sentence.
I never much liked Cap Weinberger, but….
Pollard’s release has attracted unusually broad political support in Israel, which granted him citizenship in 1995.
Both the hawkish Netanyahu as well as Israel’s president and peace advocate Shimon Peres have repeatedly advocated for it. Recent revelations that the US National Security Agency was spying on the e-mail communications of Israeli leaders only strengthened the view in Israel that Pollard’s freedom was overdue.
What does that matter? ALL NSA DATA is being GIVEN TO ISRAEL in BULK!
In the United States, Pollard counts among his advocates Nobel Peace Prize winner and Boston University professor Eli Wiesel and former United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson, who earlier this month wrote a letter to President Obama urging he set Pollard free.
“The most effective argument is on humanitarian grounds,” Richardson said at the time.
Humanitarian was sparing his life. He should have been executed.
Others agree that Pollard, who will be eligible for parole in 2015, deserves a new hearing whether he has influential supporters or not.
“[Pollard] did neither more nor less than supply them with what had been denied as a result of the Osirak flap,” said Angelo Codevilla, a professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University and former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who has followed Pollard’s case from the start. “He should have gone to jail, no question about that. But not for life.”
Seymour Reich, former chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, has visited Pollard in prison with Wiesel.
“He pleaded guilty, he was promised a sentence that was not substantial. At the last moment the judge, as was his right, decided to a impose life in prison,” said Reich. “The sentence was unjustified. What he did was wrong and he deserved to be imprisoned. He should be freed on humanitarian grounds and now is a good time to do it.”
Any easing of Pollard’s sentence, however, would likely meet fierce resistance from the US spy community. When President Bill Clinton considered it in 1998, then-CIA Director George Tenet threatened to resign. Tenet recalled in his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” what he told Clinton at the time.
“If a spy is let out as a consequence of these negotiations, I will never be able to lead my building.”
Related:
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High-Fivers and Art Student Spies
The Israeli Spy Ring
The Mother of all Scandals
Didn't seem to bother Tenet much, did it?
But not everyone is convinced that there would now be the same outcry.
Because Israeli control over AmeriKa is at a record level.
“Keep in mind his views on Pollard were pertinent to that time,” said Bill Harlow, a former agency official, “and not necessarily transferable to the current environment.”
What is clear is that the United States believes the release of additional Palestinian prisoners by Israel is crucial in creating the atmosphere for more meaningful compromises.
Said the State Department’s Harf: “The Israeli Government’s commitment to release Palestinian prisoners helped enable the start, as we all remember, and the continuation of the final status negotiations, and we believe this is a positive step forward in the overall process.”
Some Israeli analysts believe that Pollard could be a key bargaining chip for Kerry to get Israel to make deeper concessions to the Palestinians.
“If Kerry feels Netanyahu needs Pollard to make such a historic decision,” Barak Ravid wrote Tuesday in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, “he won’t hesitate to try to persuade Obama to release Pollard.”
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Related:
"In Israel, Greenwald reveals whose agenda he is serving
Maidhc Ó Cathail
The Passionate Attachment
January 7, 2014
When waging unconventional warfare, timing is everything.
In some pro-Israel circles, President Barack Obama and his Secretary of State John Kerry are now being hysterically compared to Neville Chamberlain for their alleged “betrayal” of the self-defined “Jewish state” to yet another imminent Holocaust as a result of Obama’s historic, albeit so far limited, rapprochement with today’s supposed equivalent of a genocidal Nazi regime in Tehran and Kerry’s sustained diplomatic effort to get Israel to return to its so-called “Auschwitz borders” prior to its premeditated 1967 Land Grab. In light of this dual “existential threat” posed by the Obama administration to a Greater Israel, the interview given to Israeli TV by Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who first published documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that revealed the scope of U.S. spying worldwide, is as close to a “game theory warfare” smoking gun as you’re going to get.
Speaking to Israel’s Channel 10 — whose biggest shareholder, cosmetics billionaire Ronald Lauder, is President of the World Jewish Congress — Greenwald criticized “the continued imprisonment of Jonathan Pollard,” who was sentenced to life in prison in 1987 after passing more than a million highly classified documents to Israel while working as an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy. (Incidentally, Channel 10 owner Lauder is also a supporter of clemency for Pollard.) As reported today by Haaretz, here’s what Greenwald told his Israeli audience about the spy, who, in the words of former CIA officer Philip Giraldi, “did more damage to the United States than any spy in history”:
Greenwald agreed that the Snowden revelations are relevant to Pollard’s case. “When the U.S. government goes around the world criticizing other countries for spying on allies and prosecuting them,” he said, “are they going to maintain that with a straight face when they’re doing exactly that?”
It’s proper to raise Pollard’s case in the context of U.S. spying on its Israeli ally, he continued, because that underscores the hypocrisy of what the U.S. itself is doing. The U.S. government, Greenwald charged, does exactly what it accuses its enemies of doing, and no country has the right to say other countries shouldn’t do something while it is secretly violating that very same taboo.While some may be willing to concede that Greenwald’s charge of U.S. government hypocrisy is perfectly valid, the acclaimed “independent” journalist’s remarks that American national security does not require surveillance of its so-called “ally” in Tel Aviv is at best naïve, at worst disingenuous:
Asked about the U.S. government’s claim that the purpose of the eavesdropping is to fight terrorism, he responded by citing the documents’ revelations that the NSA eavesdropped on both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli officials, asking, Does the U.S. government think Angela Merkel is a terrorist? Or that democratically elected Israeli officials are involved in terror?Although many Greeks and other Europeans may justifiably view Chancellor Merkel’s austerity measures as a form of economic terrorism, could Greenwald seriously be oblivious to Israel’s long track record of terrorism, not only its state terrorism against the indigenous Palestinians and their neighbours but its less widely-known, albeit acknowledged, false flag terror attacks on its American benefactor and imperial proxy?
Given the account of the “Five Dancing Shlomos” caught celebrating in Liberty Park, New Jersey as the twin towers burned on Sept. 11, 2001, as well as much other well-documented evidence pointing toward Israeli complicity in the 9/11 attacks — used with alacrity by Israel loyalists such as Joe Lieberman as a pretext to strip Americans of much of their constitutional rights while others such as Michael Chertoff profited from the hyped “need” for greater “security” in the post-9/11 “Homeland” — what kind of journalist genuinely concerned about civil liberties would deny that monitoring the conversations of a “spook, terrorist or criminal” such as Netanyahu, a harsh critic of NSA spying who infamously admitted that 9/11 as “very good” for Israel, is an essential requirement of any genuine fight against terrorism?
Like that other much-adored Jewish “critic of Israel” Noam Chomsky, Glenn Greenwald would appear to be just the latest branded anti-imperial “hero” serving to provide cover for a less transparent Israeli agenda.
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Related: In Israel, Greenwald Reveals Whose Agenda He is Serving
Glenn Greenwald Using “Snowden” Leaks, Shillin for Israel and … Jonathan Pollard
"So if anyone is still thinking that Glenn Greenwald is a 'real'
journalist and not an Israel firster hasbara 'take the money and run'
agent, please raise your hand. Not that many show of hands these days eh....
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No one remembers the Rosenbergs, huh?
"Outrage greets inmate release, West Bank push; Controversial projects paired by Israeli leader" by Jodi Rudoren | New York Times, December 31, 2013
JERUSALEM — As Israel prepared to release another group of 26 long-serving Palestinian prisoners overnight Monday, and was expected to follow quickly with another announcement of new construction in West Bank settlements, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu faced withering criticism from all corners, including conservative members of his own coalition.
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Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Yeah, I am sick of the Zionist Jew narrative and public relations propaganda posing as news media.
Palestinian leaders threatened that any new settlement activity could lead them to seek membership and sue Israel in the International Criminal Court, a move they had promised not to take during peace talks that started this summer.
European diplomats warned the Israelis in a series of high-level meetings over the past week against pairing the prisoner release with a construction announcement, as was done twice before.
Also see: EU puts pressure on Israel for peace with Palestinians
Even the Israeli right-wing forces that Netanyahu aimed to appease with the settlement initiative distanced themselves from the plan, denouncing any linkage between prisoners and construction as unfortunate or even immoral.
“He is wrong because he tries to please all sides. The result is nobody is happy with his steps,” said Eitan Haber, a veteran Israeli commentator, invoking a Hebrew idiom about how a bridegroom cannot dance at two weddings.
Haber, who was a close adviser to Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister, added, “If you are a true leader, a real leader, you must choose your way, and go and try to implement your ideas.”
Israeli news media reported that plans for 1,400 new housing units, including 600 in East Jerusalem, would be unveiled this week, as Secretary of State John Kerry is scheduled to make his 10th visit to the region to push for a peace agreement.
Crapping in Kerry's face!
I'm not a fan of Kohn Kerry, but as an American I am constantly offended by Israel's actions when our leaders visit. I suppose I should not be surprised because they do it to everyone. Must be why they are not very well liked around the world, among other rea$ons.
Kerry will propose a framework for a final-status agreement between Israel and the Palestinians when he travels to the region, the Associated Press reported.
Framework fell apart above.
State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf said Monday that Kerry will discuss with Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine a possible guideline for addressing all core issues in the decades-long dispute.
Harf says it is not clear whether any agreement on the proposed framework would be reached during the trip, which begins on Wednesday. The two sides resumed peace talks in July.
‘‘The Israeli government’s commitment to release Palestinian prisoners helped enable the start and continuation of the final status negotiations, and we believe this is a positive step forward in the overall process,’’ Harf said.
Although the United States opposes settlement expansion, Harf declined to criticize the new building proposal because it has not been finalized.
Netanyahu, who agreed to release a total of 104 Palestinian prisoners over nine months of negotiations rather than freeze settlement construction, said Monday that “the protection of settlement in the land of Israel” is one of the nation’s “vital interests.”
“Leadership is judged by its ability to take hard decisions,” the prime minister told lawmakers with his Likud faction. “The state of Israel, I believe, has a strategic interest in the existence of diplomatic negotiations whose goal is to achieve an agreement that will end the conflict.”
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Related:
"Israel has given final approval to building 272 more apartments in two isolated West Bank settlements, officials confirmed Monday, just as Secretary of State John Kerry wrapped up his latest mediating mission to the region. Kerry returned to Washington on Monday, after several days of talks with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, in hopes of forging the outlines of a peace deal. Kerry reported progress, but gaps remain."
Reading the Boston Globe is worthless, folks. Sorry.
