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The Manchurian presidency | page 1, 2, 3, 4
According to documents obtained by Ledeen, a mid-level government arms control bureaucrat was asked in 1997 to provide a memo supporting the administration's certification that China was not a nuclear proliferator and could be provided with advanced technologies. This request was made on the eve of a visit from China's communist dictator, Jiang Zemin. The bureaucrat refused and wrote that the agreement the U.S. government was about to sign "presents real and substantial risk to the common defense and security of both the United States and allied countries." The official added that China was actively seeking American secrets and that "China routinely, both overtly and covertly, subverts national and multilateral trade controls on militarily critical items." This patriot was immediately told by his superiors to revise his memo or lose his job. Sadly, according to Ledeen, he complied with the order and rewrote the document to state that the proposed Clinton trade agreement "is not inimical to the common defense or the security of the United States." In keeping with its fierce defense of a suicidal policy, the Clinton administration has failed to prosecute the people who have been identified as being responsible for the most critical thefts of American military secrets, and has protected those whose wrists it has slapped. Wen Ho Lee, the man believed to be responsible for the most damaging espionage, is known to have downloaded millions of lines of computer codes revealing the designs of our most advanced nuclear warheads. But Wen Ho Lee today is a free man. Peter Lee, who gave communist China our warhead testing techniques and the radar technology to locate our submarines -- until then the most secure element of our nuclear deterrent -- is also free, having served only a year in a halfway house for his treason. Wen Ho Lee was actually protected while performing his dirty work. When government agents requested a wiretap on his phone, the request was denied by Clinton's Justice Department. This was the first wiretap request ever denied in the Clinton era. Asked why it has not prosecuted Lee, the Justice Department claims that its evidence only shows that Lee downloaded the classified information onto a non-secure computer, from which others unknown may have picked it up. But, as Angelo Codevilla pointed out in a Wall Street Journal article, "By this logic no one could be prosecuted for espionage for putting stolen documents into a dead drop, such as a hollow tree, for later pickup by foreign agents." Of course, the administration lacks even this transparent excuse in the case of Peter Lee, who did in fact give the information directly to the communists. Why is Clinton furiously covering up for the communist Chinese and protecting its leaders and their spies from the wrath that should surely follow their rape of America's most guarded secrets? Certainly not, as Clinton and his complicit Democrat defenders now claim, because "everyone does it." Unlike China, for example, the state of Israel is a democracy and a proven ally of the United States. Yet when an Israeli agent named Jonathan Pollard was discovered stealing secrets whose dimensions did not even approach the seriousness of these thefts (no technologies, for example, were involved), he was given a life sentence amid the most solemn anathemas from the officials of the government he betrayed. | ||
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