Jonathan Pollard Challenges Bill Clinton

Arutz7 - June 25 2004

Jonathan Pollard challenges former US President Bill Clinton's version of events when Pollard was "almost" freed from prison during the Wye Plantation talks.

The commonly accepted version of events is that Clinton promised then-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, during the Wye talks of late 1998, to release Pollard as part of an overall Israeli-Palestinian Authority agreement. Several Israeli participants at the talks confirm that the promise to release Pollard was indeed made, but Clinton, in his newly released autobiography, wrote that he never promised such a release. According to Clinton's latest version, he only said that he would consider it, but would have to "check with my people" first. When he did, Clinton wrote, his CIA director, George Tenet, threatened to resign over the matter.

Minister Natan Sharansky, who was present at Wye, told Arutz-7 this week that there was no question about it: "Clinton promised him - I was there when he promised."

Another participant in the talks, a top aide to Netanyahu named Uri Elitzur, recently gave Arutz-7's Yosef Meiri an eyewitness report: "Netanyahu told me afterwards that Clinton had told him that Tenet had threatened to resign. Tenet and [then-Secretary of State] Albright were sitting in the room while Clinton was talking to Netanyahu, though they could not hear the conversation. But it was clear to me that they were watching Clinton and knew the gist of what he was saying. Whether Tenet actually threatened to quit or not, I have no idea - but I do know that Clinton was a bare-faced liar, just as the entire American public later found out with the Lewinsky fiasco."

Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice-Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, has provided further proof that Clinton might not have been speaking the truth regarding Tenet. Hoenlein told a JTA interviewer that he received a phone call from Tenet immediately after the Wye Summit, in which Tenet denied that he had ever threatened to resign if Jonathan Pollard were freed.

The Justice for Jonathan Pollard Organization also says that the Tenet threat is a "ridiculous excuse." The organization says that this scenario's "implausibility was vividly demonstrated a few months later when Clinton freed FALN terrorists over Tenet's vehement objections and actual threat to resign.