25th Anniversary Review Series - Article #2:
A 20th Century Dreyfus?
Justice4JP - November 13, 2009
To mark Jonathan Pollard's 25th year in American captivity - which is also his 25th year of abandonment and betrayal by the government of Israel - J4JP will be reviewing some of the best-written, most informative, and most interesting articles, essays and information written about the case over the last two and a half decades. This is article number two of the series and it is written by distinguished author and journalist, William Stevenson.
A 20th-century Drefyus?
U.S. Navy Man Knew of Iraq's Secret Weapons:
Was Warning Israel Really Such A Crime?
October 21, 1991 - William Stevenson - The Toronto Sun: Saturday Spotlight
Jonathan Jay Pollard was jailed for life because, while serving in U.S. naval intelligence, he secretly warned Israel in 1985 against Iraq's development of doomsday weapons. When Israel prepared to attack Iraq's nuclear and chemical facilities, the Reagan administration objected strongly because it was then helping Iraq in its war against Iran.
Now, President George Bush's choice for directing the Central Intelligence Agency, Robert M. Gates, defending the CIA for intelligence failures, testifies on the contrary that many failures arose from the Reagan administration's reliance on Israeli intelligence.
Neither Pollard nor Israel can win the argument before Washington lawmakers, because the CIA, like Humpty-Dumpty can "make words mean just what I choose them to mean - neither more or less."
Pollard, and a brilliant Israeli combat pilot-cum-strategist, Aviem Sella, are now being punished for actions based on intelligence the U.S. government rejected in the mid-1980s.
The Gulf War proved the Israelis right.
President Bush, eight months later, pointed up the dangers posed by Iraq's nuclear and chemical facilities. Sella planned the long-range bombing of Iraq's first nuclear complex in 1981 and wanted to strike again after obtaining U.S. spy satellite maps pinpointing Iraqi facilities. Those maps were provided by Pollard becausethe U.S. government broke intelligence-sharing agreements with Israel.
Sella had been in Toronto, seeking Canadian help to build a synagogue on an Israeli air base, when on Nov. 16, 1985, he flew to Washington D.C. to see Pollard. Five days later, Pollard's bizarre attempt to seek political asylum at the Israeli embassy broke the story.
Pollard was wrong, he readily confessed, to pass intelligence to Israel. He had asked colleagues in the U.S. Navy's Terrorist Alert Unit why they terminated vital intelligence to Israel. Getting no answer, he felt compelled to tell Israel what has finally been confirmed long after the "victory" over Iraq, which left Saddam Hussein intact and free to conceal his machinery for mass destruction. That machinery was not ready because Israel crippled some parts and prevented western suppliers from completing other weapons before the Gulf war broke out.
"What, in fact was Pollard's crime?" asked the Baltimore Sun recently. "He informed the Israelis that Iraq was building both nuclear facilities and what we now know as the Condor II missile, whose range enabled it to reach Israel ... He betrayed the fact that nerve and biological gases were being shipped to Iraq ...
When he asked his superiors why such intelligence was not being relayed to Israel, he was told, " Jews are too sensitive to gas.' "
Pollard was never put on trial. His wife was seriously ill and he co-operated so fully with U.S. authorities that investigators say his help was
invaluable
and his motives understandable. In return, he was offeredimplicit and explicit promises
to mitigate the charges.Enter Caspar Weinberger, then U.S. secretary of defence, and former vice president and legal counsel to the Bechtel Group, which he now once again assists in its multi-billion dollar business with Arab states.
Weinberger said Pollard should be shot
, and the former naval intelligence analyst was stashed away in amental hospital
, and then in amaximum security prison reserved for those criminals singled out for the harshest punishment
as a warning to others. He spends 23 hours a day in an underground cell which, claim his supporters, is regularly flooded with human sewage.His then-wife was jailed as an accessory; but after protests from horrified visitors who saw her wasting away from her illness, she has been released. Painfully thin to begin with, she lost 55 pounds in three months.