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Politics : Did Slick Boink Monica? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Catfish who wrote (15275)	5/21/1998 10:09:00 AM
From: Zoltan!	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20981

TONY SNOW 5/21/98 WASHINGTON -- The latest Chinagate eruption differs from all previous Clinton controversies because it doesn't require people to hear a lot of grisly stuff about the president's lust or his wife's greed. This one focuses on the simple issue of incompetence. In less than six years as commander in chief, Bill Clinton has done what Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and the rest of the Cold War tyrants couldn't accomplish. He has drained the American military of its muscle, crippled its will, sucked the brains from the intelligence establishment and removed what backbone remained in the foreign-policy establishment. Nobody fears us anymore. Nobody respects us. The word has gotten out: If you want the United States to treat you well, behave badly. When North Korea began threatening South Korea with nuclear annihilation, we gave them a bunch of nuclear reactors and ordered them to start behaving -- within 10 years. When China provoked a confrontation with Taiwan, the president relaxed export restrictions -- clearing the way for the communist regime in Beijing to develop an incredible arsenal. When the Serbs commit atrocities, we hold press conferences. When the Russians sell sensitive technology to Iran, we threaten to put less ice in Boris Yeltsin's drinks. We punished India for detonating bombs by selling it a strategically useful supercomputer -- and then threatening economic sanctions. This week, the administration relaxed sanctions against Iran -- which the State Department again has dubbed the world's foremost exporter of terrorism. We did the same for Libya, No. 2 on the terror list. And, of course, we tried to talk Pakistan back from the nuclear brink by offering to fulfill an old order for $600 million worth of fighter jets. Is it any wonder heads of state laugh when we lecture them on the evils of nuclear proliferation? The question is whether our bungling is the result of accident or design. To find an answer, let us examine the case of China. Soon after taking office, Bill Clinton authorized a dramatic change in the rules governing the sale of supercomputers. He gave the Department of Commerce permission to sell units that were more than 20 times as fast as anything we ever had permitted beyond our borders. We sold them to such nations as India and China. Although the machines ostensibly were sent to help other nations create nuclear power plants, we didn't monitor their uses. Now, intelligence reports indicate that the computers play crucial roles in both countries' weapons-development efforts. The administration also let loose highly sensitive encryption technology that gives China the capability of decoding some of our own spy satellite transmissions. The president personally authorized that transfer over the objections of the State and Defense departments, and the intelligence establishment. The administration permitted two companies with close Democratic ties, Hughes Aircraft and Loral Space & Communications Ltd., to help China launch American satellites that contained encryption microchips. When one such launch went awry, American teams went to search the wreckage. They found a Loral satellite more or less intact -- except for the encription microchips, which were missing! Subsequently, China got U.S. help in fixing up its rockets to avoid future explosions. The mishap thus produced two perverse results: China now not only has the microchips, it also can hit the United States with nuclear weapons. All but five of the communist nation's 18 ICBMs are aimed at us. To top it off, those rockets within a decade will have the ability to launch 10 warheads apiece, rather than just one -- also thanks to American know-how. China got access to all this stuff because the Clinton administration invited it to. The White House wiped away many previous controls on the export of sensitive equipment or technology. It transferred responsibility for evaluating the sales from the Departments of Defense and State, which tend to view such things through the prism of national security, to the Department of Commerce, which looks for a quick buck. As all this was going on, an interesting cadre of characters were making Camp Clinton safe for espionage. The president placed John Huang in the Department of Commerce, ostensibly in a mid-level job. But Huang moved in only the highest circles. He pressured the administration to put Bernard Schwartz on a 1994 trade mission to China. Schwartz is the head of Loral (the satellite maker) and the most generous contributor this decade to the Democratic Party. Schwartz got on the trip and later secured a billion-dollar contract with China. His company may have breached national security when it sent satellites to China, but the president signed an executive order that made Loral's behavior legal -- an ex post facto pardon. While Huang worked at the Commerce Department, he received 37 classified briefings from the CIA on -- you guessed it -- satellite encryption technology. He regularly sent packages to China, showed up at the Chinese embassy and maintained a private office outside the Commerce Department, from which he made hundreds of calls to Asia. Scandal devotees will recall that Huang received a top-secret security clearance without a background check. The unusual clearance became effective six months before he officially went to work for the government and remained effective a year after he left Uncle Sam's employ. He managed also to get involved with Johnny Chung -- who has told federal investigators that he received $300,000 from the daughter of China's top military man and that he routed at least one-third of that sum to the Democratic Party -- and Charlie Trie, who escorted several top Chinese officials (including at least two top arms merchants) into the White House. This kind of security breach tops anything we know about in modern times. And what did we get in return? We got a made-in-the-USA nuclear arms race in what rapidly is becoming the most unstable area of the world -- the Asia-Pacific region. India and Pakistan have nukes -- or the capability to manufacture them. Indonesia is in the midst both of a melt-down and an arms build-up. Malaysia has been increasing its defense spending at a clip of nearly 10 percent per year. North Korea continues to create problems. And China helps arm virtually every one of them. You don't have to get into the vagaries of Democratic Party fundraising to understand that the administration's casual attitude toward national security has placed us all in some jeopardy. If the White House were as jealous of our technological secrets as it is of the president's personal ventures, we could breathe easy. Unfortunately, we can't -- and our new insecurity is the result not of dumb luck, but of dumb and deliberate policy. drudgereport.com