Asian-Americans rally behind Lee
Supporters say former Los Alamos scientist has become victim of a racial witch hunt
BY MAUREEN FAN
Mercury News Staff Writer
As a federal judge on Monday ordered Wen Ho Lee be kept in jail as ``a clear and present danger,' a powerful group of high-profile Asian-Americans furiously tied up phone lines and fired off e-mail with plans to publicly blast the decision as a racially motivated witch hunt.
Friends and relatives of the former Los Alamos National Laboratory nuclear physicist packed the courtroom as U.S. Magistrate Judge Don Svet in Albuquerque ordered Lee's continued detention.
Community leaders, including former San Jose congressman Norm Mineta, Cupertino Mayor Michael Chang and former University of California-Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, put the finishing touches on a public statement that could be released as early as today.
``This man has been scapegoated,' Chang said. ``There's a high level of concern throughout the Asian-American community because the story strikes home so clearly. A lot of people here came to this country like he did; a lot of people work in high tech. It could be them.'
Lee, 60, is a Taiwan-born U.S. citizen.
Some Asian-Americans said they may take their concerns to Shamina Singh, the new executive director of the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, who will attend a reception in San Francisco this evening.
Charges against him
Lee, who was fired in March from Los Alamos, has been accused of being responsible for China's acquisition of highly secret information on the design of American nuclear weapons. He pleaded not guilty Monday to 59 counts of mishandling nuclear data, including unlawful receipt or acquisition of restricted data, unlawful gathering of national defense information and unlawful retention of national defense information. Lee has not been charged with espionage.
``It's just crazy!' Mineta said in a three-hour conference call over the weekend. ``The government evidently has no evidence that any of the information went to a third party. . . . They need a scapegoat, and they're going to dump on him.'
Mineta is a former mayor of San Jose and is a vice president at Lockheed Martin.
``This is an outrageous abuse of judicial power by the U.S. government on one hapless individual who has been tried and convicted through the media of spying, and then when it comes to the actual indictment there is not anything in there that represents espionage,' said George Koo, a San Jose member of the Committee of 100, a group of prominent Chinese-Americans.
Koo, who is also deputy director for Pacific Rim services for Deloitte & Touche, a consulting firm, said he planned to tell Singh tonight to ask President Clinton to ``call off the dogs.'
Chang, Mineta and Koo are members of a high-profile national coalition that includes groups not known for wading into political waters, such as the Chinese American Scientists and Engineers Association of Southern California and the Overseas Chinese Physics Association, which has about 400 members nationwide.
The case has especially touched a chord among immigrants and has been the subject of daily coverage in the Chinese press and on Chinese-language television and radio. Many are mindful of the communitywide tarnish that resulted after the Democratic campaign finance scandal.
``This is a witch hunt,' said David Lee, executive director of the Chinese American Voters Education Committee. ``The image of Wen Ho Lee being dragged off from his home to jail on a Friday afternoon finally mobilized a lot of these forces. I think many Chinese-Americans, particularly new immigrants, feel vulnerable and feel Lee was unfairly targeted by the government.'
Arrest at home criticized
Many supporters said they were especially galled because Lee was not allowed to surrender quietly to authorities. FBI agents arrested Lee at his home outside Los Alamos on Friday afternoon, a move that prevented an immediate bail hearing and forced Lee to spend the weekend in jail.
``Dr. Lee's human rights are being violated,' said Charles Sie, vice chairman of the Committee of 100. ``Now where are all the human rights advocates who worry about China? Do they worry about human rights in Albuquerque?'
The indictment charges Lee with transferring classified information into unclassified computer files at the Los Alamos lab and downloading other material onto portable tapes. Seven of the tapes Lee made could not be found. Prosecutors do not allege that Lee gave the material to another country, but they accuse him of acting ``with the intent to injure the United States and with the intent to secure an advantage for a foreign power.'
Lee's defense attorney Brian Sun denied the charges. ``They have freely acknowledged that they have no evidence that he gave it to anybody, that he ever met with anybody to give it to or that any of the evidence left the lab,' he said.
Sun said his client had voluntarily given up his passport in March or April, cooperated with investigators for three years and voluntarily notified the government of all travel outside Los Alamos in the past nine months.
``We're getting calls and contacts from all over the country. This is galvanizing the Asian-American community like it never has before,' Sun said. ``We think the government has blundered and totally miscalculated the community's outrage at singling him out.'
In an e-mail to supporters, Cecilia Chang of Fremont, chairwoman of the Wen Ho Lee Defense Fund Steering Committee, said: ``It is probably the equivalent of (the) Rodney King case in the African-American community.'
Other groups in the coalition that plans a joint statement include the Chinese American Citizens Alliance, the Organization of Chinese Americans, the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, and the Asian American Leadership Councils of Sandia, Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories. |
