>If they can find flaws in the news reports, they conclude the evidence against Lee is some government hoax. I think such people have absolutely no sense of how classified operations function<.
If you put one person under the scrutiny, you can always find there is something wrong. you don't mean that DOE should fired 300 employee who download the data to a unsecured computer?
Larry, is this fair? See this article:
08-04) 00:33 PDT SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Fred Lau always wanted to be a San Francisco police officer. He wanted it so badly he literally hung upside down to get the job.
Back in 1970, there was a height requirement to join the force and the 5-foot-7 Lau was an inch short. He tried hanging upside down from a bar to stretch the extra inch. It didn't work.
What did work was pressure from civil rights activists. The city dropped the height requirement in 1971 and Lau became the department's fifth Asian American officer. Today, Lau is chief of police, his career rise a reflection of a century of change for Chinese Americans.
Chinese Americans have some of the highest income and education levels of any ethnic group in the United States. This has led some to label them and other Asians the ''model minority'' as they seemingly overcame discrimination to leap past other groups.
But some fear a ripple effect from recent high-profile scandals -- allegations of Chinese espionage at nuclear weapons labs and illegal contributions by China in U.S. political campaigns -- is eroding that progress. Vivid memories linger for many from World War II, when doubts about the patriotism of Japanese Americans led to their internment.
Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., referred to ''a crafty people'' when talking about the spy scandal. An editorial in the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper evoked the image of ''Fu Manchu,'' the cunning, mustached and slant-eyed stereotype from Sax Rohmer's novels. Editorial cartoons commenting on the spy case featured images of bucktoothed Asians with thick glasses.
''It only shows that to a certain extent, some of this stuff is just below the surface,'' said Victor Hsi, a vice president of the Organization of Chinese Americans, a Washington, D.C.-based civil rights group.
When U.S.-China relations sour, inevitably there is a backlash against Chinese Americans, Hsi said.
''(Asian Americans) were neither indigenous nor brought over in chains,'' says Ling-chi Wang, chairman of the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California at Berkeley. ''The strategy was to declare these Asian immigrants as unassimilatable and treat them like foreigners, and that pretty much has stayed with us till today.''
The Asian American label describes a mix of 30 ethnicities and numerous languages. The fourth-generation Chinese American has very little in common with a recent immigrant from Laos. High incomes among established groups like Chinese Americans contrast with rampant poverty among recent immigrants from Southeast Asia.
''(Non-Asians) lump us all together,'' says George Ong, president of the Organization of Chinese Americans. ''To them we are all foreigners.''
Hong Kong native Kenny Su, 49, attended a recent job workshop in San Francisco sponsored by the community group Chinese for Affirmative Action. He's lived in the United States for 10 years, but says he isn't always accepted.
''People always make fun of my accent,'' says Su, who spoke in broken, but understandable English. ''They don't have a good image of Chinese people.''
Anti-Chinese sentiment can be traced back to the frontier days. Some of the first Asians in the United States were Chinese miners who came through San Francisco during the Gold Rush. As outsiders, they were seen as an economic threat. A tax of $2.50 a month on all Chinese living in California was passed in 1862 to ''protect free white labor.'' The backlash led to the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the country.
Over the years there have been laws preventing Asians from owning land, gaining citizenship and marrying whites. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943 when China was an ally in World War II.
In the late 1950s, a real estate agent told Ong's family they couldn't buy a home in San Francisco's Richmond district because ''Chinese aren't welcome.'' Today the Richmond is considered San Francisco's second Chinatown, with a strip of stores and restaurants that rival its older cousin.
San Francisco, along with New York, has been a historic capital for Chinese Americans. San Francisco still has one of the largest Chinese populations in the country and Asian Americans make up 30 percent of the city, the highest proportion in any major U.S. city outside of Hawaii.
Nationally, Asian Americans number 10.1 million, just 3.8 percent of the U.S. population, but they have had disproportionate affluence and achievements in recent years. Chinese are the largest group among Asian Americans, who have the highest median household income of any racial group.
More than 40 percent of the students at top campuses of the University of California are Asian Americans. That's a long way from early this century, when the first Chinese American students at UC Berkeley pooled their money and bought a house from the university president because nobody would rent to them.
In Silicon Valley, a quarter of the high-tech businesses are run by Asian entrepreneurs, mostly Chinese and Indian immigrants.
With those numbers, the image of the model minority seems true -- to a degree.
''It's very rare if you apply for a job with a Chinese surname that someone would toss your application in the garbage can like they did 30 years ago,'' says Diane Chin, executive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. ''But there are many glass ceilings out there that are still largely ignored.''
Many Asian Americans say they are hindered by the perception that they are skilled in technical fields but don't have what it takes to reach top management. Asian Americans hold about 1 percent of the board seats at the 1,000 biggest public companies in the country, according to a study by the Boyden Global Executive Search of Washington, D.C.
The height requirement San Francisco had for police and firefighters was not directed specifically at Asians, women or others, but ''it certainly had that effect,'' says Germaine Wong, a co-founder of Chinese for Affirmative Action, which supported Lau's cause.
''Our argument was that if you go to China you won't find many Irish cops,'' Wong says. ''Someone is fighting fires and being cops over there.''
Abolishing the height restriction gave Lau a chance to fulfill a dream and be a pioneer. He is the only Chinese American to lead a big city police department.
''The fact that it's a very strong position, it's a very visible position and a very non-Asian position is very important,'' Lau says. ''It's very contrary to the stereotype.'' |
