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Key Document in Jonathan Pollard Case Declassified

(Jerusalem Post) Eliot Lauer and Jacques Semmelman - On Nov. 13, 2014, after years of litigation, the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) granted our appeal and ordered the declassification of significant portions of a declaration submitted to the court in 1987 by then-secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger in connection with Jonathan Pollard's sentencing. As a result, longstanding government assertions that this document contains proof that Pollard caused unprecedented harm to the U.S. have now been exposed as utter falsehoods. In 1987, Pollard was sentenced to life in prison, largely on the basis of the Weinberger declaration. Since then, the government has invoked the Weinberger declaration, as recently as Pollard's parole hearing in July 2014, as its basis to oppose executive clemency or parole. The newly disclosed material shows that any harm that may have been caused by Pollard was in the form of short-term disruption in foreign relations between the U.S. and certain Arab countries. That is not the same as harm to U.S. national security. While the phrase "damage to the national security" is used as a section heading, what appears below it is, once again, in the nature of potential impact on foreign relations. For example, Weinberger bemoans the fact that Pollard provided information that enabled Israel to conduct a "successful strike on PLO headquarters in Tunisia." Another recently declassified document, a 1987 CIA study of the Pollard case, concludes that Pollard supplied Israel with information regarding Arab and Pakistani nuclear intelligence, Arab military capability and weaponry (including biological and chemical weapons), Soviet advisers in Syria and Soviet training of Syrian personnel, the PLO's Force 17, and a radio signal notation manual requested by Israel to help in the decryption of intercepted communications of Soviet military advisers in Damascus. The writers have been Jonathan Pollard's pro bono attorneys since 2000.
2015-02-27 00:00:00
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