Wen Ho Lee and incompetent arrogance

I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Wen Ho Lee, the
Taiwanese-American scientist who became the focus of investigations into
Chinese espionage at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was a reasonably
logical suspect for investigation. It is even possible that he really
did do something morally or even criminally wrong, that the government
is fairly certain that he did but couldn’t prove it sufficiently to win
a criminal case, and that’s why Lee’s attorney agreed to a plea bargain.
It does appear that Mr. Lee did download a whole bunch of files that had
to do with nuclear weapons, which could be suspicious even though, as
best I can figure it, they weren’t classified at the time he did it.

Even given those possibilities, however, Mr. Lee was treated shabbily
— perhaps even criminally — by the federal government’s executive
branch. U.S. District Judge James Parker, who apologized to Mr. Lee for
an incident that “embarrassed our entire nation,” said, “It is only the
top decision-makers in the executive branch of the government, in
particular the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy,” not
the prosecutors in the case, who bear responsibility for keeping Mr. Lee
in solitary confinement for nine months before he had even been tried,
let alone convicted of anything.

It is instructive to consider the contrast between the handling of
Dr. Lee and former CIA Director John Deutch, who almost certainly stored
secret information — not supposedly sensitive material that was
nevertheless not classified — on his home computer over a long period
of time. It seems likely that he did it to jump-start a lucrative
post-CIA consulting career rather than as espionage, and it is still
possible that he will face prosecution. But the CIA blew the
investigation for a long time. The ruling class seems able and more than
willing to take care of its own when they indulge in a bit of
wrongdoing.

I don’t know whether genuine indignation at Attorney General Janet
Reno’s now typical evasion of any responsibility is possible anymore.
According to AP reporter Michael Sniffen, confirming what I heard on the
radio, the estimable Ms. Reno, when asked about an apology, said, “I
think Dr. Lee, from the beginning, had the opportunity to answer this,
and I think now he needs to look to himself.”

I’m torn between sputtering rage and wondering whether to waste
energy being upset at a woman who, whatever happens, not only refuses to
take any real responsibility but instinctively and consistently tries to
blame somebody else, even to the point of delivering schoolmarmish moral
instruction oozing with hypocrisy. She won’t be around much longer, I
suppose — despite her loyal scandal-burying, it’s hard to imagine an Al
Gore keeping her — but she had already been around too long when she
lied for her keepers when Mount Carmel was burned.

If anything, Ms. Reno was topped in the effrontery department this
time by President Clinton, who told a

Washington Post reporter
yesterday that he found the government’s handling of the Lee case “quite troubling,” that it was difficult to reconcile the idea “that one day he’s a terrible risk to the national security and the next day they’re making a plea agreement for an offense far more modest than what had been alleged.”

For all the world, he acted as if he were a disinterested observer and commentator rather than the man in charge of the department Judge Parker said had “embarrassed the entire nation.” He bears ultimate responsibility for the way the executive branch acted, and he could have intervened at any time, demanding explanations for aspects of the case that have troubled other observers from the outset. Maybe he really is mentally and emotionally phasing himself out of the presidency and into some other role as his term winds down — perhaps auditioning for a network job like George Stephanopoulos.

More likely, however, it’s a typically Clintonian effort to distance himself from any responsibility over matters for which he bears legal and moral culpability. And more than likely, the media will continue to aid and abet him in getting away with it.

As tempting as it is simply to fulminate or even to laugh, the Lee case has some deadly serious aspects, even beyond the fact that it’s a serious matter when somebody accused of a crime the government ends up not being able to prove is placed in solitary confinement even before the trial takes place.

The first is that few authorities have disputed the basic assertions of last year’s Cox Commission report on Chinese espionage, to wit, that, as the Washington Post put it in a

rather good editorial, “China obtained warhead design information through espionage.” The president’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Committee and others in the intelligence community have confirmed the essence of these troubling findings.

It seems likely that, faced with embarrassment, the authorities focused too quickly on Wen Ho Lee as the likely culprit. My friend Rad Artukovic, who knows something about the process from sad experience, thinks the prosecutors “started assuming their conclusion and then set out to prove it rather than testing various plausible hypotheses.” Maybe he really did something dastardly and they couldn’t quite prove it, or maybe he had nothing to do with espionage. But by focusing almost exclusively on Wen Ho Lee, the investigators let a number of potential leads trail away into nothingness.

Now, I don’t think it’s of primary importance whether anybody goes to jail for helping the Chinese steal nuclear secrets. But I would like to know — and I think it would be in the country’s interest to find out — just how the transfers of information occurred and who did them. Espionage seems to have occurred. If Wen Ho Lee didn’t do it, somebody did. Shouldn’t we find out? Or has the trail gone cold or been covering while the investigators and prosecutors frittered away energy so ineffectively (and cruelly) on Dr. Lee?

The second issue is the overweening power of prosecutors, especially federal prosecutors, to ruin somebody’s life once they focus on a preferred suspect. I have known of numerous cases I’ve looked into locally where I am convinced, to a dead certainty, that prosecutors got the wrong person but were persistent (and sometimes dishonest) enough — usually justifying it to themselves by concluding that the suspect was a petty crook and gang member and surely did something illegal even if it wasn’t the specific crime of which he was accused — to get a conviction.

A few such cases receive independent investigation and a few each year are overturned. But it happens a lot more than most Americans would like to acknowledge. And nobody — except in most but not all cases involving the powerful and well-connected — is safe from such prosecutorial zealousness. You had better hope that you never run afoul of a determined and not entirely ethical prosecutor. You’ll be in a world of hurt.

There’s a sidelight having to do with Mr. Lee’s ethnicity. I doubt if he was targeted because of anti-Chinese ethnic hostility or bigotry, but I think his ethnic origin was used cynically in a number of ways, which may be worse.

Here’s a hypothesis. It was convenient that a Chinese-American turned out to be a likely suspect when Republicans and others started turning up the heat over possible Chinese espionage. Even better, the administration was able to blame those Wascally Wepublicans for being anti-Asian bigots when it was a Democratic administration that was prosecuting him. Pretty slick, eh? Of course, the media cooperated.

I don’t know if a congressional investigation into how the Wen Ho Lee case turned into such a fiasco would be useful or very enlightening. But some kind of investigation — maybe several competing investigations, most independent from any government agency — should be undertaken. There’s more going on than mere embarrassment, and the American people really should have an opportunity to find out about it.