China
Posted: January 3rd, 2008, 5:22 pm
by lundbaek
An Irresponsible Congress
by William F. Jasper
February 15, 1999
Congress has been fully informed about Chinagate, but has failed to move aggressively against the betrayal.
On May 13, 1998 Representative Curt Weldon (R-PA) rose in the House of Representatives to address the matter of our national security and the Clinton Administration's transfer of missile technology to China: Tonight, unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, I rise to talk about both of those issues, our national security and a scandal that is currently unfolding that I think will dwarf every scandal that we have seen talked about on this floor in the past six years. Mr. Speaker, this scandal involves potential treason, and if in fact the facts are true as they have been outlined in media reports, which we are currently trying to investigate, I think will require articles of impeachment.
Tough words. And they were echoed last August by House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-TX). The more you look into this business of the transfer of advanced, sophisticated technology to the Chinese military, which seems to be clearly for campaign contributions, said Armey, the harder it is to stay away from words like treason.
Other Republican leaders have weighed in with similarly ominous statements. Even Newt Gingrich sounded the alarm concerning presidential bribery and the compromise of our national security. This has nothing to do with campaign finance, declared then-House Speaker Gingrich on May 19, 1998. This has to do with national security. This is a profoundly deeper question than any other question that has arisen with this Administration.
It was almost a replay of the dire warning issued by Senator Fred Thompson (R-TN) a year earlier in which he averred that Red China had been involved in a plot to subvert our election process through massive infusions of illicit cash into federal campaigns. But Thompson's Senate investigation fizzled, allowing Mr. Clinton's defenders to crow that no evidence of wrongdoing had been found, that the Republicans were engaged in a purely partisan witch hunt. That wasn't true, of course; a mountain of damning evidence was available by that time, and mountains more have been added since. Perhaps some might in good conscience argue that the steady accretion of evidence against the President had not attained to the beyond a reasonable doubt standard that would apply in a criminal trial. But only the willfully blind can maintain that the accumulated information now publicly available does not meet the less stringent clear and convincing standard that has applied in impeachment trials.
The Essence of Treason
Chinagate involves not merely a few instances in which clever foreigners sneaked illegal campaign contributions past lackadaisical or errant Clinton underlings. It concerns massive corruption and bribery in which an unprecedented, ceaseless parade of criminals and agents of a totalitarian power hostile to the United States has wended its way through the White House -- with tons of unlawful funds in tow. And a grateful President Clinton, in wanton and willful disregard of the obvious threat to America's vital defenses, dramatically altered U.S. foreign policy, eviscerated our security procedures, and threw open the gates to our most sensitive military secrets and technology. The ensuing flood of technological transfers has enabled the People's Republic of China, run by a rigid Communist oligarchy that has repeatedly declared the U.S. its enemy, to achieve stunning military advances in a few short years, including the ability to target U.S. allies -- and the U.S. itself -- with intercontinental ballistic missiles. Those who quibble that these astonishing acts do not meet some technical definition of treason must, at the very least, admit that they constitute a criminal disregard of obvious threats to our national security and survival so grave and egregious that they are in essence treasonous.
The mystery is why the Republicans have walked away from this momentous issue. Oh, yes, they sporadically sputter about it whenever a new fact or startling revelation leaks out, but they have not genuinely attempted to inform the American public about the staggering enormity of this scandal and the potential consequences it could entail. They have allowed the Clinton Administration and its media allies to trivialize Chinagate to the level of another garden variety Clinton scandal, completely overshadowed by the Lewinsky story.
The Republicans in the Senate doomed their investigative effort to almost certain failure by setting an unrealistically short life span for the investigation. To make matters worse, the chairman, Senator Thompson, was super generous in giving the Democrats a full week (when the Senate rules required only that the minority have one day) of hearings concerning alleged improprieties in Republican campaign finances. Thus, after the Senate Democrats had wasted much of the Committee's time arguing and flacking for the President, they (and the Clinton spin machine) were handed an entire week -- one third of the Committee's television time -- to make the case for a moral equivalence between Republican and Democratic misdeeds.
Chairman Thompson and other Senate Democrats then jumped aboard the Clinton bandwagon which was (and is still) clamoring for passage of the so-called McCain-Feingold Campaign Finance Reform bill. The impression given the public was that Chinagate was really a scandal about the need to reform our messy and inadequate campaign laws, rather than about flagrant, systematic, criminal violation of existing laws and the betrayal of our national security by the President, Vice President, First Lady, and their minions.
It didn't help either that the senators inexplicably failed to subpoena, depose, or question some of the most obvious critical witnesses. One of the great mysteries of the Thompson hearings, write Edward Timperlake and William C. Triplett II in Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for Chinese Cash, is the kid-glove treatment given the Stephens safe house operation. Jackson Stephens, a Little Rock Clinton crony and Riady associate whose Washington, DC office was regularly used by Riady-PRC agent John Huang, was not called to testify. From his telephone records, say Timperlake and Triplett, we know that Huang spoke frequently to a number of Stephens, Inc. officials in Little Rock, but none of them was ever interviewed, deposed under oath, or called to testify.
We know that the committee was stymied by the fact that at least 18 critical witnesses fled the country and another 79 refused to testify, citing Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, but there were many other important witnesses whom the committee didn't even try to question. In the case of John Huang, the Senate should have challenged his assertion of Fifth Amendment rights, since by his earlier deposition in the Judicial Watch lawsuit he had waived any Fifth Amendment rights he could have claimed.
House Action
In the House, it was hoped, things might go better. On May 21, 1998 the House approved, by a vote of 364-54, a measure intended to block future exports of satellite technology to China. It also approved, by a vote of 417-4, an amendment to a defense authorization bill stating that presidential waivers issued by Mr. Clinton to allow transfers of sensitive technologies to China had not been in the national interest. And the House created a special select committee headed by Representative Christopher Cox (R-CA) to probe the affair. But, whereas the Thompson committee could be charged with cover-up for rushing their investigation, the Cox Committee appears to be taking the opposite approach to cover-up: secrecy, dawdling, and running out the clock. After months of silence, Cox stunned knowledgeable observers by announcing on September 25th that the Chinagate scandal is simply not a premise for impeachment. We don't have much, Cox said. The problem is, we know as much about these campaign contributions as we're going to know. Unless we come across a memo that says, 'This is going to violate national security, but this is so much money, let's go for it,' we don't have much.
Such a stupifyingly inane statement, we thought, must have been taken out of context by a pro-Clinton reporter, for surely Cox, who has one of the more conservative voting records in Congress, must be aware of far more than the already damning evidence in the public domain. In fact, THE NEW AMERICAN knew that he had been provided with a prodigious amount of strong evidence produced through the depositions and legal proceedings conducted by Larry Klayman of Judicial Watch. Charles Smith, president of Softwar Corp., who has carried on a relentless pursuit of this issue through Freedom of Information Act requests, had also provided the Cox Committee with considerable evidence concerning the Clinton Administration's treasonous transfers of hi-tech computer chips, encryption software, and sophisticated telecommunications technology for China's military command-control-communications system. Mr. Cox's reported insistence on a smoking gun memo was ludicrous. Other than his brief December 30th press conference, where he said very little besides announcing that national security harm did occur, and that his committee's declassified report would be released in February or March, Cox has remained silent. From what this writer has been able to learn from inside sources, the report paints a picture of terrible laxness, negligence, and misguided policies, but attributes nothing of a criminal nature to President Clinton.
Something is obviously very wrong here. Bill Clinton is being allowed to skate free, and the breaches to our national security his policies created have not been rectified. The Republicans, having been handed reams of evidence documenting some of the most shocking betrayals of our nation's security, have elected virtually to ignore the issue and let the nation focus instead on the l'affaire Lewinsky. What gives? Just another grand example of the Hugh Scott Doctrine that has governed Republican politics for the past several decades. Back in 1970, as President Nixon was rhetorically feinting right (and going left), liberal Senate GOP leader Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania gleefully informed his liberal colleagues that there was nothing to worry about. The conservatives get the rhetoric, noted Scott, but we get the action. Scott was not formulating a new doctrine; he was merely enunciating a principle that had already been well tested by the Eisenhower Administration.
Some Republican members of Congress undoubtedly take Chinagate seriously and genuinely mean what they say. The GOP leadership, however, is clearly applying the Scott Doctrine, offering the obligatory denunciations of Clinton's China ventures when appearing before the concerned Republican faithful, but doing nothing effective to hold him accountable or undo the damage. How have so many Republicans been silenced or compromised on this issue? There are several explanations for this, three of the most probable being:
• Fear of Team Clinton's Scorched Earth retaliation.
• Obeisance to corporate contributors who do business with Red China.
• Obedience to Party leadership that is committed to the One-China, One-World doctrines dictated by the political mandarins of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).
Following the House impeachment vote, President Clinton and his most devoted Democratic House supporters gathered on the White House lawn to piously deplore the politics of personal destruction and the venom and incivility that has fastened itself on recent political discourse. It was, naturally, another bravura performance by the master of mendacity, whose character assassin squad had just carried out a hit on House Speaker-designate Bob Livingston (R-LA). In a stunning move just before the impeachment vote, Congressman Livingston announced his resignation from the top House post and from Congress (in six months) due to threats of exposure of his previous marital infidelities. ABC's Cokie Roberts revealed that a highly placed White House source had tried to shop the story to her a couple weeks prior.
Pornographer/sleazemeister Larry Flynt announced that if Republicans continued their campaign against his President (he volunteered that he had voted for Clinton twice and supports him completely), he was prepared to out several more prominent Republicans with alleged skeletons in their closets. Geraldo Rivera, who unabashedly proclaims his adoration of the Clinton-Rodham co-Presidency, daily invited Flynt onto his MSNBC television show to underscore his blackmail threats. Simultaneously, all members of the Utah congressional delegation came under attack from State Attorney General Jan Graham, Utah's only Democrat elected to statewide office, demanding that each member sign an affidavit swearing they have not been unfaithful to their spouses.
All of this was strikingly familiar. Only three months before, in September, as the House impeachment process was heating up, the White House assassins -- using friendly media surrogates -- trashed three of Clinton's leading House antagonists with exposure of their sexual affairs dredged up from decades past. The three victims were Congressmen Henry Hyde, Dan Burton and Helen Chenoweth, all Republicans. Congressman Paul McHale of Pennsylvania, the first Democrat to call for Clinton's resignation, was smeared with a false story (parlayed through Geraldo Rivera) that he had exaggerated his war record. (See Clinton's 'Scorched Earth' Policy in our November 9, 1998 issue.)
ABC's Sam Donaldson stated on his network's This Week program that Sidney Blumenthal, a top aide to both Bill and Hillary, had tried to peddle the Hyde story to ABC. Rivera publicly admitted that he had received the McHale story from his White House sources. Another media outlet friendly to the Clinton regime, the ultra-left Nation magazine, reported that Blumenthal had been behind efforts to plant false stories about special prosecutor Ken Starr's staff.
Carville and Company
Aside from this and other specific evidence of the Clinton hand behind the vicious campaign of personal destruction, there are the admissions from Clinton confidants James Carville, George Stephanopoulos, and Dick Morris, and pro-Clinton publications Salon and Vanity Fair, that the White House War Room was unleashing a scorched earth campaign against its foes. Which was completely in keeping with the well-known Clinton modus operandi. In his written responses to the House Judiciary Committee's 81 questions, President Clinton admitted that he has been using the investigative services of Terry Lenzner and Jack Palladino, two bottom-feeding sleuths who are infamous for orchestrating smear attacks on Clinton's enemies. Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers, Dolly Kyle Browning, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Kathleen Willey, Billy Dale, David Hale, Joseph Farah, Christopher Ruddy, and Scott Ritter are but a few of the victims of the iniquitous Clinton smear machine.
Every member of Congress knows that this Administration will do whatever it takes to stay in office, including employ dirt from the hundreds of FBI files the White House was caught using illegally for adversary research. Any member with an embarrassing secret in his past is vulnerable to blackmail by the White House Secret Police. And if, as past experience shows, the Clinton machine is willing to torch its opponents to cover up lesser scandals, it will certainly not balk at the use of even bigger flame throwers to stop exposure of the more serious Chinagate charges.
On Saturday, December 19th, immediately after Bob Livingston announced that he would not stand for Speaker, Cox let it be known he would like the post. A C-SPAN broadcast that day showed Cox being interviewed by a group of reporters. When he was asked if he had any problems in his background similar to those that had caused Livingston's resignation, Cox grew visibly uncomfortable and evasive. When another reporter pointed out that he hadn't answered the question, he engaged in still more evasiveness. Does this offer a clue as to Mr. Cox's odd position on Chinagate? We don't know, but considering the stakes involved and the unconscionable tactics the Clintonites are employing, that is a possibility that has to be reckoned with.
Corporate Connections
During their week of hearings, the Senate Democrats attempted to make great hay with the admission by former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chairman Haley Barber that he had secured a $2.1 million loan guarantee from Hong Kong businessman Ambrose Young for the National Policy Forum, a front for the RNC. The loan arrangement may or may not have been improper, but it apparently was not illegal, or connected with a foreign government, espionage, threats to national security, or any change in foreign policy. There also is no indication of any congressional GOP foreign fundraising that could compare with the blatant harlotry of the Clinton Administration with regard to Beijing.
But, as we mentioned above, a second explanation for GOP reluctance to press the China issue might be found in the potent influence, on both Republicans and Democrats, from major U.S. corporations doing business in China. The scandalous revelations about the huge contributions to the Clinton-Gore campaign from corporate titans at Loral and Hughes Aerospace in exchange for favorable treatment on China-related policies have demonstrated the tremendous potential for danger and abuse in this area. Other U.S. companies with large investments in China may have exerted similar influences on members of Congress, either on their own initiative or under pressure from Beijing. Washington Post writer Bob Woodward reported in November 1997 that a senior official in the U.S. government had informed him that the FBI found the Chinese equivalent of the CIA boasting it had thwarted the Thompson hearings. If that is so, did the PRC use corporate pressure or bribes to accomplish its thwarting ?
CFR Leadership
As we also mentioned above, there is an even more troubling explanation for the Republicans' China cave-in. The guiding hand behind U.S.-China relations over the past three decades -- for both Republican and Democratic Administrations -- has been Henry Kissinger, foreign policy super savant for the Council on Foreign Relations. The CFR, which sees nationhood (including U.S. national sovereignty) as an unacceptable impediment to its vision of global convergence in a one-world government run by an oligarchy of wise men (drawn from its ranks, naturally), is not unduly bothered by the PRC's manifestations of totalitarian brutality. Shortly after becoming House Speaker, Newt Gingrich (a CFR member) named Kissinger to his kitchen cabinet, and stated in a magazine interview that there is probably no single person in America who is smarter about the world than Henry Kissinger.
When Gingrich made the faux pas of suggesting that the U.S. should recognize Taiwan as a free and independent country, he received a quick dressing down by phone from Kissinger, who was in Beijing. The New York Times recounted that Kissinger called to lecture the Speaker of the House sternly on the need to uphold the delicate one-China policy -- which Mr. Kissinger himself had invented long ago -- and to keep quiet. Gingrich immediately complied.
Other top figures from Republican Administrations, such as former Secretary of State Al Haig (CFR), or Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger (both CFR and partners in Kissinger Associates, Inc.), are powerful Republican advocates of Clintonian appeasement of Beijing and massive technological and financial aid to the PRC. In fact, Kissinger actually serves as an adviser to Bill Clinton (CFR). And David Rothkopf (CFR), who was one of the Clinton appointees supervising Red Chinese agent John Huang at the Commerce Department, is now helping run China operations for Kissinger Associates. With this kind of leadership is it any wonder that the Republican Congress has mounted little more than mock efforts to expose Bill Clinton's treasonous dealings with China?
This dangerous situation will only grow worse unless members of Congress begin to feel real and sustained heat from the home districts over their shameful abdication of responsibility in the face of this threat to the Constitution and our nation's security. They must be put on notice that their constituents take the Constitution seriously, even if the congressmen themselves do not. They must be told that if they are hostage to dark, personal secrets, they must publicly come clean or resign, rather than yield to political blackmail. We, the people of the United States, have both the ability and the awesome responsibility to force Congress to take up this momentous challenge. It is up to us.
(And the dawn comes up like thunder from China across the bay)
Posted: January 3rd, 2008, 7:00 pm
by lundbaek
W. Cleon Skousen's "The Naked Capitalist" contains a brief but accurate accoung of how Chna was pushed into the Communist camp. A few excerpts:
"Morgan-Rockefeller-Carnegie foundations operated throuth the IPR (Institute of Pacific Relations) to push China into the Communist camp" (Pg. 44)
"...the State Department sent over George C. Marshall to tell Chiang Kai-shek that if he didn't allow the Communist Chinese to immediately enter his government on a coalition basis, all U.S. aid would be terminated. General Wedemeyer wrote a comprehensove report to President Truman showing how this fantastic demand would ultimately lead to a Communist conquest of 600,000,000 Chinese. The State Department demanded that General Wedemeyer be "muzzled." Chiang Kai-shek refused to accept the Communists in his government, and General Marshall fullfilled his threat."
"The next step was to keep the American people from discovering how China had been betrayed to the Reds....Dean Acheson, Secretary of State, wrote a notorious White Paper trying to put the blame on Chiang Kai-shek and saying th eSstate Department had been helpless to prevent the Communist coup....Professor Kenneth Colegrove of the Political Science Dapartment at Northwestern University...said Dean Acheson's White Paper 'was one of the most false documents ever published by any country'"
I was 10-11 years old at the time and still remember my own chagrin at what seemed like the unnecessary fall of China to the communists. It was around that time that I also wondered how the USSR had gained control of Eastern Europe, and why it was given to them. These and subsequent giveaways to the communist forces, as in Korea and French Indo-China, probably lit the spark in me. (Pg 74-75)
Skousen references a couple other books that further document this betrayal.
