While an
air of mystery surrounds the details of Jewish businessman Jacob Ostreicher’s
return to U.S. soil after being held for more than two years in Bolivia, the
involvement of legislators and a high-profile celebrity in his case may shed
some light on the conditions that could lead to the freedom of other
high-profile Jewish prisoners.
Ostreicher, a 54-year-old Brooklyn
native, traveled to Bolivia in December 2010 to oversee rice production and was
arrested in June 2011 on suspicion of money laundering and criminal
organization. No formal charges were ever brought against him, but he spent 18
months in prison before being released on bail in December 2012, after which he
remained in Bolivia under house arrest.
News of Ostreicher’s escape from Bolivia
broke Dec. 16, and little was known about the circumstances of his return to
America until actor Sean Penn told The Associated Press on Dec. 18 that
he was with Ostreicher following a “humanitarian operation” to free the Jewish
businessman “from the corrupt prosecution and imprisonment he was suffering in
Bolivia.”
In May, Penn testified about
Ostreicher’s situation in a hearing before the U.S. House Committee on Foreign
Affairs’ Subcommittee on Africa, Global Health, Global Human Rights and
International Organizations. U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-NJ), one of the leading
advocates in Congress for Ostreicher’s release, had arranged the hearing and on
Dec. 17 thanked Penn “for his tireless work to
free Jacob.”
Bill Richardson—the former governor of New
Mexico and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations—said in a recent conference
call with reporters that, like the rest of the public, he doesn’t “have all the
circumstances of [Ostreicher’s] escape” from Bolivia. But Richardson attempted
to explain the conditions that may have led to Ostreicher’s freedom, citing a
meeting he had with Bolivian President Evo Morales a year ago as an example of
the “quiet diplomacy” he and other key officials engaged in on Ostreicher’s
behalf. Richardson also said that in the efforts to bring about Ostreicher’s release,
there was “intensive public pressure by many Jewish organizations” that was “very
effective.”
“What needs to happen in successful releases
is a combination of public pressure and private diplomacy,” Richardson said.
“Those combinations in many cases are the roots for success.”
On Dec. 10, Richardson wrote a letter to President Barack
Obama calling for the release of jailed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, who in
November entered his 29th year in U.S. prison and is the only person to receive
a life sentence for passing information to a U.S. ally (Israel) without intent
to harm America. On the conference call, Richardson
said he expects “sometime soon that I’ll get a chance to talk to
[Obama] about several things,” including Pollard. Asked by JNS.org what his main argument for Pollard’s release would be in a
conversation with Obama, Richardson said, “You want to make the most effective argument, and the
most effective argument is on humanitarian grounds.” Pollard has “been punished enough, he’s been in prison 29
years, the man has suffered enough, he’s not well,” said Richardson.
Richardson
said the Pollard case is “reaching a point where I sense some
momentum,” through increased calls for his release by former government
officials. Part of
what has been holding back U.S. presidents from releasing Pollard is “the very
strong opposition to the pardon in the intelligence communities,” but that
sentiment is “receding,” Richardson explained. Along those lines, Boston University international relations
professor Angelo Codevilla, a senior staffer on the U.S. Senate Intelligence
Committee at the time of Pollard’s 1985 arrest, like Richardson recently wrote
a letter to Obama calling for Pollard’s release.
“Having been intimately
acquainted with the materials that Pollard passed and with the ‘sources and
methods’ by which they were gathered, I would be willing to give expert
testimony that Pollard is guilty of neither more nor less than what the
indictment alleges,” wrote Codevilla.
Other officials in the intelligence
community and elsewhere who have called for Pollard’s release include former
Secretary of State George Shultz; William Webster, head of the FBI at the time
of Pollard’s arrest; former U.S. Sen. David Durenberger, who served as chairman
of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence at the time of Pollard’s
conviction; former U.S. Rep. Lee Hamilton, who served as chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee at the time of Pollard’s sentencing; former Assistant
Secretary of Defense Lawrence Korb; and former National Security Advisor Robert
McFarlane, who served under President Ronald Reagan when Pollard was
investigated.
“You would hope that at this point and time, it would be
enough people who know what went on [to call for Pollard’s release] that
justice and humanitarian concerns for his health would dictate that he be
free,” Rabbi Pesach Lerner, executive vice
president emeritus of the National Council of Young Israel, told JNS.org.
“The clemency file has been on the president’s desk for a couple years already,
all he needs to do is add his signature, and Pollard would go free. I hope and
pray that the governor (Bill Richardson) is correct, that the momentum is
there.”
Lerner, who frequently visits Pollard in
federal prison, said, “He has serious health issues that are difficult to
address in any prison situation, and I would hope that he would be able to be
freed ASAP, that not only can we take care of his medical issues, but he has a
chance to live the rest of his life in a somewhat normal situation.”
In another high-profile Jewish prisoner
case, Dec. 3 marked the fourth anniversary of the incarceration of Alan Gross,
who is serving a 15-year prison term for helping Cuba’s Jewish community access
the Internet while he was a subcontractor for the United States Agency for
International Development. Gross says he was working to promote democracy, but
Cuba convicted him of “crimes against the state.”
Ostreicher’s freedom did not shed any light
on Gross’s case in the eyes of Scott Gilbert of Gilbert LLP, the lead attorney
on Gross’s legal team.
“I think that each of these cases has its own
set of facts, including the country that’s holding these people, and that
really helps to determine what happens,” Gilbert told JNS.org. “The United States has a decades-long history of negotiating
to obtain the release of Americans who’ve been held in foreign countries that
we either have very good diplomatic relations with or very hostile relations
with.”
Gilbert said there has been “virtually no
serious engagement with the Cuban government to attempt to negotiate Alan’s
release” since his imprisonment.
“The Cuban government, at the highest levels,
has made very clear to us both privately and publicly that they would sit down
with the United States with no preconditions to discuss the conditions of
Alan’s release and try to negotiate a resolution, and the United States has yet
to sit down and do that,” he said.
The past 60 years of dysfunction in the
U.S.-Cuba relationship “is really weighing” on Gross’s case and is “causing
some of the paralysis in the administration that we’re seeing,” Gilbert
believes.
“That’s not an excuse for [the U.S.], they
should have gotten Alan out four years ago. They should do it now. But the only
way Alan Gross will be released from prison in Cuba is to have a deal
negotiated between the United States and Cuba,” he said.
Asked if high-profile individuals have been
involved in efforts to bring about Gross’s release, akin to Sean Penn’s
advocacy for Ostreicher, Gilbert said, “Indeed, there are individuals who have
significant profiles and have been involved in this, and have been talking
behind the scenes with members of the administration.”
“It’s not clear to me from press reports
exactly what Sean Penn did or didn’t do [for Ostreicher], but I think this is a
situation where the president of the United States needs to authorize a
high-level negotiation with representatives of the Cuban government to sit down
and get this done,” said the attorney. “If the president would act, this is a
far easier situation than dealing with Bolivia or anywhere else.”
High-profile Jewish prisoners in Russia, meanwhile, have
seen positive momentum in their cases as of late. Teacher Ilya Farber, who had
been sentenced to seven years in a
maximum-security penal colony on bribery charges, saw his sentence reduced to
three years by the Tver Region Court on Dec. 11. Farber’s 2012 trial drew
allegations of anti-Semitic overtones when a prosecutor asked, “Can a person
with the last name Farber truly help a village for free?”
On Dec. 19, Russian President Vladimir
Putin announced the pardoning of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, whose father is Jewish. Khodorkovsky
had been incarcerated for a decade since he was arrested on fraud and tax
evasion charges upon the dissolving of his Yukos oil company.
Sam Kliger, the American Jewish Committee’s (AJC) director of
Russian Jewish community affairs, called the
decision to pardon Khodorkovsky “a positive sign.”
“Many human rights groups, including AJC, were speaking for
his release for many years,” Kliger told JNS.org.
Will Pollard, like Khodorkovsky, see a presidential pardon
anytime soon? Bill Richardson said he sees “the glimmers of some good movement on that
issue.”
“I see
increased social media, Facebook, [and] Twitter [activity] on this subject, and
that is read, that is something that I think is increasing momentum and has
increased the potential for [Pollard’s] release,” he said.
By Jacob
Kamaras/JNS.org
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