Three-way prisoner release to free new leader for Palestinians?

WorldNetDaily: Pollard: Israel groomed jailed terrorist to head PA :
"[Israeli PM Ariel] 'Sharon is apparently reserving me for a time that my release will be the fig leaf for some very, very dastardly initiative. Perhaps something as dastardly as enabling another mass murderer of Jews to become president of the PA, just as Israel once did for Yasser Arafat,' says [convicted spy Jonathan] Pollard."

It seems Pollard, despite his bitterness over not having been released as part of the deal for the Oslo Accords of 1993 or the Wye River conference on 1998, objects to being released by the US now as part of a deal in which Egypt would release Azzam Azzam, an Israeli engineer, and Israel would release covicted murderer, terrorist mastermind, and future Palestinian Authority head Marwan Barghouti.

This WND story is very pro-Pollard, claiming that the usual sentence for what he did, which the article refers to as "spying for an ally," should have been 2-4 years rather than life. My own opinion at the time of his trial almost 20 years ago is that Pollard should have been executed and his wife should have drawn the life sentence.

There is no such thing as spying for an ally. Once you go outside the approved channels no one knows where the information will end up. There were plenty of people at paygrades higher than Pollard's with the authority to flag information useful to Israel that we might be willing to share despite Soviet penetration of Israeli intel. By substituting his own judgment for that of the responsible superior officials, Pollard demonstrated that he didn't care how the information he passed might be passed to the Soviets or what it might reveal to them about our sources, methods and assessments.

Having said all that, I trust that he is motivated by Zionist zeal and is likely to still have excellent contacts in influential Israeli and US circles, even from his prison cell in Butner, NC. So, when he says this "three-way swap" is simply a matter of the US and our number two foreign aid client Egypt providing cover for Israel to do what it wants to do anyway, I am inclined to believe him.

It would seem that the Israeli government has decided it needs to replace terrorist murderer Yasser Arafat with terrorist murderer Marwan Barghouti. Why would that be? The article suggests this is needed for credibility with the Palestinian people. Perhaps it is necessary to maintain the game that both sides profit from. Oil-rich Arab states send money to the PA, the US sends money to Israel and Egypt. Peace could be very expensive. Cui bono?