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Strategies & Market Trends : HONG KONG -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom who wrote (2736)	3/16/1999 9:38:00 PM
From: Dayuhan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2951

Tom, OT You wrote: I don't believe the circumstance has been exaggerated to quite the point of Hutchinson-Whampoa being "a front for the Red Navy." Moorer wrote: After we abandoned Subic, the Chinese military, again through commercial fronts, tried to take it over. Then President Ramos (a graduate of West Point) alerted to this impending takeover, not by us but by private individuals and information, prevented them from doing so. Moorer clearly states that HWI is "a commercial front" for the Chinese military. It also explicitly suggests that the HWI bid was rejected for security reasons, on the basis of information privately supplied to ex-President Ramos. This, as I pointed out earlier, is simply incorrect. Moorer's comment about our "abandonment" of Subic may not be as innocuous as you suggest. It implies that he believes there are steps the US could and should have taken to prevent these events from occurring. The only step that could have achieved this end would have been a US-sponsored coup d'etat, replacing the government with a more tractable one. I know that there were highly placed individuals in the US military who advocated precisely this, and I have to wonder if Moorer was one of them. Needless to say, if that step had been taken it would have been an absolute catastrophe for the Philippines and for US-Philippine relations. It is entirely possible that it would have led to a communist takeover and a full-fledged communist military presence at Subic. You wrote: The complicity appears to stem from Hutchinson's relationship w/ China Resources, which has an equity position in one of the H-W subsidiaries -- a ports operator. Port operators, if I recall correctly, are a routine provider of harbor pilots. I, therefor, don't know that it requires much in the way of an imagination to see how an agent of Beijing might find his way to the conning bridge of an American warship. How so? I hesitate to underscore the obvious, but by the time an HWI presence in Subic became an issue the US Navy's presence in Subic was over and done. US warships no longer call at Subic; how could HWI's Subic operation insert an agent onto one? Not to mention that the US Navy would hardly need to rely on an HWI pilot to move in and out of a harbor they virtually owned for most of the century. My point was that the only comments Moorer made that I am qualified to evaluate are the ones regarding Subic. In my judgement, these points have been wildly and deliberately distorted - as specified above - in a manner calculated to induce paranoia. I have to wonder if some of the same methods have crept into the other comments as well.