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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ann Corrigan who wrote (327)	11/18/2004 9:52:34 PM
From: cirrus	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224648

In the dirty business of raising political funds it is inevitable that certain political contributions will, after the fact, be found illegal or otherwise tainted. It happens from time to time with both parties. Accepting money in exchange for secret military technology is treason. Clinton was a lot of things, but it's a absurd to accuse him of treason. Consider this from the conservative New American Century: --------------------------------- It was Ronald Reagan, after all, who first allowedthe launch of U.S.-made satellites on Chinese rockets,after the Challenger space shuttle crash in 1986deprived the satellite industry of launch alternatives. And it was George Bush who waived TiananmenSquare sanctions to allow the Chinese launch of up tofive U.S.-made satellites, three of which—all made byHughes—were launched before he left office. If this larger record is examined, three pointsemerge. First, all of our satellite transfers have helpedChina perfect its military rocketry. China’s launchingof U.S.-made satellites—worth up to a half-billion dol-lars in revenue to date—has helped finance China’sown missile-modernization efforts and missile exportsto nations like Pakistan and Iran. It also has given theChinese access to U.S. rocket know-how. U.S. contrac-tors have a natural inclination to tutor the Chinese onwhat they should do to make their crude rockets pre-cise and reliable (they don’t want to lose their satel-lites, which are worth up to 10 times the value of thelauncher). Anticipating this, State and Defense offi-cials drew up strict rules in the late 1980s coveringprecisely what information companies could sharewith the Chinese. These rules required monitoring ofall contractor-Chinese exchanges (including discus-sions) by a U.S. government rocket-engineer enforce-ment agent. Did this prevent militarily useful informationfrom being conveyed to the Chinese? No. But becauseall exchanges were monitored, there was a clear recordof what was conveyed and a concerted effort to keepsuch transfers to a minimum. Were there infractions?Yes, but when they were reported, senior officials inthe Defense and State departments reprimanded thecontractors and got them to stop. Yet despite theseenforcement measures, a number of key technologieswere transferred before 1993. Clean-rooms were con-structed in China to assure Hughes’s sensitive com-munications satellites wouldn’t be ruined by dust,humidity, or major temperature changes before theywere launched. And clean-room technology, as it hap-pens, is also crucial in preparing any advanced systemfor launch, including reconnaissance satellites andcomplex warhead packages. Edited. For full text: newamericancentury.org. That could be the reason cirrus. It's not as harmful to U.S. however as when Pres Clinton took campaign contributions from China, and then thanked them by allowing their procurement of secret encription technology.