Former NSA and CIA consultant Edward Snowden languishes under temporary Russian asylum while much of the United States argues about whether he’s a traitor or a hero. Snowden, in his capacity as a consultant with America’s most important and secretive intelligence agencies, gathered information that demonstrated longstanding covert global surveillance. He leaked it to a number of western news agencies, including the Washington Post and the Guardian in what was described as the most significant unauthorized release of classified material in the history of the United States. Snowden’s motivation? He believed in his heart of hearts that the American public had a right to know what their government was doing in their name. The debate rages on. Some senators, such as right-wing Republican and Tea Party favourite Rand Paul, have publicly stated that Snowden deserves leniency. Indeed, Paul picked up the current thinking of at least one federal court judge, who believes that the NSA’s actions as exposed by Snowden are unconstitutional. Not to be outdone, another federal judge offered a very contrary opinion, arguing that the NSA is fully within its rights, leaving the entire question open to a Supreme Court challenge. Couple this with the fact that other senators, such as Democrat Charles Schumer, strongly believe that Snowden deserves the harshest of punishments. And yet again, on the other side of the ledger, the liberal-leaning New York Times has argued editorially that Snowden should be granted clemency. Contrast this with the older, but equally notorious, spying debacle of Jonathan Pollard, who in 1987, while working as an intelligence analyst for the United States, passed classified information to an ally, Israel. Pollard’s life sentence was the severest ever given to an American citizen for spying on behalf of an ally. No amount of contrition or heartfelt acknowledgments of wrongdoing by Pollard seems to have moved the American intelligence community. Indeed, in 1998, then-Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu pleaded with then-U.S. president Bill Clinton for Pollard’s release. Clinton indicated in his memoirs that he was favourably disposed to doing so, but he cited the robust objections of the intelligence community for not moving forward. It took until 2010 for the American political system to reassess the Pollard case, fully 23 years after he was sentenced. Representatives Barney Frank, Anthony Weiner, Bill Pascrell and Edolfus Townes asked President Barack Obama to consider clemency. This was followed by 39 members of Congress backing a plea for leniency along with numerous others, including former secretaries of state Henry Kissinger and George Schultz, former CIA director James Woolsey, and the chair of the Senate intelligence committee, Arlen Specter. To be sure, there have also been many nay-sayers who oppose Pollard’s release. Former secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, former vice-president Dick Cheney and other former defence secretaries, including Caspar Weinberger, James Schlesinger and Elliott Richardson, all oppose any form of leniency. In 2011, the New York Times reported that Obama was considering Pollard’s case, though vice-president Joe Biden was dead set against anything less than Pollard serving his full term. To date, Pollard continues to serve his unprecedented life sentence in federal prison. In the early stages of this case, most Jewish organizations, fearing the specter of the “dual loyalty” charge, stayed far away from Pollard. It has only been recently and in retrospect that certain respected Jewish legalists and leaders have begun to petition for his release. Some have suggested that had Pollard been a non-Jew or if Israel were not part of the equation, he never would have received such a severe sentence. In his book Chutzpah, Harvard University law professor Alan Dershowitz, a confidant to many U.S. presidents and renowned legal counsel said, “As an American, and as a Jew, I hereby express my outrage at Jonathan Pollard’s sentence of life imprisonment for the crime to which he pleaded guilty.” From where I sit, the actions of both Pollard and Snowden deserve to be seen for what they are: acts of treason that violated the public trust. No matter the motivation, the fidelity to law must always be paramount. Yet, given the treatment of Snowden even before he has entered a courtroom or sat one minute in jail, surely it’s time to reconsider the Pollard case. I fear history will be unkind in its appraisal of a government that incarcerated a felon who certainly broke the law of the land but seemed more harshly judged than another American citizen whom most agree committed the most significant leak of classified material ever in the United States. - See more at: http://www.cjnews.com/?q=node/120669#sthash.pcU2LsSx.dpuf