On September 13, Dr Wen Ho Lee was freed from prison in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Lee, a US citizen born in Taiwan, was convicted of a single felony for the mishandling of nuclear secrets. He had downloaded 10 tapes from the Los Alamos National Laboratory to work at home. While this was a violation of lab policy, other scientists who had done the same were only asked to resign; no felony charges were filed against them.
Lee, however, is Chinese. And during an anti-China political campaign in which Congress was looking for spies everywhere, Lee became an easy scapegoat.
Racial profiling was used to claim that China targets Chinese-Americans and other Asian-Americans to become spies. (The record shows that most US citizens who spy for foreign governments tend to be Caucasian, and they do it for the money!)
The plea bargain is an about-face for the government. It allows Lee to go free with no probation or financial penalty. His nine months in jail are considered enough time served for his "crime". He agreed to cooperate with the government in explaining what happened to seven missing tapes.
Lee had been fired from his job in March 1999, and arrested in December.
Rebuke to executive
In an unprecedented and startling speech, US District Court Judge James Parker apologised to Lee in the courtroom. He accused the Justice Department, Energy Department and FBI with abuse of power and official ineptitude. "They", he said, "have embarrassed this entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it". He added, "Dr Lee, I tell you with great sadness that I feel I was led astray last December by the executive branch of our government."
The next day, in another unprecedented statement, President Bill Clinton told reporters: "I always had reservations about the claims that were being made denying him bail. So the whole thing was quite troubling to me, and I think it's very difficult to reconcile the two positions that one day he's a terrible risk to the national security and the next day they're making a plea agreement for an offence far more modest than what had been alleged."
"I don't think", he continued, "you can justify in retrospect keeping a person in jail without bail when you're prepared to make that kind of agreement. It just can't be justified, and so I, too, am quite troubled."
At the same time, Clinton denied the government targeted Lee for his ethnic background. And he said he had full confidence in his attorney general, Janet Reno.
The obvious question remains: why didn't Clinton, who said he had concerns for weeks, direct the attorney general and the FBI head, Louis Freeh, to grant Lee bail? Preventive detention is usually reserved for those charged with mass murder or terrorism. Lee was charged with downloading tapes that weren't labelled "classified" until after his arrest. It came out later, from other scientists, that 99% of the so-called crown jewels of US nuclear secrets were already in the public domain.
The politics of US relations with China and the right-wing China-bashing campaign is the reason for Lee's arrest and preventive detention. The Republicans in 1999 charged the Clinton administration and the Democrats with being soft on Chinese nuclear espionage. A Republican member of Congress, Christopher Cox, released a 900-page report saying China had been stealing US nuclear weapons secrets.
In this climate, Democrats joined the Republicans in demanding that the Clinton government act. That's what Reno, Freeh and energy secretary Bill Richardson did. Richardson even appointed a "security czar".
That's why, despite Clinton's reservations today when there is egg on the government's face, his appointed officials continue to defend the prosecution's actions and Reno et al refuse to apologise to Lee. A Justice Department spokesman stated even after Clinton voiced concern: "We pursued it [the case] because Dr Lee created his own personal library of our nation's nuclear secrets".
Clinton changed his stance because of broad public questioning of the case. Almost everyone believed that Lee's ethnicity was a factor in his treatment, particularly after it was reported that a former CIA director had misused classified computers and white scientists were never investigated as possible spies for doing what Lee did. This included talking to Chinese scientists in China.
Major victory
The freeing of Lee and the judge's rebuke mark a victory for all Chinese- and Asian-Americans who charged that this was a case of racial profiling. It is also a victory for everyone opposed to the abuse of power by the government and Congress, the China-bashing policy and attacks on civil liberties under the cover of going after foreign terrorists and spies.
The key to this victory was the public campaign — led by Lee's daughter — to expose the frame-up and racist nature of the Justice Department and FBI case.
Many Chinese-Americans began recounting publicly for the first time how the "model minority" is unjustly treated. Gish Jen, an author, wrote in the New York Times on September 15: "Whether or not it can be proved he was a victim of racial profiling, Mr. Lee's case dramatizes what many Americans believe to be true: There is opportunity here, but justice? Equality before the law? No, not for the model minority, it appears."
The amazing thing is that the government's case unravelled so quickly. It was only last December when Lee was arrested. He was charged with 59 felony counts of mishandling nuclear secrets.
The espionage charge was dropped for lack of proof. Yet the government's lawyers convinced Judge Parker that Lee was a security threat if released on bail. One agent said Lee could cause the loss of "hundreds of millions of lives". The FBI said he could pass on secrets even if under house arrest.
False testimony
The news media bought the government's sting operation hook, line and sinker. The judge was sceptical, but an FBI agent testified that he had proof of Lee's deceptions.
It turned out a few months later that the FBI agent lied. He said it was "an honest mistake"!
Lee's lawyers had offered a similar plea agreement in December in which Lee would take another lie detector test and cooperate with the government. The government refused. In an earlier lie detector test, Lee scored one of the highest credibility ratings ever.
Lee was placed in solitary confinement with insufficient food and lights on 24 hours a day for months. The psychological torture included forcing him to wear shackles for his one hour of daily exercise. When his family was allowed to see him once a week, an agent had to be present. He wasn't allowed to speak Chinese unless a Chinese-speaking guard was present.
Some officials said later that they kept Lee confined in such harsh conditions to pressure him into pleading guilty or into confessing what a number of officials believed, but could never prove — that he was a spy for China.
Judge Parker's anger toward the government grew as it became clear he was being set up and lied to. He wanted to release Lee on bail a week earlier but a stay was granted by a higher court to keep him in prison.
The reason the government moved to a plea agreement on September 13 was because on September 15 the government was to turn over classified information to the judge. Since the government had nothing, and didn't want to set a precedent of allowing a federal judge and maybe eventually the defence lawyers to see "secret documents", it decided to accept deal like the one it rejected in December.
The defiant stance of the Justice Department and prosecution means Lee is not out of the woods. Public pressure was key to the victory, and vigilance remains important.
Lee's lawyers announced after his release that a civil suit filed last December against the Energy Department — accusing the government of violating Lee's privacy by releasing a large amount of confidential materials to the public saying he was a spy — will be pursued. While winning monetary damages is part of the suit, the main goal is to obtain documents from the government to expose why Lee was singled out for prosecution.
BY MALIK MIAH