​Exposed: Secret Weinberger memo reveals Pollard sentence a sham

By Aaron Klein - Worldnetdaily Exclusive – February 22, 2015

[May be reprinted with credit to author and courtesy of Worlnetdaily.com]

http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/exposed-secret-memo-reveals-pollard-sentence-a-sham/



NEW YORK – With little fanfare and no news media coverage, a dramatic,
potentially game-changing development in the Jonathan Pollard spy case
quietly occurred three months ago.

Jonathan Pollard is currently serving his 30th year of an unprecedented life
sentence in a U.S. prison for espionage on behalf of an ally, Israel.

After years of failed efforts petitioning the government and the court
system to gain access to the classified material used to sentence their
client, Pollards’ security-cleared attorneys finally won an appeal for
declassification last fall.

As a result of the appeal, key sections of a 28-year-old classified document
that was the central justification for Pollard’s unprecedentedly harsh
sentence were declassified and released Nov. 13, 2014.

The 49-page document in question is a memorandum that was submitted to the
sentencing judge in 1987 by then-Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger.

The document was obtained and reviewed by WND.

Pollard, who worked as a civilian intelligence analyst for the U.S. Navy,
was arrested in 1985 and indicted in 1987 on one count of passing classified
information to an ally, Israel. He gave up his right to a trial and entered
into a plea agreement, which was intended to spare both Israel and the U.S.
the embarrassment and damage that a lengthy trial might incur. Despite the
government’s acknowledgment that Pollard fulfilled all the terms of his plea
agreement, the government reneged. He was sentenced to life despite the plea
deal.

Pollard is the only person in U.S. history to receive a life sentence for
spying for an ally. The median sentence for the offense is two to four
years.

His sentence is generally acknowledged to have been driven by Weinberger’s
memorandum, a document that was never disclosed to the public nor to any of
Pollard’s security-cleared attorneys from the time that he was sentenced in
1987.

According to U.S. government representations of the memo for nearly three
decades, the document was alleged to demonstrate that Pollard was the spy
responsible for the greatest harm to U.S. national security up to the time
of his sentencing. The government has persisted in this characterization of
the document despite a number of other documents which have been brought to
public attention and which appear to contradict the government’s claims. The
material includes the victim impact statement and a recently declassified
1987 CIA damage assessment of the case. And now, the new declassifications
of the Weinberger document itself.

Since his formal sentencing in 1987, the U.S. government has repeatedly
cited the secret Weinberger document as its main basis to oppose either
parole or presidential pardon for Pollard.

Last July, at Pollard’s first parole hearing after 29 years in prison, the
government again cited the Weinberger declaration, claiming it contained
sufficient evidence to warrant a denial of parole. Neither Pollard’s
security-cleared attorneys nor the parole commission itself were allowed to
view the document.

At the parole hearing, the government relied upon the document to claim
Pollard’s case represented “the greatest compromise of U.S. national
security to that date” – a charge which the parole board accepted without
viewing the document. Numerous former U.S. officials who viewed the document
have since stated categorically that representation is false.



POLLARD'S SPY ACTIVITIES LISTED




About 20 percent of the memo is still classified, while many of the section
heads of the still secretive sections can now be seen in the declassified
version.

According to the document, as reviewed by WND, the crux of Pollard’s spy
activities described in the declassified sections affected the U.S.
relationships with Middle Eastern countries.

It states that Pollard provided Israel with information on Soviet weaponry
and radar systems, information of vital import to the Jewish state’s
security since at the time almost all of the technology used by Israel’s
enemies was Soviet-made.

The document notes Pollard “provided information on Soviet built air-to-air
missile systems and Middle East air orders of battle,” even while allowing
“[s]ince Israel depends for its national security on control of Middle East
air space, much of this information was considered vital, and, as Col. Sella
[of the Israeli Air Force] remarked, was not previously possessed by
Israel.”

The memo states Pollard provided information concerning the fighting
capabilities of Israel’s Mideast adversaries, with many of the specific
examples still classified.

In one newly declassified section, the document reveals Pollard provided
Israel with information on the Libyan air force. This data resulted in
enabling an Israeli airstrike on Palestine Liberation Organization
headquarters in Tunisia by helping the Israelis avoid confrontation with
Libyan air defenses.

The Libyan case provides a glimmer into what Weinberger viewed as harmful to
U.S. national security. Weinberger wrote in the memo the strike harmed U.S.
regional interests because of the resultant damage and loss of life – 62
Palestinians and 27 Tunisians were killed in raid. Weinberger called those
deaths a “detriment” to the U.S.

He further complained the Israeli airstrike may damage relations with Libya,
which the Defense Secretary said he viewed as an “honest broker” for U.S. He
said Libya was helpful when it volunteered, with U.S. assistance, to provide
sanctuary to Yasser Arafat’s PLO – which at the time was regarded by Israel
as an enemy terrorist organization – when Arafat’s group was exiled from
Lebanon in 1982.

Weinberger further claimed Pollard caused “harm” to the U.S. intelligence
community by sharing with Israel intelligence that the U.S. did not believe
was in its interests to provide to the Jewish state.

States the document: “Defendant not only provided classified information to
Israel, which Israel was not authorized to receive, but in doing so, he
furnished original source documents, which had not been ‘sanitized,’ thus
substantially compounding the harm.”

Weinberger is implying Israel was not supposed to receive full intelligence
on some issues and Pollard undermined that policy. Weinberger himself signed
the 1983 U.S.-Israel Memorandum of Understanding that established strategic
military and intelligence cooperation between the U.S. and Israel on
regional threats.



ATTORNEYS PETITION OBAMA

In an oped published at WND today, Pollard’s pro bono attorneys, Eliot Lauer
and Jacques Semmelman, stated, “The recent disclosures … show that the
government has been dishonestly hiding behind the mask of ‘classified
information’ to materially mischaracterize the nature and extent of the harm
caused by Mr. Pollard.”

Lauer and Semmelman contend, “The newly disclosed material shows that any
harm that may have been caused by Mr. Pollard was in the form of short-term
disruption in foreign relations between the United States and certain Arab
countries. That is not at all the same thing as harm to U.S. national
security.”

In light of the new disclosures and the strong support from American
officials who have long questioned Pollard’s “grossly disproportionate” life
sentence, the attorneys urge President Obama to commute Pollard’s sentence
immediately.

Obama “has the solemn duty to uphold the law of the land by finally putting
a stop to this ongoing travesty. There are no more excuses. The president
should exercise his constitutional power and grant clemency to Jonathan
Pollard,” they state in the WND oped.



WEINBERGER CONTRADICTS OWN MEMO, SENIOR U.S. OFFICIALS DEMAND ‘JUSTICE’



Weinberger’s memorandum has been the U.S. government’s main basis for
Pollard’s continued incarceration. Yet stunningly, even Weinberger, before
his death in 2006, recanted. Weinberger stated in a 2002 interview that the
Pollard case was “a very minor matter, but made very important. … It was
made far bigger than its actual importance.”

Weinberger was one of the central figures accused in the Iran-Contra affair
of trading arms to Iran for hostages. He was indicted by a federal grand
jury on two counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice but
was pardoned before trial by President George H. W. Bush, who was Reagan’s
vice president during the scandal.

Since Pollard’s sentencing, a number of former Reagan Administration
officials who worked with Weinberger have charged that he was biased against
Israel and this affected his handling of the Pollard case.

Robert C. “Bud” McFarlane served as U.S. national security adviser and
worked closely with Secretary Weinberger.

In a letter dated Feb. 9, 2012, McFarlane wrote, “The affidavit filed by
former Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger was surely inspired in large
part by his deeply held animus toward the state of Israel. His extreme bias
against Israel was manifested in recurrent episodes of strong criticism and
unbalanced reasoning when decisions involving Israel were being made.”

McFarlane went on to say the “imprisonment of Mr. Pollard for more than 26
years is more than excessive,” and “a great injustice.”

Dr. Lawrence J. Korb served as assistant secretary of Defense under
Weinberger and worked closely with him from 1981 to 1985 (a period that
includes Mr. Pollard’s arrest). In a declaration filed Dec. 20, 2013, in the
United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Korb stated that
“the severity of Mr. Pollard’s sentence appears to be the result of Mr.
Weinberger’s almost visceral dislike of the impact that Israel has on U.S.
foreign policy.”

Korb went on to state, “I fully support Mr. Pollard’s application for
release on parole.”

In a letter dated July 5, 2012, R. James Woolsey, former director of the
CIA, wrote of Pollard that he supports his release and that it is time to
“free him.” Woolsey has repeatedly contended in his public statements on the
case that “anti-Semitism” is a factor in the on-going incarceration of
Pollard, and he has repeatedly urged the administration in the pages of the
Walls Street Journal and other newspapers to “Forget that Pollard is a Jew …
pretend he’s a Greek- or Korean- or Filipino-American and free him!”

The day after the new Weinberger declassifications were released last fall,
eight senior U.S. officials, fully versed in the classified material of the
case wrote a strongly worded letter to Obama decrying the parole commission’s
denial of parole to Pollard.

The officials include Woolsey, MacFarlane, Korb, former White House counsel
Bernard Nussbaum and other former heads of the Senate Intelligence
Committee. In their Nov. 14, 2014, letter they slam the alleged “lie” that
was used to deny Pollard parole.

The officials write, “The allegation that Pollard’s espionage ‘was the
greatest compromise of U.S. security to that date’ is false; and not
supported by any evidence in the public record or the classified file. Yet
it was this fiction that the Parole Commission cited to deny parole.”

The officials continue by noting that the government relied on a “stale,
largely discredited, 28-year-old classified memorandum written by former
Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger” in making its decision.

“Mr. Weinberger himself discounted his original damage assessment of the
Pollard case in a 2002 interview … [and] the unreliability of the 1987
Weinberger document was known to and ignored by the Parole Commission,” the
officials wrote.

Perhaps the most damning part of their letter to Obama, who when visiting
Israel in March of 2013 and stated there he would ensure Pollard received a
fair parole hearing, was the close of their appeal to the president:
“Denying a man his freedom based on a claim of damage that is patently false
while ignoring exculpatory documentary evidence and hiding behind a veil of
secret evidence is neither fair nor just, and it simply is not the American
way. …

“We therefore strongly urge you, Mr. President, to tolerate no further delay
in rectifying an injustice that has gone on for far too long. We urge you to
act expeditiously to commute Mr. Pollard’s life sentence to the [more than]
29 years which he has already served.”



SEE ALSO:



WND Exclusive OpEd: Feds Lied about Jonathan Pollard for Thirty Years – by
Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman [May be reprinted]
http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/feds-lied-for-30-years-about-jonathan-pollard/



Haaretz: Senior US Officials: Charge used to keep Pollard in prison patently
false http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2014/112014c.htm



Doc: Letter by 8 Senior US Officials Slamming Unjust Denial of Parole to
Pollard http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2014/111414.pdf



Document: Clemency Letter to President Obama by Pollard Attorneys –October
2014 ( Re: unjust, flawed parole process) www.JonathanPollard.org



JPost Editorial: Prisoner of Zion in the US
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Prisoner-of-Zion-in-the-US-383577


--

JUSTICE FOR JONATHAN POLLARD
Website: http://www.JonathanPollard.org
Follow J4JP on Twitter:http://twitter.com/J4JPollard
Follow J4JP on Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/justice4jp