AUSTIN, Texas -- The "case" against Wen Ho Lee of the Los Alamos Laboratory
is disgraceful. The man was held for nine months over a "case" that never
even rose to the level of contempt. And by and large, the media have been
culpable as well.
One need know very little about nuclear weapons to realize that the
likelihood of Lee's having given away the "crown jewels" of our nuclear
secrets was extremely remote, starting with the fact that the W-88
technology is more than 20 years old. Science just doesn't work like that. I
suppose this is another indication of how short the American media are in
trained science writers.
Nor was it difficult to discern from the beginning that the case, qua case,
was quite rank. Wen Ho Lee was busted and smeared all over the front pages
for something that we knew almost immediately was not that unusual, and we
knew that the same thing had been done by the former director of the Central
Intelligence Agency, who was not accused of treason.
If the people at Los Alamos did not previously think the national security
apparatus was being manned by dimwitted gumshoes (as per the case of the
missing computer hard drives that were eventually discovered lurking behind
the copier) they are now entitled to think that it's being manned by racist
liars.
It is not the culture of the laboratory that's under question here. It's
the culture of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which flatly lied about
Lee to a federal judge, as well as providing a series of wildly unlikely
scenarios.
Why veteran reporters of Washington intelligence agencies were not more
suspicious of this story from the beginning is also a puzzle. I suppose
we're programmed to go after spy stories the way we go after "a good
murder," but the thing was clearly leaked before it had been fully
investigated.
From the beginning, we had very knowledgeable sources saying the thing was
a crock. We all know there's a problem with the spy agencies trying to find
enough to do since the end of the Cold War, but the media should examine
their own consciences over all those "Chinese spy" headlines (the man is a
U.S. citizen from Taiwan, for pity's sake).
To my knowledge, only Newsweek has treated this story with appropriate
skepticism. Anyone who buys the lame government line about how they didn't
want to prosecute the case because "nuclear secrets" would come out in open
court needs his head examined.
Believe me, a classified document does not a nuclear secret make. I suspect
that people in the security system would have a great deal more respect for
it if every requisition for paper clips weren't "classified."
If this case is as bad as it looks, and I don't see how it could look much
worse, it's not the "culture" of the labs that's the problem. We're going to
continue to have the problem because this country has to rely on
foreign-born scientists.
It is well-known that perhaps the only happy fallout of the Tiananmen
Square tragedy is that we got half a generation of Chinese physicists who
were studying over here out of it. Go to any school of physics in this
country and look at the composition of the students. I have no idea why so
many are foreign-born, but I have heard it suggested that American kids just
don't want to work that hard. I suspect that's racist, too, and it has more
to do with poor science education and a failure to encourage the very bright
kids who would be drawn to the field.
If by some remote chance Lee is actually guilty of something important, the
FBI has destroyed its own case and made its work on future cases that much
more difficult. This country has been through 50 years of suspicion,
paranoia and government lying at various levels over various things, with
the result that we've poisoned our own civic culture, alienated much of the
citizenry and spawned a movement of nuts in the militias who consider the
government the enemy. It's enough to make you miss Jimmy Carter, who at
least never lied to us.
Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out
more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers
and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.
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