Free Pollard Now

January 5, 1996 - Heritage Southwest Jewish Press - Editorial

As the secular year ends, upper most on the wish of Heritage is the release - long, long overdue - of Jonathan Pollard from prison.

It is our hope that among the first items on the 1996 agenda of President Clinton is according a compassionate release to Pollard, whose only crime was to help protect the Israelis from inhuman nerve and chemical attacks by the hostile nations of Iraq, Iran and Libya.

Pollard has been in jail for more than 10 years, most of that time in solitary confinement.

The court acted to imposed a life sentence on Pollard when Caspar Weinberger, then secretary of defense, sent a secret letter to the judge requesting that the maximum sentence possible be imposed on Pollard.

The letter to a black federal judge was explosive. It charged, without any confirmation, that Pollard had spied for South Africa as well as Israel.

It alleged that Pollard had revealed to the South Africans information regarding a secret American "anti-terror weapon."

A total fabrication.

Other falsehoods employed by the government were revealed in the Aldridge Ames spy case. Ames, who was a paid spy for the Soviet Union, laid the blame for what he did onto Pollard. A despicable act by a despicable spy who sold out his country.

Why this Weinberger vendetta against Pollard, who clearly had not injured America in his wrongful effort to help Israel?

Both the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and his successor, Shimon Peres, have at long last made personal appeals to the president to free Pollard and return him to his new homeland, Israel.

Government, in the Pollard case, has long ago obtained its pound of flesh.