PRAGER, POLLARD AND NATIONAL LOYALTY

I caught a re-broadcast of the Dec. 21st Hugh Hewitt show and Dennis Prager was one of the guests.  Prager was there solely to discuss the "issue' of whether Jonathan Pollard, who was convicted of spying on the U.S. for Israel, should have his life sentence commuted.  Prager is all for a commutation and compared Pollard to a hypothetical British spy in the U.S. before our entry into WW II.

Then Defense-Secretary Caspar Weinberger submitted a 46 page memo to the presiding judge in camera detailing the harm Pollard had done to American national security and a couple of months later submitted a short letter giving us some hints of what the memo contained:

"...he both damaged and destroyed policies and national assets which have taken many years, great effort and enormous national resources to secure."

Prager mentioned the memo but did not reveal to the listeners that there was also a letter from Weinberger. He also didn't mention this report in the WaPo that gives us a better idea of the magnitude of Pollard's betrayal. Here's one part of it:

Now another key official at the time of Pollard’s arrest, former FBI and Navy lawyer M.E. “Spike” Bowman, is weighing in -- against his release -- in a forthcoming article.

But the retired Navy captain singles out three of Pollard’s leaks, the first being “the daily report from the Navy’s Sixth Fleet Ocean Surveillance Information Facility (FOSIF) in Rota, Spain, a top-secret document filed every morning reporting all that had occurred in the Middle East during the previous twenty-four hours, as recorded by the NSA’s most sophisticated monitoring devices.”

“Probably the most serious disclosure (of those of which we are aware) was the TOP SECRET NSA RAISIN manual, which lists the physical parameters of every known signal [or electronic communication], notes how we collect signals around the world, and lists all the known communications links then used by the Soviet Union,” Bowman writes.