Playing Politics With Pollard Editorial of The New York Sun ****
http://www.nysun.com/editorials/playing-politics-with-pollard/89229/
What a moment for the Obama administration to leak word that it is considering releasing Jonathan Pollard. He is being held at a federal prison in North Carolina on a life sentence. Almost 30 years ago, he’d pled to a single count of passing defense information to, in Israel, a friendly nation. The Iran accord is coming up for a vote in the Congress. Israel is warning about appeasement. Could there be a connection? The Wall Street Journal quotes administration sources as suggesting there is.
This wouldn’t be the first time President Obama has played politics with Pollard. As recently as last spring the administration proffered the possibility of springing Pollard as part of what the Reuters called “an emerging deal to salvage Middle East peace talks.” Better the spy should sit in prison, we said at the time. If Pollard doesn’t deserve to be let out, we wrote, no release should be countenanced. If he does, no deal should be asked — leastwise one that demands Israel give up its legitimate claims.
The sad fact is that Pollard should never have been handed a life sentence to begin with. It’s not that we want any truck — we do not — with spying against America. We have said before that a life sentence would not be too long for even one count of handing serious American secrets over even to a friendly country. But we will never forget reading the dissenting opinion issued in Pollard’s case by Judge Stephen Williams of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
At the time the question was whether Pollard deserved a new sentencing hearing. Judge Williams concluded that American prosecutors violated both the letter and the spirit of the plea bargain they’d struck with Pollard. Judge Williams quoted Shakespeare, likening the prosecutors to the witches in “Macbeth” — “these juggling fiends no more believed, that palter with us in a double sense; that keep the word of promise to our ear, and break it to our hope.”
Our own basis for sensing that a new sentencing hearing was warranted was reports suggesting that the defense secretary at the time, Caspar Weinberger, had used the world “treason” or “traitor” to describe Pollard’s crime. The Constitution forbids Congress or the courts or any other arm of the government from defining treason as anything other than levying war against the United States or adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. Whatever Pollard did, it was not anything even close to that definition.
Yet the court reckoned that Pollard had missed an appeal deadline — and cast him away for life. It is to Israel’s credit that it has remembered Pollard and that Prime Minister Netanyahu has campaigned for Pollard’s release from the injustice of the violation of his plea bargain. But it would be a mistake for Israel to retreat from its criticism of the Iran deal in order to correct the injustice under which Pollard is suffering — and an abuse for the Obama administration to use Pollard for politics.
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