10 The Jewish Herald • Friday, March 22, 2013 13 O P - E D S


Prosecuting Terrorists Alan Joseph Bauer


T


he story recently broke that the U.S. had captured and extradited Osama bin-Laden’s


son-in-law, Suleiman Abu Ghaith. The former Al- Qaida spokesman was picked up as he traveled from Turkey to Amman, Jordan. The U.S. acted very quickly to prosecute bin-Laden’s son-in-law. Interestingly, in Amman, there lives a woman


who was far more active than Abu Ghaith in kill- ing and maiming American citizens. Ahlam Tamimi, described as a university stu-


dent and part-time journalist, planned the Sbar- ro massacre of August 2001 in Jerusalem and per- sonally led the guitar-case-carrying bomber to the crowded destination. Fifteen people were murdered, including two


American citizens; another four Americans were wounded in the massive explosion. Tamimi was arrested, tried, and sentenced to


How Pollard’s Sentence Helped American Jews


Cameron S. Brown P


resident Barack Obama’s visit to Israel has reignited once more the question about Jonathan Pollard,


and whether after 27 years he should be set free. In this debate, there is an ugly, generally unspo-


ken, truth about Pollard’s sentence: it is only tangen- tially connected to Israel. He continues to rot in pris- on both because of the enormous success enjoyed by American Jews, and to prevent the Pollard case from jeopardizing that success. Generally, those who support Pollard’s release want


the discussion to be about Pollard’s disproportionate and excessive sentence. If this was a typical spy case, that argument would have been accepted over a de- cade ago. Until 2001, some suggested that perhaps Pollard’s


secrets ended up unintentionally in Soviet hands, and that this had resulted in the death of almost a dozen American spies. Yet the discovery of two highly placed Soviet, then Russian spies — Aldrich Ames (a CIA counter-intelligence chief arrested in 1994) and Rob- ert Hanssen (an FBI agent arrested in 2001) — made it clear that Pollard had no connection to the issue at all. Yet, that was 12 years ago. Indeed, as more light has


been shed on the case over the past 27 years, it has become impossible to explain why Pollard was the only person to receive a life sentence for spying on behalf of an ally in peace time — a sentence without parallel in Ameri- can history. By what measure of justice does Pollard de- serve the same prison sentence as Ames and Hanssen, who both actively undermined American national se- curity by selling out American spies to its arch enemy? To appreciate the miscarriage of justice, compare


Pollard with Steven J. Lalas, an American of Greek ethnicity who sold hundreds of documents to the Greek government, including the identities of CIA agents and information about U.S. military movements. Despite the gravity of Lalas’ crimes, and despite his failure to fully disclose the extent of his activities to the FBI, he only received 14 years in prison. Perhaps the most “apples to apples” comparison is


with Robert Kim, a Korean-American who, like Pol- lard, worked as a civilian analyst for the Navy at Suit- land, Maryland, passing secrets about North Korea to South Korea. Kim only received nine years for his crime because he — just like Pollard — cooperated and reached a plea bargain. Only with Kim, the U.S. gov- ernment honored their part of the bargain. But again, Pollard’s is not a typical spy case. Had


he sold similar information to Australia or Saudi Ara- bia, Pollard would not have become a household name and would have been freed long ago. Pollard’s case was dealt with disproportionately be-


cause it resonated with one of the oldest, and most te- nacious, antiSemitic aspersions ever cast on the Jews: dual-loyalty. Neither Koreans nor Greeks are the sub- ject of such unshakable suspicions.


At the same time, American Jews have become more


fully integrated in American political and governmen- tal life than in any other country (spare Israel) at any other time. They are exceedingly prominent in both Republican and Democratic parties, serve in the most senior positions of every administration in every agen- cy, and thus have access to America’s top secrets. When Pollard used this access to give Israel reams


of classified information, he struck at both the heart of this vulnerability and the heart of this centuries- old suspicion. Thus the reason Pollard continues to rot in prison,


even as his health fails him, is for the same reason, his- torically, that governments kept the corpses of those ex- ecuted in the town square. The stench filling citizens’ nostrils was a reminder of what would happen should one break the covenant with their society. As Isabel Kirshner of the New York Times summa-


rized the CIA position in 2010, “the release of Mr. Pol- lard would send a bad message about how the United States viewed people who traded in American secrets.” But the point is not really to deter Americans. Pollard’s


suffering is meant to deter other American Jews. However, the irony most observers miss, especially


in Israel, is that Pollard’s sentence created a way for American Jews to move beyond the Pollard scandal, and allowed them to continue to play a central role in America’s most sensitive positions. Correspondingly, the longer Pollard has sat in prison, and the more the American government appears merciless in his case, the more American Jews can continue without fear that they will be suspect because everyone knows what happens to a Jew caught spying for Israel. This dynamic is so strong that we should not be sur-


prised if one day we learn that some of America’s most influential Jews have not just abstained from work- ing on behalf of Pollard’s release, they may have ac- tively sabotaged it. To push an already controversial topic even further,


allow me to suggest that if prominent Jewish Americans indeed undermined Pollard, the knee-jerk reaction of many will be to condemn them. Yet with a bit of perspec- tive, American Jews probably owe them more gratitude than disdain. The fact is it worked. Since Pollard’s ar- rest, Jews have only climbed higher up the federal gov- ernment ladder. When Joe Lieberman ran for vice presi- dent in 2000, the question of dual loyalty did not dog him. All this said, eventually, even medieval courts would


take down the rotting body once the message was clear- ly sent. Pollard is no innocent. He betrayed the oath he took and he jeopardized the ability of American Jews to work for their government, questions doubtless be- ing raised about where their true loyalties lie. But af- ter 27 years, let’s hope Obama realizes it is time to bury this and move on.


Cameron S. Brown is Neubauer Research Fellow at the In- stitute for National Security Studies, Tel Aviv University.


16 life sentences. In October 2011, she went free as part of the deal Israel made to release its cap- tured soldier, Gilad Shalit. Today, Tamimi lives in Amman, where she has


her own talk show. As to her role in the bombing, one can hear it in her own words. Tamimi’s is the story of the failure of U.S. law


enforcement. After the murder of Leon Klinghoffer on the Achille Lauro in 1985, the U.S. passed a set of laws to make a terror act against a U.S. citizen anywhere in the world an offense prosecutable in U.S. federal court. These laws form the legal ba- sis for extradition of terrorists and pirates but, to date, the U.S. has never applied them to a Pales- tinian terrorist involved in the death or injury of an American citizen. This state of affairs is not due to a lack of such


incidents: from the 1993 signing of the Oslo Ac- cords to 2006, the tail end of the “second intifada,” Palestinian terrorists murdered 54 American cit- izens and wounded another 84 — including this writer and his son — in a total of 72 separate ter- ror attacks. The FBI dutifully opened files on ev- ery attack and a new office was opened in the De- partment of Justice to “monitor” such cases: the Office of Justice for Victims of Overseas Terror- ism (OJVOT). If anything should be abolished during the pres-


ent “sequester,” it is this office: as many Palestin- ians have been tried since this office came into ex- istence in 2005 as before then — zero. While no Palestinian terrorist has ever been


extradited by the U.S., the Department of Justice has been busy coordinating with Israel the trans- fer to the U.S. of accused drug dealers and want- ed criminals. Since 2004, two years after my son and I were the recipients of Palestinian shrapnel from a suicide bombing, I have badgered, begged and pleaded with U.S. officials to actually prose- cute Palestinian terrorists. While their responses have uniformly sounded


sincerely full of concern and determination (“The United States is committed to seeking justice for our citizens victimized by terrorism whether at home or abroad” — Attorney-General Eric Hold- er to this writer), no Palestinian terrorist has ever been prosecuted. When Israel was set to release hundreds of convicted terrorists in the aforemen- tioned Shalit deal, I frantically contacted officials in the U.S. government: the two women who brought “our” bomber to downtown Jerusalem were on the launch pad for release. The U.S. belatedly passed along to the Israeli


government that no terrorist with American blood on his or her hands should be released. This note was given the day before the prisoner


exchange. Needless to say, Israel ignored the re- quest and not a word was said in Washington about the matter. The reason is simple: Washington never expect-


ed Israel to comply because our cases are irrel- evant for the FBI and the Justice Department. When the terrorists were released for the Israeli soldier, the FBI could not even figure out who got out: they could not translate the names, while iden-


C O N T I NU E D O N P A G E 3 3


Illustration Wes Bausmith


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42