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Strategies & Market Trends : Asia Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rolla Coasta who wrote (9791)	9/13/2000 8:04:51 PM
From: George Papadopoulos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 9980

Nuclear Scientist Lee Freed, Judge Apologizes dailynews.yahoo.com --------- I think we all owe Lee an apology. The way he was treated was shameful and I hope the guy sues the govt for millions. Sickening that they locked him up in solitary confinement for 9 months! They should have thown Deutch in the next cell for the same "crimes"... The plea bargaining snag had probably to do with Lee not giving in pursuing a lawsuit against the govt. It is amazing that these guys still insist that they were right on doing what they did and still collect a paycheck. ------------------- By Marcus Kabel ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (Reuters) - Former Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee was freed on Wednesday after nine months of solitary confinement, with a judge apologizing to him and blasting the U.S. government for ``embarrassing our entire nation'' with its zealous pursuit of an unproven case. In an extraordinary 10-minute courtroom rebuke to the government for its handling of the case, U.S. District Judge James Parker declared, ``The executive branch has enormous power, the abuse of which can be devastating to citizens.'' Parker ordered Lee, a 60-year-old naturalized American citizen who was born in Taiwan, released from jail in a plea bargain in which the scientist pleaded guilty to a lone felony count of downloading nuclear weapons design secrets to a non-secure computer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb. But outside the courthouse in Albuquerque, defiant government lawyers defended their actions. They refused to apologize for pursuing Lee -- who initially had been portrayed as a spy for China, although those allegations went unproven -- and said they had acted to protect U.S. national security and stop one man from compiling his own ``personal library'' of U.S. nuclear secrets. In Washington, Attorney General Janet Reno (news - web sites) echoed their comments, saying that she and FBI Director Louis Freeh ''shoulder the awesome responsibility of protecting national security'' and adding that the terms of the plea agreement would allow investigators to find out what happened to missing tapes that Lee made of U.S. nuclear weapons secrets. Lee told reporters outside the courthouse: ``I am very happy to go home with my wife and children and I want to say 'thank you' to all the people who supported me. In the next few days I am going to go fishing.'' Judge Apologizes For Unfair Treatment The judge had harsh words for the U.S. Department of Justice and the Department of Energy. He said that people at their top levels ``have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.'' He told Lee that as ``a member of the third branch of the U.S. government, the courts, I sincerely apologize to you ... for the unfair manner you were held in custody.'' He said he was misled by the prosecution last November to order Lee held in solitary confinement, often in shackles. Parker also said he regretted that the plea agreement prevented disclosure of information that would shed light on the reasons for the detention and whether he was singled out, as the defense claimed, because he was of Chinese descent. ``What I think remains unanswered is ... the government's motive in insisting you be confined under onerous and demeaning conditions,'' Parker said. The prosecution had presented Lee as a threat to national security who had access to the ``crown jewels'' of U.S. nuclear secrets and suggested he had spied for China although he was never charged with espionage. As part of the deal, Lee signed a sworn statement that he never intended to harm the United States and never passed the secrets he copied to any third party. He also gave the government a written declaration of how he made the computer tapes of nuclear weapons designs and how he destroyed them. Prosecutors, defending the plea deal, said getting Lee's cooperation in determining the fate of the seven missing tapes was more important than seeking a long prison term. Reno said, ``This is an agreement that is in the best interest of our national security in that it gives us our best chance to find out what happened to the tapes.'' Lee also pledged under the plea deal to undergo 10 days of extensive questioning under oath by federal investigators about the tapes and to allow them to search any storage spaces, safety deposit boxes or computers to which he has access. In return, the government dropped all other charges including nearly 40 counts of acting with intent to harm the United States that could have landed Lee in prison for life. Lee Loses Some Rights Before Lee entered his guilty plea, the judge asked him if understood that a felony conviction meant he would lose certain rights of citizenship, including voting, running for office or owning a gun. ``In my opinion you have been punished harshly, both by the conditions of pretrial detention and the fact that you have lost rights as a citizen,'' the judge said. Many critics of the government portrayed the plea bargain as a face-saving gesture in an embarrassing situation for the prosecution, which saw its case against Lee collapse over the last few weeks amid charges that it had targeted him because of his ethnicity as a possible spy for China. Norman Bay, an Asian-American who recently was appointed as U.S. attorney for the district that includes Los Alamos, insisted to reporters that the case had nothing to do with race, as many critics of the prosecution had insisted. ``Mr. Lee was not prosecuted because of his race, he was prosecuted because of what he did. He compiled his own personal library of nuclear secrets, transferred from the secure side (of the computer) to the unsecure side. He then downloaded all information to 10 tapes, three of which have been recovered as (a) result of our investigation and seven never recovered at all,'' Bay said as he and other prosecutors faced the news media outside the courthouse. Bay added, ``I am proud to be a career federal prosecutor. I am especially proud, deeply proud to be a U.S. attorney under Janet Reno. ... This is a case about a man who mishandled huge amounts of nuclear data and got caught doing it.'' He added that justice was being served because for the first time, Lee had agreed to ``tell us what he did with the tapes ... something he refused to do for approximately the past 18 months.''