Jonathan Pollard was guilty of a serious crime, and it was just that he be arrested and punished. But the politically- determined excessiveness of his sentence has already become a stain on American justice, especially when it is compared to sentencing in similar cases of spying for friendly countries in U.S. courts and to ongoing U.S. Government perversions of justice in matters involving Yasser Arafat and egregious terrorist criminality. Jonathan Pollard violated U.S. law and deserved punishment. For the moment, the absurdities of Clinton justice, reinforced from Jerusalem, are triumphant in this ironic matter, but there is still ample opportunity for the triumph of real justice. By recognizing that Pollard has now served adequate prison time for his crime, President Clinton could commute the sentence to time served and proceed to deal with a far more urgent instance of criminality - the past and future terrorist murders authorized by his honored guest Yasser Arafat.
International law is an integral part of United States law.
According to international law, the deliberate failure to arrest and prosecute terrorists is a serious violation. It follows that President Clinton's formal invitation to the world's principal terrorist, Yassir Arafat, to visit the White House on March 3 is illegal under our domestic law. For the United States, the Nuremberg obligations to bring terrorist criminals to trial are doubly binding. This is because these obligations represent not only current obligations under international law, but also the obligations of a higher law embedded in the United States legal tradition. All international law is part of the law of the United States.