New York Press, Sep. 20-26, vol 13 no 38
Wild Justice
Alexander Cockburn
The Disgrace of the Times
The collapse of the government's case against Wen Ho Lee last week
represents one of the greatest humiliations of a national newspaper in
the history of journalism. One has to go back to the publication by
the London Times of the Pigott forgeries in 1887 libeling Charles
Stewart Parnell, the Irish nationalist hero, to find an equivalent
debacle. Yet not a whisper of contrition, not a murmur of remorse, has
as yet agitated the editorial pages of The New York Times, which now
righteously urges the appointment of a "politically independent person
of national standing to review the entire case."
No such review is required to determine the decisive role of The New
York Times in sparking the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, his solitary
confinement under threat of execution, his denial of bail, his
shackling, the loss of his job, the anguish and terror endured by this
scientist and his family. On March 6, 1999, the Times carried a report
by James Risen and Jeff Gerth entitled "Breach at Los Alamos,"
charging an unnamed scientist with stealing nuclear secrets from the
government lab and giving them to the Chinese People's Republic. The
espionage, according to a CIA man cited by Risen and Gerth, was "going
to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs."
Two days later Wen Ho Lee, an American of Taiwanese descent, was fired
from his job. Ahead of him lay months of further pillorying in a
racist witch-hunt led by the Times, whose news columns were replete
with more mendacious bulletins from Risen and Gerth, and whose op-ed
page featured William Safire using their stories to launch his own
calumnies against Wen Ho Lee and the Clinton administration.
Guided by Safire, the Republicans in Congress pounced upon the Wen Ho
Lee case with ardor approaching ecstasy. By the spring of 1999 their
efforts to evict Bill Clinton from office for the Lewinsky affair had
collapsed. They needed a new stick with which to beat the
administration and The New York Times handed it to them. In Safire's
insinuations, the Clinton White House was but an annex of the Middle
Kingdom, and the transfer of U.S. nuclear secrets merely one episode
in a long, dark narrative of treachery to the American flag. Former
U.S. Sen. Warren Rudman went on NBC's Meet the Press and declared
flatly, "The agenda for the body politic is often set by the media.
Had it not been for The New York Times breaking the story of Chinese
espionage all over the front pages, I'm not sure I'd be here this
morning." The most preposterous expression of the Republican spy
crusade against the Clinton administration came with the release of
the 900-page report named after California Rep. Christopher Cox,
filled with one demented assertion after another, including the
memorable though absolutely false claim that "the stolen information
includes classified information on seven U.S. thermonuclear warheads,
including every currently deployed thermonuclear warhead in the U.S.
ballistic missile arsenal."
Yet Risen and Gerth's stories had been profuse with terrible errors
from the outset. Their prime source had been Notra Trulock, an
embittered security official in the Dept. of Energy intent upon his
own vendettas within the department. Risen and Gerth swallowed his
assertions with disgraceful zeal. From him and other self-interested
officials they relayed one falsehood after another: that Wen Ho Lee
had failed a lie detector test; that the Los Alamos lab was the
undoubted source of the security breach; that it was from Los Alamos
that the Chinese had acquired the blueprint of the miniaturized W-88
nuclear warhead. Had The New York Times launched its campaign of
terror against Wen Ho Lee at the height of the Cold War, it is quite
likely that Wen Ho Lee would have been swept to his doom, most likely
with a sentence of life imprisonment amid vain efforts by his
defenders to get the scientist a fair hearing. It is doubtful that
U.S. District Judge James Parker in New Mexico would have had the
courage to denounce the Justice Dept. for a shabby case and to order
the release of Wen Ho Lee after harshly criticizing the 59-count
government indictment and the "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive
conditions" in which Wen Ho Lee had been held. But we are no longer
amid the fevers of the Cold War. And though the Pentagon has wanly
tried to foment a budget-boosting campaign to suggest that China
represents a fearsome military threat, it has not been taken with any
great seriousness. The exaggerations of Chinese might are simply too
egregious.
So, in these post-Cold War years, Wen Ho Lee did have his sturdy
defenders. Some were government officials evidently appalled by the
Times' campaign. Some commentators, most notably Lars-Erik Nelson of
the Daily News, were scathing about the case against Wen Ho Lee. In
July 1999 the New York Review of Books published a long piece by
Nelson that explicitly criticized the witch hunt and noted the malign
role of the Times. Nelson pointed out how many of the supposedly
filched "secrets" had been publicly available for years.
By September of 1999 The New York Times had evidently entertained
sufficient disquiet to publish a long piece by William Broad that
decorously-though without any explicit finger-pointing -undermined the
premises of Risen and Gerth's articles. None of this helped Wen Ho Lee
escape terrifying FBI interrogations, in which an agent flourished the
threat of execution. He was in solitary, allowed to exercise one hour
a day while shackled, kept in a constantly lit cell. (Such horrible
conditions and worse, it should be noted, are the lot-year after
year-of thousands of prisoners in so-called Secure Housing Units in
prisons across the U.S.) Even near the end, when it was plain that the
government's case was falling apart, Attorney General Janet Reno's
prosecutors successfully contested efforts to have Wen Ho Lee released
on bail. And when Judge Parker finally threw out almost the entire
case, the prosecutors continued to insist, as has Reno, that their
conduct had been appropriate throughout.
The New York Times, without whose agency Wen Ho Lee would never have
spent a day in a prison cell, perhaps not even have lost his job, is
now, with consummate effrontery, urging that an investigation of the
bungled prosecution take place. On Sept. 16 Times columnist Anthony
Lewis excoriated Reno's Justice Dept. and proclaimed piously that
"this country's security rests in good part on having judges with the
character and courage, like Judge Parker, to do their duty despite
prosecutorial alarms and excursions." No word from Lewis about the
role of his own newspaper. Lewis knows well enough, as does everyone
at the Times, the infamous role played by Risen, Gerth, Safire and the
editors who condoned their stories and columns. No doubt even had
Lewis noted the role of the Times, an editor would have struck the
tactless phrases from his column. But if ever there was an occasion
for self-criticism by a newspaper, it is surely this one. In an
extraordinary breach of conventional decorum the President of the
United States has criticized his own attorney general for the way Wen
Ho Lee has been maltreated. Yet the editors of The New York Times can
admit no wrong. Risen and Gerth are not required to offer reflections
on the outcome of the affair.
When the forgeries of Richard Pigott, who was described in the 1911
edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as "a needy and disreputable
Irish journalist," against Parnell were exposed, he fled to Madrid and
there blew out his brains. The London Times required years to efface
the shame of its gullibility. Would that The New York Times were
required to admit equivalent error. But it won't. Next year it will no
doubt preen amid whatever Pulitzer awards are put its way by the jury
of its friends. This is no-fault journalism, and it's a disgrace to
the Fourth Estate.