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Wednesday, October 15, 2008 3:34:25 AM
How America Fell
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/101308.html
By Robert Parry
October 14, 2008
As the American people pick through the wreckage left
by the Bush administration, many may wonder how the
most powerful nation on earth got so far off track. An
illustrative case study is the bogus story of Al
Gore’s “Chinagate” scandal.
The story doesn’t explain all that’s gone wrong in the
past eight years, but it reveals how aggressive
right-wing operatives, aided and abetted by a lazy or
complicit news media, can create an impression for
millions of voters that is nearly the opposite of the
truth.
So, in the razor-thin presidential election of 2000 –
at the dawn of the George W. Bush era – a significant
number of Americans went to the polls believing a
right-wing canard, that Al Gore was implicated in a
treacherous scheme to trade American nuclear secrets
to China for campaign cash.
The smear had been pushed by a combination of
Republicans and right-wing activists relying on the
Internet, talk radio, direct mail, Fox News and TV
ads. Meanwhile, the mainstream news media did little
to dispel the ugly suspicions, even though exculpatory
evidence existed that would have cleared Gore.
A bitter irony of the story was that Americans, who
voted against Gore to stop a “traitor” whom they
thought had bargained away life-and-death nuclear
secrets to China, were letting back in Republicans
upon whose watch the nuclear secrets apparently were
leaked.
Up had become down. The votes of those misguided
Americans then helped make Election 2000 close enough
for Bush and the Republicans to steal the White House.
[For details on that election, see our book Neck
Deep.]
Daisy Ad
The “Chinagate” story surfaced dramatically in the
weeks before Election 2000 when a pro-Republican group
from Texas, called Aretino Industries, ran an
emotional ad modeled after Lyndon Johnson’s infamous
1964 commercial that showed a girl picking a daisy
before the screen dissolved into a nuclear blast.
The ad remake accused the Clinton-Gore administration
of selling vital nuclear secrets to communist China
for campaign donations in 1996. The compromised
nuclear secrets, the ad said, gave China “the ability
to threaten our homes with long-range nuclear
warheads.”
The ad – airing in “swing” states including Ohio,
Michigan, Missouri and Pennsylvania – suggested that a
Chinese government front funneled $30,000 in illegal
“soft money” donations to the Democrats in 1996 in
exchange for the nuclear secrets. The most important
secret had been the blueprint for the W-88
miniaturized nuclear warhead.
The allegation hit a nerve with many voters because
the Bush campaign had run other ads showing grainy
photos of Al Gore with saffron-robed monks at a
Buddhist temple in California, implying corruption
with mysterious Asians.
The daisy ad also played off an earlier report by a
Republican-controll ed congressional investigation into
China’s apparent theft of the W-88 warhead design and
other U.S. nuclear secrets. The so-called Cox report,
named for the probe’s chairman Rep. Christopher Cox,
accused the Clinton-Gore administration of failing to
protect top-secret nuclear data from Chinese
espionage.
When released on May 25, 1999, the Cox report was
greeted by conservative groups and much of the
national news media as another indictment of the
Democrats in the aftermath of President Bill Clinton’s
Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. By then the press corps,
addicted to “Clinton scandals,” paid little attention
to the sleight of hand in the Cox report.
Cox’s key trick was to leave out dates of alleged
Chinese spying in the 1980s and thus obscure the fact
that the floodgates of U.S. nuclear secrets to China –
including how to build the miniaturized W-88 nuclear
warhead – had opened wide during the Reagan-Bush
years.
While leaving out Republican time elements, Cox shoved
references to the alleged security lapses into the
presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
For instance, the Cox report’s “Overview” stated that
“the PRC (People’s Republic of China) thefts from our
National Laboratories began at least as early as the
late 1970s, and significant secrets are known to have
been stolen as recently as the mid-1990s.”
In this way, Cox started with the Carter presidency,
jumped over the 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush, and landed in the Clinton years. In the
“Overview” alone, there were three dozen references to
dates from the Clinton years and only five mentions of
dates from the Reagan-Bush years, with none related to
alleged wrongdoing.
Cox’s stacking of the deck carried over into the
report’s two-page chronology of the Chinese spy
scandal. On pages 74-75, the Cox report put all the
information boxes about Chinese espionage suspicions
into the Carter and Clinton years.
Nothing sinister is attributed specifically to the
Reagan-Bush era, other than a 1988 test of a neutron
bomb built from secrets that the report says were
believed stolen in the “late 1970s,” the Carter years.
Only a careful reading of the text inside the
chronology’s boxes made clear that many of the worst
national security breaches could be traced to the
Reagan-Bush era.
But the major U.S. news media did little to challenge
Cox’s misleading findings, even though some newspapers
knew then or learned later that the evidence pointed
to a hemorrhage of nuclear secrets during the 1980s.
For instance, the Washington Post reported on Oct. 19,
2000, just weeks before the election, that when
federal investigators translated previously ignored
documents turned over by a Chinese defector in 1995,
they learned that the exposure of nuclear secrets in
the Reagan-Bush years was worse than previously
thought.
“The documents provided by the defector show that
during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large amount
of classified information about U.S. ballistic
missiles and reentry vehicles,” the Post reported. But
the newspaper didn't dispute Cox’s earlier findings or
debunk the treasonous “Chinagate” allegations then
being spread about Gore.
[Cox is now chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, where he has come under criticism for
failing to adequately regulate Wall Street banks. One
of his aides on the Cox report was I. Lewis Libby, who
became Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and
was later convicted of perjury and obstruction of
justice in the “Plamegate” affair.]
Iran-Contra Connection
Other evidence, also available before Election 2000,
suggested that conscious decisions by senior
Reagan-Bush officials in the 1980s may have put
communist China in a position to glean those sensitive
secrets.
The rupture of U.S. nuclear secrets followed an
extraordinary decision by Ronald Reagan’s White House
in 1984 to collaborate with Beijing on a highly
sensitive intelligence operation, the clandestine
shipment of weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels,
in defiance of U.S. law.
The collaboration was especially risky because
Congress had forbidden military shipments to the
contras and the administration was insisting that it
was abiding by the law. In reality, President Ronald
Reagan had tapped a National Security Council staffer,
Oliver North, to oversee an off-the-books contra
supply operation.
Reagan’s White House turned to China hoping that it
would deliver surface-to-air missiles that might turn
the tide of the battle against Nicaragua’s leftist
Sandinista government, which had been inflicting heavy
losses on the contras by using Soviet-built attack
helicopters.
In his 1989 Iran-Contra trial, North described this
procurement of China's SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles as
a “very sensitive delivery.”
For the Chinese missile deal in 1984, North said he
received help from the CIA in arranging false end-user
certificates from the right-wing government of
Guatemala. But China balked at selling missiles to the
Guatemalan military, which was engaged in a
scorched-earth war against its own leftist guerrillas.
To resolve this problem, North was dispatched to a
clandestine meeting with a Chinese military official.
The idea was to bring the Chinese in on what was then
one of the most sensitive secrets of the U.S.
government – the missiles were not going to Guatemala,
but rather into a clandestine pipeline arranged by the
White House to funnel military supplies to the
contras.
“In Washington, I met with a Chinese military officer
assigned to their embassy to encourage their
cooperation,” North wrote in his autobiography, Under
Fire. “We enjoyed a fine lunch at the exclusive Cosmos
Club in downtown Washington.”
North said the Chinese saw the collaboration as a way
to develop “better relations with the United States.”
Possession of this sensitive information also put
Beijing in position to leverage future U.S. actions by
the Reagan administration. It was in this climate of
cooperation that secrets, including how to make
miniaturized hydrogen bombs, allegedly went from the
United States to China.
The Wen Ho Lee Case
While the details of how China learned the W-88
secrets are still unclear, it is clear that the Reagan
administration authorized a broader exchange program
between U.S. and Chinese nuclear physicists. The
Chinese were even given access to the Los Alamos
nuclear facility.
By 1985, the Reagan administration’ s expanded nuclear
exchanges with China were in full swing. In March
1985, Los Alamos nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee (who
would later come under suspicion of espionage) was
seen talking with Chinese scientists during a
scientific conference in Hilton Head, South Carolina,
according to a New York Times chronology that was not
published until after Election 2000 (on Feb. 4-5,
2001).
In 1986, with approval of the Los Alamos nuclear lab,
Wen Ho Lee and another scientist attended a conference
in Beijing. Wen Ho Lee traveled to Beijing again in
1988.
“With the Reagan administration eager to isolate the
Soviet Union, hundreds of scientists traveled between
the United States and China, and the cooperation
expanded to the development of torpedoes, artillery
shells and jet fighters,” the Times wrote. “The
exchanges were spying opportunities as well.”
The fruits of any Chinese espionage during Ronald
Reagan’s presidency became apparent during the
presidency of George H.W. Bush.
“On Sept. 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China’s
western desert,” the Times wrote. “From spies and
electronic surveillance, American intelligence
officials determined that the test was a breakthrough
in China’s long quest to match American technology for
smaller, more sophisticated hydrogen bombs.”
Assessing this Chinese breakthrough, U.S. intelligence
experts began to suspect that the Chinese had
purloined U.S. secrets.
“It’s like they were driving a Model T and went around
the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,” said Robert
M. Hanson, a Los Alamos intelligence analyst.
By the early years of the Clinton administration,
investigators had begun looking back at the mid-1980s
when the Reagan administration had authorized U.S.
nuclear scientists to hold a number of meetings with
their Chinese counterparts.
Though the American scientists were under restrictions
about what information could be shared, it was never
fully explained why those meetings were held in the
first place – given the risk that a U.S. scientist
might willfully or accidentally divulge nuclear
secrets.
A breakthrough in the probe didn’t occur until 1995
when a Chinese walk-in to the U.S. Embassy in Taiwan
provided documents indicating that China apparently
had gained access to American nuclear designs back in
the 1980s.
‘Chinagate’
It took four more years – until March 1999 – for the
Chinese nuclear story to gain national attention, when
the New York Times published several imprecise
front-page stories fingering Wen Ho Lee as an
espionage suspect.
During those chaotic first weeks of “Chinagate,”
Republicans and political pundits mixed together the
suspicions of Chinese spying and allegations about
illegal Chinese campaign donations to the Democrats in
1996. Clinton’s Justice Department overcompensated by
demonstrating how tough it could be on suspect Wen Ho
Lee.
Amid the spy frenzy, however, no one took note of the
logical impossibility of Democrats selling secrets to
China in 1996 that China seemed to have obtained a
decade or so earlier during a Republican
administration.
Instead, pro-Republican groups grasped the political
and fund-raising potential, especially since President
Clinton had just survived his impeachment ordeal and
there was a strong appetite for more “Clinton
scandals.” Plus, Clinton’s sidekick, Al Gore, was the
frontrunner to succeed his boss.
Larry Klayman’s right-wing Judicial Watch sent out a
letter seeking $5.2 million for a special “Chinagate
Task Force” that would “hold Bill Clinton, Al Gore and
the Democratic Party Leadership fully accountable for
election fraud, bribery and possibly treason in
connection with the ‘Chinagate’ scandal.”
The hysteria had especially ugly consequences for Wen
Ho Lee, the 60-year-old physicist who was imprisoned
on a 59-count indictment for mishandling classified
material.
The Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen was put in
solitary confinement with his cell light on at all
times. He was allowed out of his cell only one hour a
day, when he shuffled around a prison courtyard in leg
shackles.
However, the tenuous case against Wen Ho Lee began to
collapse in 2000 against the backdrop of the
presidential campaign. On Sept. 13, 2000, the
scientist pled guilty to a single count of mishandling
classified material, and U.S. District Judge James A.
Parker apologized to Lee for the “demeaning,
unnecessarily punitive conditions” under which Lee had
been held.
Still, the suspicions about Clinton-Gore treachery
with China lingered and reemerged during the final
days of Campaign 2000 with the “daisy ad” remake. The
closing message was blunt: “Don’t take a chance,” the
ad said. “Please vote Republican.”
George W. Bush’s campaign also exploited the
“Chinagate” suspicions, albeit a touch more subtly, by
running those ads showing Gore meeting with the
saffron-robed monks at a Buddhist temple in
California.
So, millions of Americans went to the polls in
November 2000 thinking that Gore’s temple appearance
and the Chinese nuclear spying were somehow linked.
The mainstream news media – still bristling with
hostility toward Clinton and Gore – offered no timely
explanation that the Chinese espionage represented a
Reagan-Bush scandal, not a Clinton-Gore scandal.
Through disinformation from the Right and acquiescence
from the mainstream media, the stage was set for a
historically close presidential election and for the
Republicans to be returned to the White House.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in
the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His
latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of
George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam
and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook. com. His
two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of
the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost
History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
WRITE IN RON PAUL.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/101308.html
By Robert Parry
October 14, 2008
As the American people pick through the wreckage left
by the Bush administration, many may wonder how the
most powerful nation on earth got so far off track. An
illustrative case study is the bogus story of Al
Gore’s “Chinagate” scandal.
The story doesn’t explain all that’s gone wrong in the
past eight years, but it reveals how aggressive
right-wing operatives, aided and abetted by a lazy or
complicit news media, can create an impression for
millions of voters that is nearly the opposite of the
truth.
So, in the razor-thin presidential election of 2000 –
at the dawn of the George W. Bush era – a significant
number of Americans went to the polls believing a
right-wing canard, that Al Gore was implicated in a
treacherous scheme to trade American nuclear secrets
to China for campaign cash.
The smear had been pushed by a combination of
Republicans and right-wing activists relying on the
Internet, talk radio, direct mail, Fox News and TV
ads. Meanwhile, the mainstream news media did little
to dispel the ugly suspicions, even though exculpatory
evidence existed that would have cleared Gore.
A bitter irony of the story was that Americans, who
voted against Gore to stop a “traitor” whom they
thought had bargained away life-and-death nuclear
secrets to China, were letting back in Republicans
upon whose watch the nuclear secrets apparently were
leaked.
Up had become down. The votes of those misguided
Americans then helped make Election 2000 close enough
for Bush and the Republicans to steal the White House.
[For details on that election, see our book Neck
Deep.]
Daisy Ad
The “Chinagate” story surfaced dramatically in the
weeks before Election 2000 when a pro-Republican group
from Texas, called Aretino Industries, ran an
emotional ad modeled after Lyndon Johnson’s infamous
1964 commercial that showed a girl picking a daisy
before the screen dissolved into a nuclear blast.
The ad remake accused the Clinton-Gore administration
of selling vital nuclear secrets to communist China
for campaign donations in 1996. The compromised
nuclear secrets, the ad said, gave China “the ability
to threaten our homes with long-range nuclear
warheads.”
The ad – airing in “swing” states including Ohio,
Michigan, Missouri and Pennsylvania – suggested that a
Chinese government front funneled $30,000 in illegal
“soft money” donations to the Democrats in 1996 in
exchange for the nuclear secrets. The most important
secret had been the blueprint for the W-88
miniaturized nuclear warhead.
The allegation hit a nerve with many voters because
the Bush campaign had run other ads showing grainy
photos of Al Gore with saffron-robed monks at a
Buddhist temple in California, implying corruption
with mysterious Asians.
The daisy ad also played off an earlier report by a
Republican-controll ed congressional investigation into
China’s apparent theft of the W-88 warhead design and
other U.S. nuclear secrets. The so-called Cox report,
named for the probe’s chairman Rep. Christopher Cox,
accused the Clinton-Gore administration of failing to
protect top-secret nuclear data from Chinese
espionage.
When released on May 25, 1999, the Cox report was
greeted by conservative groups and much of the
national news media as another indictment of the
Democrats in the aftermath of President Bill Clinton’s
Monica Lewinsky sex scandal. By then the press corps,
addicted to “Clinton scandals,” paid little attention
to the sleight of hand in the Cox report.
Cox’s key trick was to leave out dates of alleged
Chinese spying in the 1980s and thus obscure the fact
that the floodgates of U.S. nuclear secrets to China –
including how to build the miniaturized W-88 nuclear
warhead – had opened wide during the Reagan-Bush
years.
While leaving out Republican time elements, Cox shoved
references to the alleged security lapses into the
presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
For instance, the Cox report’s “Overview” stated that
“the PRC (People’s Republic of China) thefts from our
National Laboratories began at least as early as the
late 1970s, and significant secrets are known to have
been stolen as recently as the mid-1990s.”
In this way, Cox started with the Carter presidency,
jumped over the 12 years of Ronald Reagan and George
H.W. Bush, and landed in the Clinton years. In the
“Overview” alone, there were three dozen references to
dates from the Clinton years and only five mentions of
dates from the Reagan-Bush years, with none related to
alleged wrongdoing.
Cox’s stacking of the deck carried over into the
report’s two-page chronology of the Chinese spy
scandal. On pages 74-75, the Cox report put all the
information boxes about Chinese espionage suspicions
into the Carter and Clinton years.
Nothing sinister is attributed specifically to the
Reagan-Bush era, other than a 1988 test of a neutron
bomb built from secrets that the report says were
believed stolen in the “late 1970s,” the Carter years.
Only a careful reading of the text inside the
chronology’s boxes made clear that many of the worst
national security breaches could be traced to the
Reagan-Bush era.
But the major U.S. news media did little to challenge
Cox’s misleading findings, even though some newspapers
knew then or learned later that the evidence pointed
to a hemorrhage of nuclear secrets during the 1980s.
For instance, the Washington Post reported on Oct. 19,
2000, just weeks before the election, that when
federal investigators translated previously ignored
documents turned over by a Chinese defector in 1995,
they learned that the exposure of nuclear secrets in
the Reagan-Bush years was worse than previously
thought.
“The documents provided by the defector show that
during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large amount
of classified information about U.S. ballistic
missiles and reentry vehicles,” the Post reported. But
the newspaper didn't dispute Cox’s earlier findings or
debunk the treasonous “Chinagate” allegations then
being spread about Gore.
[Cox is now chairman of the Securities and Exchange
Commission, where he has come under criticism for
failing to adequately regulate Wall Street banks. One
of his aides on the Cox report was I. Lewis Libby, who
became Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and
was later convicted of perjury and obstruction of
justice in the “Plamegate” affair.]
Iran-Contra Connection
Other evidence, also available before Election 2000,
suggested that conscious decisions by senior
Reagan-Bush officials in the 1980s may have put
communist China in a position to glean those sensitive
secrets.
The rupture of U.S. nuclear secrets followed an
extraordinary decision by Ronald Reagan’s White House
in 1984 to collaborate with Beijing on a highly
sensitive intelligence operation, the clandestine
shipment of weapons to the Nicaraguan contra rebels,
in defiance of U.S. law.
The collaboration was especially risky because
Congress had forbidden military shipments to the
contras and the administration was insisting that it
was abiding by the law. In reality, President Ronald
Reagan had tapped a National Security Council staffer,
Oliver North, to oversee an off-the-books contra
supply operation.
Reagan’s White House turned to China hoping that it
would deliver surface-to-air missiles that might turn
the tide of the battle against Nicaragua’s leftist
Sandinista government, which had been inflicting heavy
losses on the contras by using Soviet-built attack
helicopters.
In his 1989 Iran-Contra trial, North described this
procurement of China's SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles as
a “very sensitive delivery.”
For the Chinese missile deal in 1984, North said he
received help from the CIA in arranging false end-user
certificates from the right-wing government of
Guatemala. But China balked at selling missiles to the
Guatemalan military, which was engaged in a
scorched-earth war against its own leftist guerrillas.
To resolve this problem, North was dispatched to a
clandestine meeting with a Chinese military official.
The idea was to bring the Chinese in on what was then
one of the most sensitive secrets of the U.S.
government – the missiles were not going to Guatemala,
but rather into a clandestine pipeline arranged by the
White House to funnel military supplies to the
contras.
“In Washington, I met with a Chinese military officer
assigned to their embassy to encourage their
cooperation,” North wrote in his autobiography, Under
Fire. “We enjoyed a fine lunch at the exclusive Cosmos
Club in downtown Washington.”
North said the Chinese saw the collaboration as a way
to develop “better relations with the United States.”
Possession of this sensitive information also put
Beijing in position to leverage future U.S. actions by
the Reagan administration. It was in this climate of
cooperation that secrets, including how to make
miniaturized hydrogen bombs, allegedly went from the
United States to China.
The Wen Ho Lee Case
While the details of how China learned the W-88
secrets are still unclear, it is clear that the Reagan
administration authorized a broader exchange program
between U.S. and Chinese nuclear physicists. The
Chinese were even given access to the Los Alamos
nuclear facility.
By 1985, the Reagan administration’ s expanded nuclear
exchanges with China were in full swing. In March
1985, Los Alamos nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee (who
would later come under suspicion of espionage) was
seen talking with Chinese scientists during a
scientific conference in Hilton Head, South Carolina,
according to a New York Times chronology that was not
published until after Election 2000 (on Feb. 4-5,
2001).
In 1986, with approval of the Los Alamos nuclear lab,
Wen Ho Lee and another scientist attended a conference
in Beijing. Wen Ho Lee traveled to Beijing again in
1988.
“With the Reagan administration eager to isolate the
Soviet Union, hundreds of scientists traveled between
the United States and China, and the cooperation
expanded to the development of torpedoes, artillery
shells and jet fighters,” the Times wrote. “The
exchanges were spying opportunities as well.”
The fruits of any Chinese espionage during Ronald
Reagan’s presidency became apparent during the
presidency of George H.W. Bush.
“On Sept. 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China’s
western desert,” the Times wrote. “From spies and
electronic surveillance, American intelligence
officials determined that the test was a breakthrough
in China’s long quest to match American technology for
smaller, more sophisticated hydrogen bombs.”
Assessing this Chinese breakthrough, U.S. intelligence
experts began to suspect that the Chinese had
purloined U.S. secrets.
“It’s like they were driving a Model T and went around
the corner and suddenly had a Corvette,” said Robert
M. Hanson, a Los Alamos intelligence analyst.
By the early years of the Clinton administration,
investigators had begun looking back at the mid-1980s
when the Reagan administration had authorized U.S.
nuclear scientists to hold a number of meetings with
their Chinese counterparts.
Though the American scientists were under restrictions
about what information could be shared, it was never
fully explained why those meetings were held in the
first place – given the risk that a U.S. scientist
might willfully or accidentally divulge nuclear
secrets.
A breakthrough in the probe didn’t occur until 1995
when a Chinese walk-in to the U.S. Embassy in Taiwan
provided documents indicating that China apparently
had gained access to American nuclear designs back in
the 1980s.
‘Chinagate’
It took four more years – until March 1999 – for the
Chinese nuclear story to gain national attention, when
the New York Times published several imprecise
front-page stories fingering Wen Ho Lee as an
espionage suspect.
During those chaotic first weeks of “Chinagate,”
Republicans and political pundits mixed together the
suspicions of Chinese spying and allegations about
illegal Chinese campaign donations to the Democrats in
1996. Clinton’s Justice Department overcompensated by
demonstrating how tough it could be on suspect Wen Ho
Lee.
Amid the spy frenzy, however, no one took note of the
logical impossibility of Democrats selling secrets to
China in 1996 that China seemed to have obtained a
decade or so earlier during a Republican
administration.
Instead, pro-Republican groups grasped the political
and fund-raising potential, especially since President
Clinton had just survived his impeachment ordeal and
there was a strong appetite for more “Clinton
scandals.” Plus, Clinton’s sidekick, Al Gore, was the
frontrunner to succeed his boss.
Larry Klayman’s right-wing Judicial Watch sent out a
letter seeking $5.2 million for a special “Chinagate
Task Force” that would “hold Bill Clinton, Al Gore and
the Democratic Party Leadership fully accountable for
election fraud, bribery and possibly treason in
connection with the ‘Chinagate’ scandal.”
The hysteria had especially ugly consequences for Wen
Ho Lee, the 60-year-old physicist who was imprisoned
on a 59-count indictment for mishandling classified
material.
The Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen was put in
solitary confinement with his cell light on at all
times. He was allowed out of his cell only one hour a
day, when he shuffled around a prison courtyard in leg
shackles.
However, the tenuous case against Wen Ho Lee began to
collapse in 2000 against the backdrop of the
presidential campaign. On Sept. 13, 2000, the
scientist pled guilty to a single count of mishandling
classified material, and U.S. District Judge James A.
Parker apologized to Lee for the “demeaning,
unnecessarily punitive conditions” under which Lee had
been held.
Still, the suspicions about Clinton-Gore treachery
with China lingered and reemerged during the final
days of Campaign 2000 with the “daisy ad” remake. The
closing message was blunt: “Don’t take a chance,” the
ad said. “Please vote Republican.”
George W. Bush’s campaign also exploited the
“Chinagate” suspicions, albeit a touch more subtly, by
running those ads showing Gore meeting with the
saffron-robed monks at a Buddhist temple in
California.
So, millions of Americans went to the polls in
November 2000 thinking that Gore’s temple appearance
and the Chinese nuclear spying were somehow linked.
The mainstream news media – still bristling with
hostility toward Clinton and Gore – offered no timely
explanation that the Chinese espionage represented a
Reagan-Bush scandal, not a Clinton-Gore scandal.
Through disinformation from the Right and acquiescence
from the mainstream media, the stage was set for a
historically close presidential election and for the
Republicans to be returned to the White House.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in
the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His
latest book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of
George W. Bush, was written with two of his sons, Sam
and Nat, and can be ordered at neckdeepbook. com. His
two previous books, Secrecy & Privilege: The Rise of
the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq and Lost
History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth'
are also available there. Or go to Amazon.com.
WRITE IN RON PAUL.
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