He was the Israeli spy who got life in prison for spying on behalf of Israel in the 1980's. He just lost an appeal. So why is he important now? Well, among other things, he is in jail precisely because he gave the identities of our agents to Israel.
We do not know precisely what Secretary Weinberger wrote in this declaration; much of the document remains classified and unavailable to the public.
In the heavily redacted version that has been released, however, there appears the charge, for the first time, that Pollard had endangered American lives. By disclosing to the Israelis "sources and methods of information acquisition," Weinberger asserted, Pollard "jeopardized ... the sources of that information, by placing it outside of a U.S. controlled security environment."6In addition, "U.S. combat forces, wherever they are deployed in this world, could be unacceptably endangered through successful exploitation of this data."7Then, on March 3, 1987 -- the day before Pollard was to be sentenced -- Secretary Weinberger submitted a supplemental declaration to the court, which included the following:
It is difficult for me, even in the so-called "year of the spy," to conceive of a greater harm to national security than that caused by the defendant in the view of the breadth, the critical importance to the U.S., and the high sensitivity of the information he sold to Israel ...
I respectfully submit that any U.S. citizen, and in particular a trusted government official, who sells U.S. secrets to any foreign nation should not be punished merely as a common criminal. Rather the punishment imposed should reflect the perfidy of the individual's actions, the magnitude of the treason committed, and the needs of national security.8Weinberger here accuses Pollard of "treason" -- a legal term of art defined in both the Constitution and Federal statute as levying war against the United States or aiding America's enemies.9 The secretary's use of the term is breathtakingly inappropriate.10
In making its case against Pollard, the government traveled a great distance: from choosing in its indictment not to charge Pollard with injuring the United States, to listing in the Victim Impact Statement allegations of damage to American interests, to raising in Secretary Weinberger's January declaration the specter of danger to American lives, to accusing Pollard of "treason" in Weinberger's eve-of-sentencing supplemental declaration. It almost appears that the government leveled a charge of lesser magnitude against Pollard; successfully secured his guilty plea; and then post-facto kept upping the ante, to the point where a life sentence became almost inevitable.
http://www.meforum.org/article/355end of quote (bold and italics mine)
Note what one of the biggest deals here was. Full disclosure, I don't know enough about this case to intelligently decide who is right on what should be done with Pollard. It also is very hard to find neutral sources about him. This is a pro Pollard source but they do reference the government's position in Pollard's case which is all that is relevent for this discussion.
Pollard is in jail, for doing on a larger scale, what Rove is accused of having done. I will grant that there is a difference of scale here which really does matter. It isn't irrelevent that Pollard may have revealed the identity of hundreds of agents while Rove only exposed one. Nor is it irrelevent that Pollard also gave away secrets.
But there are someways in which what Rove did is actually worse. Israel is an ally and presumedly wouldn't purposely endanger our agents, nor disclose their names. Novak was under no such compunction. Also, the motives here were quite different. Rove wanted to get back at the agent's spouse. Pollard thought, I have no idea to what extent correctly, that the US was holding back informantion Israel needed to survive.
The next conservative who tries to excuse, or even worse praise, the exposing of Ms. Plame, should be asked what their opinion of the Pollard case is. If it is no big deal to reveal the identities of CIA agents, then why was it a big deal when Pollard did so?
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