Every time the issue of Pollard’s release comes up, intelligence professionals and prosecutors rise up against it. After Netanyahu’s request in 1998, a group of retired admirals wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning the request. Late last year, after 39 members of Congress wrote to Obama requesting clemency, a retired navy captain argued in The Intelligencer, a journal of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers, that clemency would be ill-advised. And the day after Netanyahu’s public request, the attorney who prosecuted Pollard told the Washington Times that the idea of Israel seeking clemency is "a joke."
The above excerpt was originally published in Foreign Policy.
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