Re: FBI to Wen Ho Lee: you will get the same treatment as theRosenbergs

["ÁÎ×Ó¹â Henry C.K.Liu ¹ù¤l¥ú" <hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The Wen Ho Lee case is the American version of the French Dreyfus
case.  At least Dreyfus was defended by the French left.

Henry C.K. Liu


Louis Proyect wrote:

> New York Times, Aug. 29, 2000
>
> PUBLIC INTERESTS / By GAIL COLLINS
>
> Spies in the Attic
>
> There were very few public enemies as nefarious as the 1999 version of Wen
> Ho Lee, the 60-year-old scientist who's accused of downloading the "crown
> jewels" of our nuclear secrets with the intent of harming the United States.
>
> The 1999 Lee model, brought to you courtesy of the F.B.I. and the
> Department of Energy, lied to his colleagues in order to get mounds of top
> secret data out of the secure computers in the Los Alamos labs and put it
> on tapes, which are still missing -- out there somewhere. He had
> fishy-looking contacts with Chinese scientists when he was abroad, and kept
> them secret from American authorities. The director of nuclear weapons at
> Los Alamos testified that if the data Dr. Lee downloaded fell into the
> wrong hands it could "change the global strategic balance."
>
> Well, you could see why they put the guy in a segregated cell. With
> manacles. "For a long time, during his one hour of exercise, he'd have to
> try to kick the soccer ball around with leg shackles," said his lawyer.
>
> But after being held for eight months without bail, the biggest danger to
> national security since Benedict Arnold is starting to look a tad less
> threatening. It turns out:
>
> The data Dr. Lee downloaded was classified as secret only after the fact.
> Defense experts -- who seem just as smart as the prosecution experts -- say
> virtually all of it is already public knowledge, and what isn't probably
> wouldn't pose a threat even if it wound up on Muammar el-Qaddafi's bedside
> table.
>
> The lie Dr. Lee told his colleague to get access to the computer existed
> only in the mind of an F.B.I. agent, who now says he made "an honest
> error." That agent, Robert Messemer, also now acknowledges that Dr. Lee did
> file reports of his meetings with Chinese scientists.
>
> Mr. Messemer threatened Dr. Lee with the death penalty during one
> interview, pointing out what happened to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg when
> they refused to come clean. The agent, unlike Dr. Lee, is still working at
> his job.
>
> Nobody is denying that Dr. Lee spent hours and hours downloading one large
> mountain of codes. And nobody has a good explanation for why. Did he want a
> backup file? A scientific version of the "Collected Works of Wen Ho Lee"?
> So far, he hasn't explained himself, although his lawyer says the missing
> tapes were all destroyed.
>
> Other Los Alamos employees in the past have been fired or disciplined for
> mishandling classified information. But Asian-American civil rights groups
> point out that Dr. Lee, an American citizen who was born in Taiwan, is the
> first person in the lab's history to be charged in a criminal case, let
> alone one carrying a penalty of life in prison.
>
> Whatever Dr. Lee was doing, the government has offered not one iota of
> evidence that it was espionage. The prosecution, despite its grim talk of
> Chinese spies, claimed in its court papers that Dr. Lee wanted to use the
> data to impress potential employers during a job search. We have gone from
> worrying about rogue nations to a research lab in Switzerland. And there
> seems to be no evidence, by the way, that he ever actually contacted
> anybody about a job. Last week a judge in New Mexico ruled that the
> government's case "no longer has the requisite clarity and persuasive
> character" needed to keep holding Dr. Lee without bail.
>
> Security cases always involve the politics of paranoia. Dr. Lee looks
> harmless from here. (How many spies call the computer help line for advice
> while they're stealing secrets?) But maybe the F.B.I. can't tell us the
> whole story because laying it all out in court would compromise our
> security even more. If the prosecution says "hundreds of millions of people
> could be killed," who wants to take a risk?
>
> The problem is that right now, an average citizen might conclude that the
> multitudinous embarrassments over Los Alamos left federal officials
> desperate for somebody to arrest. They might assume that, in a facility
> where security was so lax even the vending machine was probably downloading
> secrets, the authorities picked on Dr. Lee because of his race. They might
> suspect that the F.B.I. ignored evidence that he was telling the truth,
> gave false testimony about his past activities in court, and kept a
> 60-year-old man isolated in a maximum security prison for months in the
> hopes of getting him to confess to something that would allow them to save
> face.
>
> Paranoia works both ways.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
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