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Among them, the New York Times, which called Mr. Pollard's sentence "just" and scolded that the U.S. government's "responsibility" is to "put limits on its intelligence- sharing to protect the nation's wider interests. Individuals like Mr. Pollard, whatever their mo- tivation, cannot be allowed to...take matters into their own hands...[Leniency] would mud- dy that lesson and perversely encourage other spies who see themselves as well-intentioned." For the Times to voice such anti-leniency sentiment may be especially telling since media critic Jude Wanniski has called the paper "clearly the principal voice of the national Democra- tic establishment." 2. Conservative columnist James. J. Kilpatrick demanded that Mr. Pollard "rot" in prison: Any clemency "will have more to do with politics than with jus- tice. In Pollard's case...justice has been quite well served." 3. The New York Jewish Week reported that Mr. Pollard had disavowed a key section of a letter he wrote to President Clinton last March expressing moral repugnance at his espi- onage. The paper also quoted Philip Baum, the American Jewish Congress' assistant ex- ecutive director, who portrayed Pollard advocates as "terrible people" who had called him and other Jewish leaders "traitors to the Jewish people." 4. The Times printed a letter from Alan V. Stone, president of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism, who as- serted that Mr. Pollard had "cost our country billions of dol- lars and possibly the lives of in- formants...There is no basis for claims that._ [he] is a 'political prisoner' or was mistreated by the judicial system." Mr. Stone also addressed the possibility of U.S. Jews' double- loyalty that has been high- lighted by the Pollard case: "Judaism is a religion of uni- versal values, not a nationality. American Jews are Americans, WPw''W110/111.11110 , Les Aspin: Against commutation. no different from Americans of other faiths. Israel, it must be clear, is a foreign country." 5. The Times reported from a source deep inside the Penta- gon that defense secretary Les Aspin recommended that the president not commute Mr. Pol- lard's sentence since he had tried to slip classified informa- tion into 14 letters from prison. One of the few bright spots in Mr. Pollard's crummy month came on the Baltimore Sun and the New York Times' op ed pages. In the Sun, Kenneth Lasson, a University of Balti- more law professor, argued that government lawyers had re- neged on a promise not to seek the maximum sentence for Mr. Pollard, and that, "in contrast to many other spies convicted of more serious crimes, Pollard was never accused of intending to harm the United States. Nor was he ever charged with trea- son — except by former secre- tary of defense, Casper Weinberger. Now even Mr. Weinberger, perhaps rendered contrite by his own recent par- don, says he wouldn't oppose re- ducing Pollard's life term." In the Times, Akiva Eldar, Washington bureau chief of the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, proposed that President Clin- ton commute Mr. Pollard's sen- tence and Israel commute the 18-year term given Mordechai Vanunu, the Israeli who gave the British what he said were secrets about Israel's nuclear weapons program. Both men, wrote Mr. Eldar, were "naive" and believed they were "serving a noble cause." Mercy "would be seen every- where as a willingness to let by- gones be bygones in favor of giving a timely catalyst to ef- forts to create a new order in the Middle East." . -