According to a bill proposed in the Knesset on Tuesday, Israel will pay for its agent Jonathan Pollard’s “reasonable living conditions” for the rest of his life following his expected release after 28 years of a 30-year prison sentence on November 20.
The conditions for Pollard’s parole have not yet been revealed; but it’s expected he will be forced to remain in the United States for the next five years and that he will immediately seek medical attention for multiple ailments.
By Eileen Fleming
On Tuesday Knesset House Committee chairman David Bitan (Likud), proposed a bill which would require the government to fund Pollard’s residence and medical expenses, and give him a monthly stipend to support him.
Pollard is 61, and could soon start collecting Israeli social security. He also could be hired as a consultant for Gail Berman’s The Jackal Group who are developing a feature film based on Martin Blank’s play “The Law Of Return,” about Pollard’s work for the US Navy, and how he became a spy, for FOX Networks Group.
On Monday according to the Washington Post, Pollard supporters asked Prime Minister Netanyahu to ask President Obama to use executive power and waive the parole conditions so that the released spy can be with his wife Esther who lives in central Jerusalem.
Netanyahu did not respond to reporters who asked about Pollard after his meeting at the White House.
In January 2011, Netanyahu became the first Israeli prime minister to formally and publicly request the release of Pollard in an official letter to President Obama calling for freedom for Pollard.
On 7 March 2014, M.E. “Spike” Bowman a former intelligence officer and specialist in national security affairs stated [at the National Summit to Reassess the U.S.-Israel “Special Relationship”]:
Jonathon Pollard had a top secret SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] clearance, and he had a courier pass. So he could take classified information out and anything he wanted. And he started giving information to the Israelis, and one of their comments was, don’t give us any secret information, we don’t need that level. Only top secret and SCI information…
And because of his credentials and his courier pass, he could go to the various intelligence libraries and get anything he wanted. And pretty soon the Israelis started tasking him with specific documents they wanted…
He didn’t start out to give information to the Israelis; he started out trying to sell anything he could, including classified information. He approached the Pakistanis, he approached the South Africans, and he approached the Australians. He turned over classified information to a South African attaché just as a show of good faith. So you know, he’s not a person who was trying just to help the Israelis; he was a pretty venal person here….
He took so much information to the Israelis, that they had to install two high-speed copiers in an apartment to take care of everything that he brought them. He would take information out every night in a couple of briefcases, give it to them to copy and then, because they had high speed copiers, they were able to get it back to him quickly. And then he would replace it as soon as he got to work in the morning.
How much did he give them? By his own admission, he said I gave them enough information to occupy a space that would be six feet by six feet by ten feet. That’s his admission. We never got the documents back from the Israelis that he gave them. Now they did give us a few documents back, they gave us a couple of thousand back. But really, you know, we don’t know all that he gave….
Now the information that he turned over, some of it actually was information covered by 18 U.S. Code 194, which is mostly electronics communication information. It carries the death penalty. But at the time that Jonathan Pollard did his espionage work, there was no death penalty in the United States. That had been ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. And at that time, a life sentence was really, in practice, 30 years….
In 1993, Ian Williams wrote for WRMEA that although “Pollard insists he was motivated by concern for Israeli security, he was paid (and is still being paid) a handsome salary by the Israeli government…The severity of Pollard’s sentence was based on secret testimony by [then-Defense Secretary] Caspar Weinberger, who is on record as saying that Pollard was lucky–he should have received three life sentences. Pollard provided Israeli intelligence with more than 1,000 classified U.S. documents, some consisting of hundreds of pages, comprising overall some 360 cubic feet of paper.
“According to American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh, Pollard sold information on nuclear targets in the Soviet Union to Israel. U.S. defense sources suggest that what caused the most bitter anger against Pollard in the Pentagon and throughout the American intelligence community was the fact that the information compromised human agents in the Soviet Union and elsewhere. U.S. intelligence sources have concluded that the Israeli government bartered this information to the Soviet Union.
“In March 1987, Pollard pled guilty and received a life sentence. One year later, in March 1988, Mordechai Vanunu, after a trial conducted in secret, during which he was forced to wear a motorcycle crash helmet in and out of the court, was sentenced to 18 years’ imprisonment. Since then he has been kept in solitary confinement in a 2-by-3-meter cell with artificial light only, kept on 24 hours a day. His family believes that the Israeli government is trying to drive him insane so that when his sentence is over he can be transferred straight to an asylum. Any information that he gives would then be discounted as the ravings of a lunatic…”
Everything of importance that Vanunu ever told this reporter over the last ten years has been enshrined HERE
On July 2, 2007,The Jerusalem Post reported, “In listing the factors that he took into account when determining [Vanunu’s freedom of speech trial sentence] Judge Yoel Tzur referred to an appeal against the state which Vanunu had lodged in 1998, while still in prison.
In that appeal, a doctor testified in Beersheba District Court that Vanunu suffered from chronic paranoid schizophrenia…
Tzur said that although Vanunu’s lawyers, Avigdor Feldman and Michael Sfard, had not presented the doctor’s testimony in court, he would still take it into account because Vanunu’s condition was said to be chronic.
Mordechai Vanunu, Nov. 2013. Copyright Eileen Fleming
As Gail Berman and The Jackal Group are developing factual entertainment programming they might also be interested in the Vanunu Saga which begins in 1963, when Vanunu was nine years old and his Orthodox father decides to abandon his general store and pack up the first seven of his eleven children for the land of milk and honey. Instead, the Vanunu’s were banished to the desert of Beesheva, one of over 500 ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages Israel wiped off the map.
A few months later, Shimon Peres, then Israel’s Deputy Minister of Defense met with President John Kennedy, at the White House. Kennedy told Peres, “You know that we follow very closely the discovery of any nuclear development in the region. This could create a very dangerous situation. For this reason we monitor your nuclear effort. What could you tell me about this?”
Peres replied, “I can tell you most clearly that we will not introduce nuclear weapons to the region, and certainly we will not be the first.”
By September of 1986, Peres was convulsing over Vanunu, who had been employed as a lowly tech in his progeny; Israel’s clandestine underground nuclear weapons centre in the Negev called the Dimona.
Peres ordered the Mossad, to “Bring the son of a bitch back here.”
Vanunu’s kidnapping included a clubbing, drugging and being bound and flung upon an Israeli cargo boat which transported Vanunu back to Israel for a closed-door trial and 18 years in jail for providing London’s Sunday Times his photographic proof and telling them everything he knew as a mid-level technician on the night shift within Israel’s WMD Facility at Dimona.
In 2010, after six years under 24/7 surveillance, Israel even sent Vanunu back to solitary for 78 days essentially because he spoke to foreign media in 2004!
Within days of the announcement of the 2009 nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize, Vanunu declined the honor in a letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in Oslo: “I am asking the committee to remove my name from the nominations…I cannot be part of a list of laureates that includes Simon Peres…Peres established and developed the atomic weapon program in Dimona in Israel…Peres was the man who ordered [my] kidnapping, he continues to oppose my freedom and release. WHAT I WANT IS FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM. FREEDOM AND ONLY FREEDOM I NEED NOW.”
Oren Rosenfeld @NewsHolyland
Mordechai Vanunu under house arrest in a Jerusalem Hotel, all he wants is to leave.
https://twitter.com/NewsHolyland/status/663351182992240640
Vanunu’s wife is waiting for him in Oslo and all the paperwork for Vanunu’s asylum has been filed and which must be granted on humanitarian grounds.
Americans need to know that in April 1999, thirty-six members of the House of Representatives signed a letter calling for Vanunu’s release from prison because they believed “we have a duty to stand up for men and women like Mordechai Vanunu who dare to articulate a brighter vision for humanity.”
President Clinton responded with a public statement expressing concern for Vanunu and the need for Israel and other non-parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty to adhere to it and accept IAEA safeguards.
The silence from the White House and Congress over Israel’s WMD, Vanunu’s human rights and details of Pollards duplicity would distress all people of conscience; IF they only knew what they do NOT know.
LEARN MORE HERE
Producer "30 Minutes with Vanunu" who founded WeAreWideAwake.org in response to her first of 8 trips to both sides of The Wall in Palestine Israel.
In 2012, Eileen ran for US House of Representatives District 5, in Fl.
Read her FREE eBooks and more at:http://www.eileenfleming.org/
- Mordechai Vanunu: Final Annual Update and this Writers Next Steps - June 19, 2021
- US-Israel PTSD Collaboration UPDATE and USS Liberty’s 54 Commemoration - May 28, 2021
- Iran’s Foreign Minister Zarif and Vanunu: Israel’s Nuclear Whistleblower - February 21, 2021