Is It Not Torture When the Prisoner is a Jew?

Phyllis Chesler - NewsReal Blog - December 24, 2010

Why is this man still in jail? Why was this man forced to spend seven years in solitary? Why is he still confined, languishing, festering in jail for a total of twenty five years?

Solitary confinement is the most barbaric of punishments. Few people can withstand this form of torture without becoming very ill, both physically and mentally.

Am I talking about the Soviet Gulag? Or about some hell-hole in Afghanistan or Iran?

Last year, The New Yorker ran a piece about solitary confinement. The article concludes that this punishment amounts to torture, that it can even induce "acute psychosis with hallucinations." The article describes the cases of two political prisoners or prisoners-of-war: AP's Middle East correspondent, Terry Anderson, who was put into solitary by Hezbollah in Lebanon for six years. Anderson "felt himself disintegrating"; his mind went blank; he had hallucinations; he started to become "neurotically possessive about his little space"; he felt his brain was "grinding down." He also describes Senator John McCain who said that "solitary confinement crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more than any other form of mistreatment. And he said that even though he had his arms broken and was subjected to other forms of torture."

Clearly, the New Yorker's man, Atul Gawande, opposes this practice.

He does mention the cases of two unnamed inmates: one was convicted of felony-murder and spent five years in isolation. After a few months he began talking to himself, pacing back and forth, having panic attacks, and hallucinating. After a year he was hearing voices on the television who were talking to him. In another case, Gawande describes another American man in solitary whose initial crime was armed robbery and aggravated battery but who then "misbehaved" at a medium security prison for which he was was put in solitary or in isolation for almost fourteen years. This man stopped showering and began throwing his feces around his cell. He became psychotic.

Even he was released after he served his sentence of fifteen years.

Gawande does not mention the man I have in mind, a man whose living head is on a pike in the public square for all to see-a message, a warning to us all-a man who killed no one. I am talking about Jonathan Pollard.

What crime did he commit? Did he spy against America for the Soviets or for the Chinese communists? Did he do so for money, sex, or for ideological reasons? American Navy Seaman, Michael Walker, operated a Soviet spy ring; he was arrested in 1980, pleaded guilty, was sentenced to 25 years and released after 15.

CIA Agent David Barnett sold the Soviets the names of thirty American undercover agents. He was arrested in the mid-1980s, sentenced to only 18 years, and paroled after only ten years. In 2001, John Walker Lindh, who joined the Taliban and received training as a terrorist in Pakistan, was captured and sentenced to 21 years. Kedar Helmy, an Egyptian-born American, transmitted classified materials to Egypt used in a joint weapons program with Iraq to vastly increase the range of ballistic missiles, including Scud missiles, which were later fired on U.S. troops during the Persian Gulf War." In 2010, Chinese-American engineer Dongfan "Greg" Chung operated as a spy for China against America for thirty years. He received a 15 year sentence.

What is "different" about Pollard? Unlike Walker, Barnett, Lindh, Helmy, and Chung, Pollard is the only Jew. The others are Christians or Muslims or atheists.

What else is different? Pollard is the only one who shared secrets with an American ally with whom America was not and is not now at war. Pollard shared information with Israel.

What else is "different" about Pollard? There is one more thing. Like the Rosenbergs, Pollard was the proving grounds, the scapegoat, for another man, also a Jew, but a Jew who did not like being mistreated as a Jew, as a Jew who wanted to prove how tough the was or how hard he was ready to be on another Jew and on the Jewish state.

The Rosenbergs (who were guilty) had their Jewish judge who chose to have them electrocuted. Pollard, poor Pollard, had Secretary of Defense Caspar W. Weinberger whose paternal grandparents were Jews and whose father was a Jewish lawyer. When Caspar was a boy, he was taunted for supposedly being Jewish. His mother was a Christian and he was raised as a Christian. When he visited Yad Vashem, the Memorial to the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, he said loudly: "I am not a Jew." He said this in response to the guard who told him that "he, too, would have been murdered in the Holocaust."

Weinberger submitted a 40 page affidavit in which he insisted that Pollard should be harshly sentenced. In later years, he said that "the Pollard matter was comparatively minor." Weinberger is now dead and no doubt roasting in Hell. One wonders: What did he have over CIA head George Tenet (who threatened to resign when President Clinton suggested pardoning Pollard)? What did Weinberger have over President Bush's Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, both of whom went along with Weinberger's revenge?

Where are all the anti-torture activists on Pollard? How can it be that our most prominent American political prisoner has never made it onto their honor roll of causes with which to browbeat America?

Yesterday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu formally asked President Obama to pardon Jonathan Pollard, at long last. I stand with him in this matter.

Update

Phyllis Chesler, Ph.D is an Emerita Professor of Psychology and Women's Studies at City University of New York. She is an author, psychotherapist and an expert courtroom witness. She has lectured and organized political, legal, religious and human rights campaigns in the United States and in Canada, Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. A popular guest on campuses and in national and international print, television, radio and online media, she has been an expert commentator on the major events of our time.

View original article.