>>Roosevelt was never enfeebled. I lived in that era'..That is pure unadulterated B/S
Sure he was. Churchill wrote about it and Yalta. His doctors knew that he was suffering from hypertension, hypertensive heart disease, and cardiac failure. Some of the president's advisers suspected as much, and they feared that he might not live through another term. FDR lived amonth or so after his inauguration and Yalta. He was vitually dead at Yalta.
>>Watch this same accusation of the Chinese Scientist...He is not guilty..
Looks like he is guilty, the demagogues are playing the race card after all. Then again, a few unrepentant leftists still say Hiss was innocent.
August 19, 1999
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Review & Outlook
Something Happened
We're beginning to think that the epitaph over the eight years of the Clinton administration is going to read, "Honest bureaucratic mistake."
This, of course, was the explanation offered when more than 900 raw FBI files on Republican figures floated into the White House. Now it appears that the scandal over the transfer of nuclear-missile technology to China is about to recede into these same bureaucratic mists.
The Washington press the past few days has been carrying stories about Robert Vrooman, the former Los Alamos counterintelligence chief, who now says that suspected spy Wen Ho Lee is the victim of ethnic bias. We doubt it. Still, we have some sympathy for Messrs. Vrooman and Lee. They're the ones out in the open taking the bullets, while the Reno Justice Department and at the top, the Clinton White House, deploy their bureaucracies to deflect responsibility, even the smallest responsibility, away from them and onto others.
The handling of the Los Alamos Chinese spying case sounds familiar. It sounds like what happened to the campaign-finance investigation, if indeed Chinese espionage and Chinese contributions can be separated.
Wen Ho Lee has been under FBI suspicion at the lab for years. By 1995, the U.S. was actively investigating the possibility that China had obtained data on the W-88 nuclear warhead. In June 1997 the FBI asked the Justice Department for a "FISA warrant," referring to the Federal Internal Security Act, which sets up a federal court that approves such requests, to conduct surveillance of Mr. Lee and his wife. In August, Allan Kornblum, a Justice deputy counsel, said the Bureau had failed to show "probable cause."
Rejections of FISA requests are rare. As to probable cause, an August 5 report by Senators Fred Thompson and Joseph Lieberman lists the FBI's suspicions about the Lees across 18 paragraphs, including: "The FBI learned that during a visit to Los Alamos by (Chinese) scientists from IAPCM, Lee had discussed certain unclassified (but weapons-related) computer codes with the Chinese delegation. It was reported that Lee had helped the Chinese scientists with their codes by providing software and calculations relating to hydrodynamics." A congressional source tells us that two additional reasons to monitor were dropped from the public report for security reasons.
The FBI then made an unprecedented appeal of the denial to the Attorney General. After a meeting about security issues, the head of the FBI's National Security Division told Ms. Reno "we've been turned down" by her department. The Thompson report then states: "Attorney General Reno has said that she does not recall the conversation, but does not deny that it occurred." Nonetheless, another Justice attorney, Daniel Seikaly, ended up with the assignment of reviewing the original turndown, and weeks later concurred with the decision not to monitor the Lees.
The turndown of this wiretap is at the heart of the Thompson-Lieberman report. Both criticized Justice's refusal.
Sen. Lieberman, noting various bureaucratic failures by the FBI along the way, concluded: "I ask why, given the extreme importance of this case to America's national security, [Justice] did not raise this issue to the Attorney General herself, push the FBI harder to make its case, or decide to send the request for a warrant to the court to make the final judgment
Squaring this circle, Sen. Thompson said Justice "adopted a highly restrictive view of probable cause, even though the showing necessary in a national security context is less than for a criminal investigation." Another report by the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, led by former Sen. Warren Rudman, raised precisely the same issues regarding these decisions.
Obviously there was a judgment call to be made here. And reasonable people might differ on the call. They might differ, that is, if Justice under Ms. Reno had not by now shown itself to come down routinely on the side of doing nothing or next to nothing in investigations of this sort. As in the campaign finance investigation of illegal foreign contributions to the President's reelection campaign.
Consider the record. As with the Los Alamos case, clearly something illegal was taking place with the Chinese fundraising. But Ms. Reno rejected the advice of both Charles La Bella and Louis Freeh to turn these matters over to an independent counsel. The La Bella episode is especially illuminating.
It would have been one thing if Ms. Reno had simply rejected Mr. La Bella's recommendation. But she and her aides went further, essentially trashing La Bella for his position and pushing him out of federal service. One might reasonably suspect that the lower-echelon lawyers, including those handling the Los Alamos decisions, knew better than to get on the wrong side of any Justice investigations involving China.
Then, after giving "her people" full responsibility for this investigation, and after a few indictments, the result has been no jail time for anyone. Johnny Chung and John Huang got probation. Charlie Trie awaits sentencing.
And it is similarly clear that something happened at the Sept. 13, 1995, Oval Office meeting at which Bill Clinton, Bruce Lindsey, Joe Giroir and James Riady told a nobody named John Huang that he was moving from his Commerce Department job over to fund raising for the DNC. Absent a real inquiry into this crucial meeting's content, we're supposed to conclude that it was John Huang's idea to go all the way to China to break the contribution laws.
In other words, it is at least clear to us that Bill Clinton and Janet Reno have inculcated the Department of Justice with a culture of nonfeasance. Nonfeasance is about not doing what duty requires. And duty, some sense of a higher purpose or judgment, is what we think Senators Thompson and Lieberman are asking for in their report on the Los Alamos case. It is what many had hoped for in the campaign-finance investigation.
But neither Mr. Clinton nor Ms. Reno are inclined to do what they don't want to do. They always have their reasons. Somehow, whether it is national security or the integrity of a presidential election, the electorate is supposed to shrug and get over it.
Perhaps, for another year or so. It will then be the next President's job to remake Justice from a place of constant suspicion about motive to one of respect.
interactive.wsj.com
>>. History is only as good as the Liars of the era'
Both FDR and JFK hired good ones, the Schlesingers, father and son. |
