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Washington Watch

Fighting celemency for Pollard

JAMES D. BESSER
Washington Correspondent

he Jonathan Pollard contro-
versy came to a high boil
this week — again — as
the White House collected
comments from a host of federal
agencies as part of President Bill
Clinton's promised reevaluation of the
case for commutation.
Most of that input was negative —
much of it vehement, according to
reports here.
In anticipation of a possible move
by the President, Senate Intelligence
Committee Chair Richard C. Shelby
(R-Alabama) and the ranking
Democrat, Sen. Bob Kerrey, (D-Neb)
last week urged their colleagues to
weigh in against commutation.
Shelby said that releasing Pollard
would set a dangerous and unwise
precedent that crimes against the
United States are not serious."
/
Several Jewish leaders fired back;
World Jewish Congress President
Edgar Bronfman, Noble Peace Prize
winner Elie Wiesel and Alan
Dershowitz, the Harvard University
law professor and early Pollard
defender, urged Clinton to show
mercy by releasing Pollard.
The three leaders asked for a meet-
/—
ing with Clinton to counter the bar-
rage of anti-Pollard
input coming from
defense and intelli-
gence agencies.
But investigative
reporter Seymour
Hersh, writing in
this week's New
Yorker, cited
unnamed senior
intelligence officials
who claimed that
the damage Pollard
did to the nation's
intelligence appara-
tus was greater than Jonathan Pollard
previously revealed.
Hardline pro-Israel groups quickly
jumped on Hersh.
"After Seymour Hersh's long record
of false claims and bias against Israel, it
is surprising anyone would take serious-
ly his writings concerning Israel or
Pollard," said Morton Klein, president
of the Zionist Organization of America.

"

\

But the collective weight of this
week's developments — including
Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright's assessment that there is no
compelling foreign policy interest in
freeing Pollard — could add up to
bad news for Pollard, who has been
serving a life sentence since 1986.
The White House this week refused
to estimate when the President's
review would be completed.

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The Clinton administration's ire over
the de facto freeze in implementation
of the Wye River agreement — anger
directed primarily at the government
of Prime Minister Binyamin
Netanyahu — was kept at a low sim-
mer this week. Officials here tried
hard to express their displeasure with-
out getting entangled in the political
melee taking place in Israel.
On Monday, State Department
spokesman James Rubin asserted that
the Palestinians "have been making a
good faith effort" to implement their
Wye Agreement commitments,
including amending the charter of the
Palestinian National Council and
fighting
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said, "it is the Israelis who have not
fulfilled any of their Phase Two oblig-
ations" by postponing the required
West Bank redeployments.
That was the strongest
statement of displeasure yet
from the administration,
but it did not come close to
matching the mood of
anger and frustration
among the administration's
Mideast team.
Officials here were par-
ticularly infuriated by a
Washington Times op-ed by
Israeli ambassador Zalman
Shoval that they saw as
shifting all of the blame for
the stalled talks to the
Palestinians.
But administration offi-
cials say they are not likely to respond
positively to Palestinian demands that
they step up the pressure on the
Netanyahu government. To do so,
they said, would produce a backlash
in Israel that would give the embat-
tled Prime Minister a powerful
weapon to use in his reelection bid.

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.TEWISEI NEWS

Detroit Jewish News

1/15
1999

19