Interesting to see CarolC and Jack the Sailor standing firm in their support for the Reagan Administration strategy of Middle East politics dictated then, as now in Republican circles, by the agenda of the oil administration. Remember who Reagan's VP was? W's daddy, of course.

Under the previous Carter Administration, we brokered a peace between Israel and Egypt. Peace making, was never on the agenda of the Reublicans. Not under Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Daddy Bush or W. Rather, the agenda of the oil industry has been firmly in control.

The out-of-whack sentence in the Pollard case was part of the Republican/oil industry agenda to show oil countries like Iraq (Saadam Hussein was an ally of the Reagan Administration)and Saudi Arabia (then, as now, the Saudis and Bushes are inextricably linked) that they, and their oil, not Israel, were the priority. Do you think that the Republicans cared an iota about the Jewish vote? Not with Jews always voting 80-90% for Democratic, rather than Republican
candidates.

As for Weinberger's role. The Jewishness of his father was never a factor in his life. Greed, power and money were always his motivations. Look where he ended up, Bechtel Corporation, a company in bed with the Bushes, the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family.

While Weinberger was the point man who squashed the judge in the Pollard affair, most of the dirty work was done by Pat Buchannan. Anyone who knows anything about American politics knows that Buchannan is as blatant an anti-Semite who has risen to the corridors of power in the past 50 years.

The major result of Pollard's espionage on behalf of Israel was the information that Israel needed to take out Iraq's nuclear bomb factory. Given how things have played out between Iraq and America in the years since, the Israelis did the world a major favor with that strike.

The only democratic president to hold power in the years since the Pollard imprisonment has been Bill Clinton. Clinton was the only president since Carter to seriously pursue a peace agenda in the Middle East and it can be assumed that he avoided pardoning Pollard because it would upset the delicate negotiations that he was pursuing. At the end of his term, many thought that Clinton would go ahead and pardon Pollard. However, by that time, things in that administration had become so cynical that it was money that did the talking (look up the Mark Rich case).

What it all boils down to is that the sentence handed down in the Pollard case was dictated by the extreme right wing agenda of the oil industry and their Republican puppets; the same people now firmly in control of the White House. The same people responsible for the first Gulf War under Daddy Bush. The same people responsible for what's happening now in Iraq. That's the agenda that CarolC and Jack the Sailor have been defending in this thread.