Obama To Release Israeli Spy?

Jonathan Pollard is an infamous spy in America, but widely loved and a cause célèbre on the Israeli right. While working for a series of American federal defense agencies, Pollard was providing classified information to the Israeli intelligence outfit, Mossad, and rendered his services for roughly a decade. What Pollard provided to Israel is not entirely certain since Israel, which claims to be America’s ally, refuses to tell the United States what Pollard handed.

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America’s biggest contention with Pollard is not just his treason committed against the United States in the name of his loyalty to Israel, but what the Russians may know. Israel’s sold Pollard’s information to the Soviet Union in exchange for release of some Soviet Jewry. That’s why Pollard’s case is so infamous. He was a spy both for Israel and indirectly for the Soviet Union.

Israelis though see it differently: To them Pollard is a hero whose information was used as leverage to allow for Soviet Jews to immigrate to Israel. And in that cause Israelis consistently champion Pollard’s release. Including Israeli political leaders:

The Israeli government has paid for at least two of Pollard’s trial attorneys—Richard A. Hibey and Hamilton Philip Fox III—and continues to ask for his release.[19] Benjamin Netanyahu and Ehud Barak, in 1999 in the context of the Israeli elections, exchanged barbs in the media over who was more supportive of Pollard.[4]

In 2002, Netanyahu visited Pollard in prison.[36][37] In 2007, Netanyahu claimed that if he was elected Prime Minister he would bring about the release of Jonathan Pollard.[3

So the Israelis love their spy and some of them even have the temerity to say that Pollard should be released simply because treason is defined as giving aid to the enemy. And Israel, after all, is not an enemy but an ally. That’s dubious. But, in any case, treason is treason no matter who and Pollard’s information made its way to Soviet hands.

The United States has consistently rebuffed Israeli efforts to release Pollard. Not because American presidents all of a sudden found a backbone in the face of Israeli demands, but because the intelligence/defense establishment would riot if this traitor was released. When Clinton contemplated Netanyahu’s demand, then C.I.A. director George Tenet threatened to resign and the deal was off.

But now there is news that Obama may considering releasing Pollard and over 30 members of Congress have signed onto a letter, at the behest of the Israel lobby, asking the president do to so.

And the Israeli prime minister has now put his request in official writing: "I respectfully ask that you favorably consider this request for clemency. The people of Israel will be eternally grateful."

If Obama releases Pollard to Netanyahu, who has rebuffed ever single thing Obama has asked of him, and hands over this torphy to a man who has consistently spit in his face then Obama will be President Cunt-Lips in my books.

Pollard should rot, but if he is to be released it better be in exchange for a peace deal:

Convicted spies can be bargaining chips. If Netanyahu were to commit to collapse his government, reassemble with sensible pragmatists in the Knesset, and deliver definitively on an internationally-accepted two state arrangement between Israel and Palestine, then I would support releasing Pollard to the Israelis.

There is nothing less than that that would suffice as the price for the release of this person who betrayed his nation. Israelis and Palestinians say that they could do a deal -- if both were serious -- in just a few months.

If so, then do the deal -- and release Pollard after the leaders have signed the pact and the Quartet and Arab League have blessed the arrangement.

That would be a price worth giving up a spy for -- but Obama giving him up for anything else would reinforce a view held by some that he is weak while simultaneously sending tremors of outrage through the intelligence community who see Pollard on par with Aldrich Ames and Richard Hanssen.