Time To Put the Pollard Case to Rest—by Demanding He Be Set Free

A newly clear aspect of the case reveals evidence of a deeper injustice—which must now be addressed

By the Editors of Tablet Magazine

It should be ever more difficult for patriotic Jewish Americans—or anyone else, for that matter—to believe that Jonathan Pollard, who has spent 29 years in prison for passing secret intelligence documents to Israel, is being punished for the very real crime to which he pleaded guilty in 1986. Pollard, a former naval intelligence analyst, has spent nearly three decades in prison for a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years under current U.S. law—more time than any other convicted spy in American history. He is the only person in American history to receive a life sentence for the crime of spying in a case involving a friendly country, and the only person convicted of such a crime to be sentenced to more than 10 years in prison.

And what you are about to read is not a knee-jerk, tribalist defense of Pollard—you will be subjected to no whining about his health, no assertions about how serving time in a maximum security prison is hard, or the like—but is rather an argument about a newly clear and deeply problematic aspect of the case.

In an op-ed published this week in the New York Times, M.E. Bowman, former deputy general counsel for national security law at the FBI and coordinator of the investigation that put Pollard behind bars, did his best to revive the idea that the spy deserved his extreme sentence and should remain in prison. Yet the logic of Bowman’s argument is so tenuous, and so noxious, that it only magnifies the perception that Pollard was railroaded by an American national security establishment animated by a very personal animus towards one particular spy—and one that has spent the past three decades trying to cover up its own failures.

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