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Let the litigation begin
Kevorkian's lawyer's suit against the Columbine killers' parents is just the beginning.
By Dave Cullen
[05/28/99]

Traitor in chief
Clinton has not only dismantled our national defense, he has given away our military advantages to enemies all too willing to destroy us.
By David Horowitz
[05/28/99]

Will Milosevic's indictment matter?
They're not dancing in the streets of Sarajevo yet, because the indicted Serbian war criminal may never be brought to justice.
By Laura Rozen
[05/27/99]

Text of the Milosevic indictment
The U.N. International Criminal Tribunal charges the Yugoslav president with murder, persecution and deportation.

[05/27/99]

Spies and lies
Scientist Wen Ho Lee passed a polygraph test, but the feds want to depend more on them to detect espionage.
By Jeff Stein
[05/27/99]

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Just look at the shelf life of Congress' investigation of Chinese spying. All that hard work by the Cox Committee, and the story was knocked off the front page of the Washington Post by day two. So Republicans angry at the success of the Clinton spin machine are trying to give the spying issue a longer life by resurrecting another Democratic scandal that wouldn't stick to the nation's ribs: the flap over Chinese and Chinese-American campaign contributions.

Even though the nine-member Cox Committee was hailed as a paradigm of bipartisan cooperation, it didn't take long for partisan sniping to begin on Capitol Hill. Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., has called for the resignation of Attorney General Janet Reno. The heretofore invisible Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, wants National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to resign. And though the Cox Report's grave conclusions were agreed to by four Democrats, those Democrats have backed away from their work as the Clinton spin machine has kicked into overdrive. Cox Committee member Rep. John M. Spratt Jr., D-S.C., said the report "is alarming. But is it accurate?" The committee's ranking Democrat, Washington's Norm Dicks, said that the conclusions were "written in a worst-case fashion."

Frustrated Republican committee member Curt Weldon of Pennsylvania says the Clinton communications team partially inoculated itself against bad press by leaking the least damaging aspects of the story before the official report was made public on Tuesday. "The administration wants the media to focus on the labs because that part of the story took place during a previous administration and also because the problem has been done away with," Weldon said in an interview with Salon News.

Weldon took his j'accusatories one step further, laying out an intricate conspiratorial time line of all the Asian-themed scandals of the past few years. Could all of the Asian names associated with the administration's campaign finance scandals somehow tie in with the exportation of U.S. military and commercial technology? Weldon, a blue collar Republican and former fire chief from the Philadelphia suburbs, has no proof. But on Thursday he plotted the dots behind the various Asian scandals and asked the national press corps to connect them.

One chart, labeled "The China Connection," was designed to prove links between Chinese military organizations, Chinese front companies, banks and financial institutions and players in the scandal like the Lippo Group, John Haung, James Riady and Vice President Al Gore.

The other chart, "Liberalized/Decontrolled Technologies to Peoples Republic of China," is a time line that begins in January 1993, suggests there may be a connection between the White House visits of Huang, Riady, Johnny Chung and Charlie Yah Lin Trie to Chinese space launch transfers, warhead design and Chinese sales of weapons to Iran, Pakistan, North Korea, and Syria.

Weldon admits his evidence is only circumstantial. "I don't have the direct quid pro quos," Weldon acknowledged. "Our mission on the committee was to determine if technology transfers occurred; not why they did, if they did." Pressed to give the motivation for letting corporate jackals have at it, Weldon said that he "thought that was obvious: Technology safeguards were loosened on behalf of political and financial allies of the president in exchange for their continued support and so the president could be reelected in 1996. That played the major influence on the entire process."

"That's outrageous," says National Security Council spokesman David Leavy. "The Cox Committee looked into and found absolutely no evidence with issues of lab security with anything having to do with campaign finance. You may question our judgment about how we handled lab security -- and rightly so -- but any question of our motivation is outrageous and offensive."

Leavy says that blaming the current scandal on Clinton is also only giving part of the picture. "A vast majority of the Cox Report details events that went on in the '70s and '80s," Leavy says. "And there is no evidence that there was any compromise of nuclear weapons information at the labs during the Clinton presidency" -- though Leavy acknowledges that "ongoing investigations" may eventually contradict that assertion.

Over the last six years, Clinton's team has proved masterful at spoon-feeding information to the press, and controlling which parts of the story get the most ink and air time. "The Clintonites have gone the 'modified limited hangout' route of acknowledging some damage was done, while also relentlessly reminding reporters that much of this happened during the Reagan-Bush years and insisting that they have got the problem under control," says Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz, author of "Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine."

Kurtz says that such spin tactics are par for the course. "The White House has pretty clearly been on the defensive for months over this issue and it's hardly surprising that they would emphasize a defense that plays to their strongest points," he observes. Nor is such a White House strategy new. "During the campaign fund-raising scandals," Kurtz says, "the White House adopted a deliberate strategy of leaking the most damaging memos and materials about their fund-raising abuses so they could proudly proclaim it to be 'old news' by the time congress got around to airing it. And to a surprising degree, that was a successful strategy."

Leavy doesn't dispute that his office provided information for "the public," but he downplays its significance. "We made available to the public the Cox Committee Report recommendations, and our responses to them," he says, "but there was a lot of leakage of information that didn't come from the administration. I'd caution the congressman on pointing fingers."

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