Cockburn on the NYT on Wen Ho Lee

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Wed Sep 20 13:46:58 PDT 2000


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.



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