| ISRAEL | |
| 3-5,7 | Secretary Albright will make recommendations to President on possibility of clemency for Jonathan Pollard based on foreign policy considerations. |
| 5-6 | Recommendation to the President comes from State's Office of the Legal Adviser. |
| 7,8 | President and PM Netanyahu spoke about Pollard's case several times, before and during Wye. |
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QUESTION: Are you prepared to talk about the advice the Secretary is giving the President concerning Jonathan Pollard?
MR. RUBIN: It is not our practice to provide publicly the advice the Secretary of State gives to the President on matters such as this. Let me say that our views about the issue were requested. It is my expectation that by the end of today, those views will have been communicated to the White House. We will, in that recommendation, address the question to what extent, if any, foreign policy consideration should be taken into account in this decision. But I'm not in a position to talk about what specifically she will say in that recommendation.
QUESTION: In her recommendation, part of her recommendation will not be whether Pollard should be released or not?
MR. RUBIN: The questions that she will address from the State Department will be both the generic question of the importance of keeping our nation's secrets and the specific question of what foreign policy considerations, if any, the President should take into account in deciding whether to grant clemency to Jonathan Pollard. That is the role for the Secretary of State to play.
QUESTION: Has the failure of the Israeli Government, specifically Prime Minister Netanyahu, to carry out their Phase II commitments, does this have any effect on the recommendation in the Pollard case?
MR. RUBIN: Let me say that there has been a past history here of the State Department's recommendations in this area that take into account a variety of factors. That is our job -- to take into account those factors. I don't think that it would be possible to address your question without beginning to preview or provide some presumption or assumption about what the Secretary's recommendations would be.
Let me say that on the subject you asked, we have said very clearly that we believe that the Palestinians have been making a good faith effort to implement a number of the commitments in the Wye Agreement, including the commitment to amend the charter of the Palestinian National Council, including the fight against terrorism. In both of those cases, we believe they are making strong and largely successful efforts. In other areas, including the question of police and weapons confiscation and number of committees, they have also been making a good faith effort. To the extent there are problems, we believe the Palestinians and the Israelis should be working those problems out through discussion and communication.
On the Israeli side, we have not seen the Israelis implement their commitment to withdraw from a second phase of the further redeployment. So that is the status of implementation of the Wye Agreement; but I wouldn't be able to make a direct connection there for you.
QUESTION: Jamie, on Pollard, just generally speaking, when you talk about foreign policy ramifications, what does that mean?
MR. RUBIN: Well, each case is different. Obviously -- I'm trying to help, because to the extent that it's about this case, it becomes very difficult for me to talk about it. As the nation's chief diplomat and the architect of our foreign policies after the President, it is the Secretary's job to alert the President to issues that could provide compelling or overriding concerns in his decisions on such matters as this.
Whether it's a case of law enforcement or whether it's a case of another decision the President has to make, the President has to make these tough decisions. The idea, as I understand it, is the law enforcement professionals talk about the law enforcement ramifications of a decision one way or the other; the intelligence community talks about its concerns; and the Secretary of State needs to talk about to what extent there may or may not be overriding foreign policy considerations that would justify a particular action or another. That could, hypothetically, in other cases, mean that the United States would gain greater benefit or huge benefits from some action, as opposed to the down sides of a particular action.
But that is the concept of how this kind of a recommendation and this kind of a process would work. None of that is designed to suggest to you what the Secretary specifically, or the State Department specifically recommended. For your knowledge, the recommendation comes from the Legal Adviser's office and not from the Secretary of State herself.
QUESTION: At the risk of getting too specific, then, if it came down - (inaudible) word this, preserving the Wye accord would not be a ramification, then, of this decision; or is that too specific?
(Laughter.)
MR. RUBIN: It sounds a lot like a delicately phrased form of the last question by your colleague, which would make it very hard to answer. But in theory, peace is a foreign policy consideration.
QUESTION: I'm going to write that one down.
(Laughter.)
QUESTION: In deliberations on this or similar matters, would the fact of an election season in another country be a factor taken into account?
MR. RUBIN: One would certainly hope that in every recommendation on every subject that the State Department would be aware of the political developments in every country that it considers and talks about. To not be aware of the political situation in a country would be an abdication of our responsibility to know what's going on in another country. So any recommendation that we make would take into account the foreign policy considerations and analysis in any country on any subject of our best judgment of what is going on in another country.
But none of that is to say that we will take positions that interfere in the electoral processes of a sovereign state which is a thriving democracy.
QUESTION: Jamie, you said the decision comes from the Legal Adviser's office, not from the Secretary.
MR. RUBIN: Right. She's aware of - she approves the recommendation.
QUESTION: She approves it, so it's under her name to the President?
MR. RUBIN: No, it's actually not. But what I'm telling you is that she would be aware of and agree with and decide how to communicate such a recommendation, especially on a matter like this. But as a technical matter, this is done by lawyers. So the lawyers talk to each other. But she's obviously aware of what the Legal Adviser's office and concurs in what the Legal Adviser's office would recommend.
QUESTION: So if she did not concur, there would be --
MR. RUBIN: I doubt they would be sending such a letter.
QUESTION: Jamie, rather than fact, why is it done by the Legal Adviser's office when this is mainly - when you're looking at the foreign policy ramifications?
MR. RUBIN: Because it's a legal case. But I'll have to ask them what precedent it is. I just don't really know; I just know that that's the form that these often take. At different times, it is done in different ways. I'm not sure it's really relevant to the fact that the Secretary and her legal office discussed this issue and made a joint recommendation. In other words, they agreed with each other about how to frame our response.
QUESTION: I just want to be clear. Seen from the specialized point of view of the State Department, a recommendation that is sent from this department will not deal with the relative guilt or innocence of Pollard or the degree of guilt, but only with the foreign policy considerations and the impact on keeping the nation's secrets; is that right?
MR. RUBIN: Correct.
QUESTION: Let's go back to this question of the legal adviser.
MR. RUBIN: A point I'm sorry I raised.
(Laughter.)
In my pursuit of giving you more and more information, I am continually amazed at how much difficulty is created by more rather than less.
QUESTION: The only question raised is, the Justice Department is theoretically handling that end of things - the legal end of things --
MR. RUBIN: No, Ruff has sent out the requests. It is my understanding that White House spokesmen have said that Charles Ruff, the President's chief counsel - I believe is his title - sent out requests for recommendations and considerations to his counterparts at all the various agencies.
Now, on a matter like this and most matters, it would be unlikely in the extreme that any legal office of the Pentagon or the intelligence community or the Justice Department or the State Department would make a recommendation on this without the concurrence of their superiors, in this case, the Secretary. I was merely pointing out a procedural fact.
QUESTION: Right, that makes perfect sense now, thank you.
QUESTION: Was this Department asked to take into account any additional factors that had not been addressed during previous such deliberations?
MR. RUBIN: I believe the request was generic to take into account what we believed to be the current foreign policy considerations. Since the last time, the world has changed in many different ways. We would hope that a responsible Department -- and we would hope that all the officials involved -- would look at the situation now as compared to the situation last time and decide whether any considerations had changed, if any had changed.
We would certainly expect the people advising the Secretary to take into account the fact that it's 1999 and not 1998 or 1997.
QUESTION: Just for the record, Jamie, at Wye the President did not tell the Prime Minister of Israel that he would release Jonathan Pollard?
MR. RUBIN: It is my understanding that there were a series of discussions about Jonathan Pollard between the President and Prime Minister Netanyahu, preceding the Wye conference and during the Wye conference and at nearly every meeting the President and Prime Minister Netanyahu had. The President's commitments were to review the matter, and he said at the conclusion of Wye review it seriously. That is what is going on now and what the Secretary is contributing to in her capacity as the nation's chief diplomat.
QUESTION: I know you don't speak for the President, but can you give any sort of possible time frame for the -
MR. RUBIN: No, that would be up to the White House to provide you.
QUESTION: I know you can't talk about the specific recommendation, but can you tell us what, if anything, the Secretary has said about this subject in the past, her feelings, prior to this recommendation delivered today?
MR. RUBIN: That was another well-formulated attempt to get at the question. I'm not aware of her making any public comment on this, other than describing accurately to all of you and others about what transpired at Wye and the commitment the President made to seriously review the case.
As far as her personal views, I can certainly say that like any senior official of this government or previous governments, she takes extremely seriously the commitment to protect the integrity and release of classified information that could affect our nation's security.
QUESTION: One more, do you know that if in the thousands of documents that Pollard turned over to the Israeli Government any State Department classified documents were included?
MR. RUBIN: I wouldn't know the answer to that question. I don't know whether I would ever be able to answer it, but I will inquire.
QUESTION: Nearly every meeting - you're not talking about Wye, you're talking about bilaterals --
MR. RUBIN: It is my understanding that in nearly every meeting between Prime Minister Netanyahu and the President prior to Wye, that the Prime Minister raised his concerns about this case. I would not say that at every meeting the President had with the Prime Minister at Wye this issue came up, because there were dozens of such meetings. But I am sure that it did come up in a significant number of those discussions.
..................
(The briefing concluded at 1:45 P.M.)
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