Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
Sep 25, 2000 | Read the story
The New York Times will never admit to any wrongdoing in its coverage of Whitewater, the Loral allegations or the persecution of Lee. They have acted too badly too long to back off now and are pretty much stuck with claiming that Alfred Dreyfus really was guilty and anyhow has to take the blame for obfuscating the investigation.
Thinking about Jeff Gerth makes me long for the good old days when a disgraced club member was loaned a revolver and expected to do the right thing.
-- Jim Harrison
Not one of the senators, government officials and other accusers of Lee seems to have noticed that Wen Ho Lee, by passing U.S. nuclear secrets to China would be betraying not only his adopted country, but his birthplace as well. The man was born in Taiwan.
This fact is mentioned frequently in connection with his ethnicity. Yet no one in this whole long, drawn-out, ugly affair has stopped to ask why on earth a Taiwanese would hand China a larger stick with which to bludgeon his homeland. And in a rhetorical atmosphere in which defending democratic Taiwan is basically equivalent to defending U.S. world interests, few of us can claim not to know that China's and Taiwan's interests are very different.
It's not just the New York Times that should take the blame for this silly, depressing and embarrassing episode -- it's all of us, for not noticing, not asking about and not questioning the obvious.
-- Lissa Michalak
The case of Wen Ho Lee represents a watershed moment in the political history of Asian-Americans. Lee was a 20-year veteran of the Los Alamos lab. He was fired for the same offense -- transferring secrets to a non-secure computer -- that a former CIA director was recently merely reprimanded for. Furthermore, the security level of Lee's secrets was upgraded post facto. Lee was denied bail, shackled and left in solitary confinement for nine months. To keep him in prison FBI agents provided false testimony.
This all sounds like the due process Chinese immigrants received in 19th century America.
Beijing may well present national security challenges to our nation. Let's not grab the first Taiwanese-American that satisfies the race requirement for a scapegoat.
President Clinton does well to echo the doubts of the judge in this case. Like the Irish, Italians and Jews before them, Americans of Asian descent should pull together and speak out loudly against their defamation, personified by Wen Ho Lee.
-- Robert Eason
Eric Boehlert's piece on Jeff Gerth's New York Times frame-job on Wen Ho Lee correctly identifies the shared features of Gerth's "journalism": ominous conclusions from questionable evidence, loaded language, flawed sources with axes to grind and charges that never pan out. He fails to mention another thread that runs through Gerth's work: its perfect utility to the strategic political goals of the Republican National Committee. He repeatedly has turned the reputation of the "newspaper of record" as an instrument to savage President Clinton and his administration. In the process, beyond the political damage and waste wrought, he has grievously damaged the paper's credibility, made the Pulitzer committee and its prize look ridiculous and has shamed journalism itself to an extent which could hardly be exceeded.
If Gerth has served any useful purpose, it is to reveal the malignant arrogance that has become the New York Times. Such an institution ill-serves our democracy.
-- Louis J. Van den Berg
In Chapter Six of the famous Cox Report, I found the following paragraph:
"As an example, simply giving a foreign national an article from the Encyclopedia Britannica is not an export requiring a license. If, however, the article is provided to a foreign national by an experienced engineer in the context of specific technical discussions, a defense service that requires a license may have been performed."
And that is national security: Loral was accused of telling the Chinese they had a bad solder joint in the rocket that blew up. And the Cox committee proclaimed that a crime based on the logic quoted above.
No wonder we cannot protect our national security. Our government in its infinite wisdom proclaims that everything under the sun is national security.
Next thing you know, you cannot even talk about the sun to a foreigner.
-- Eng Ha
If Lee had been an athlete, a politician, an actor or a farmer, would he have been locked in chains in a prison for nine months, without bail or trial? Of course not. But it is common practice in the U.S. for scientific geniuses to be feared, despised and viewed with a wary sense of contempt.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Congress is getting ready to flood America with another quarter-million foreign replacement workers, targeting U.S. citizens in high-tech jobs. In 1998, half a million U.S. high-tech workers were fired in order to keep stock prices up; many of them became homeless and destitute. Except for a handful of super-rich business magnates posing as wizards, America's high-tech geniuses have no social capital, no political clout and no place at the table of U.S. prosperity. As a former NASA engineer who spent the Clinton-Gore years in deep poverty, I should know. Lee's case shows clearly that civil rights and social capital only belong to the extremes of the wealthy and the uneducated, not to hard-working, well-educated members of the middle class.
-- Tom Nadeau
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