DOWNSIDE LEGACY AT TWO DEGREES OF PRESIDENT CLINTON
SECTION: RECORD OF LIES AND DECEPTIONS:
SUBSECTION: PART 3
Revised 8/20/99
Sacramento Bee 5/30/99 Michael Doyle "... President Clinton says new lie-detector tests at places like Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are already helping to protect the nation's nuclear secrets. His energy secretary, Bill Richardson, agrees. But in fact, the aggressive new testing -- touted publicly for more than a month -- hasn't begun at Lawrence Livermore, and it's not clear when it will. "The discussions are under way," Lawrence Livermore spokesman Jeff Garberson said last week..."
NewsMax.com 5/30/99 Inside Cover "...And what about the ever popular claim that there's no evidence the Chinese have actually implemented the high tech they got from us? Tell it to the Taiwanese. Even a cursory reading of the Cox Report (i.e., the "Overview") reveals that the Chinese stole guidance technology from advanced aircraft like the F-14, F-16 and even the F-117 Stealth fighter -- which, the report states, "is directly applicable to medium and short range PLA missiles, such as the CSS-6 (also known as the M-9)". The Cox report continues: "CSS-6 missiles were, for example, fired in the Taiwan Strait over Taiwan's main ports in the 1996 crisis and confrontation with the United States." What's worth noting here is that the CSS-6 (M-9) is nuclear capable, a fact which made U.S. defense experts extremely nervous when they saw that particular missile soaring over a Pacific Island we have a treaty obligation to defend...."
Salon 5/28/99 David Horowitz "....If these revelations were not disturbing enough, the Clinton team's initial reaction to the Cox Report gives even more cause for alarm. Before the report was issued, the Clinton cover-up squad had already scrambled its famous spin control into action. We have been told by the Clinton team, for example, that the damage resulting from all this spying is not very great because China has only 18 missiles and we have 6,000. Well, that's this year. The theft has given China a 20-year jump in its nuclear weapons development -- an eternity in terms of modern technologies. What happens five or 10 years from now when the Beijing dictatorship has hundreds of missiles aimed at American cities and decides that it wants Taiwan? What consolation would it be to people in Los Angeles, for example, who have already been threatened with a nuclear attack over the Taiwan issue, should Beijing decide to launch even one missile in their direction, given the fact that their president has denied them a missile defense? In the event of such an attack, would Washington be willing to trade 17 American cities (and that's just this year) in a retaliatory nuclear exchange to defend Taiwan? On the other hand, if historical experience is any guide, the communists just might. In Vietnam, the communists were willing to sacrifice 2 million of their own citizens, while 58,000 proved to be too great a sacrifice for Americans in pursuit of the opposite result. The Chinese communists have already killed an estimated 50 million of their own population in the pursuit of a revolutionary future. Is the risk of China's willingness to pay another awful price to achieve what its leaders consider a worthy objective one that we can just brush off? ..."
Committee on Government Reform 6/1/99 Dan Burton "....I am deeply troubled by reports that the leadership at the Department of Energy would discourage an employee from informing Congress of security problems at the agency," Burton said. "One of the key findings of the bi-partisan Cox Report was that Congress was not adequately briefed on DOE security breaches and the unprecedented scale of espionage at DOE labs. It is disturbing to think that whistleblowers would have to fear for their jobs." During the 1990s, Mr. McCallum wrote several reports faulting agency budget cuts, saying they seriously weakened security forces assigned to protect weapons-related facilities and to screen foreign visitors. Mr. McCallum, who was placed on administrative leave in April, has claimed that within the last few weeks he has come under pressure not talk to Congress if he wants to continue working in the government...."
Freeper Rhammm 6/1/99 "...From the COX REPORT, I fould 12 sections that the Clinton administration has determined that further information cannot be made public. We can only guess. ....
In addition, in the mid-1990s the PRC stole, possibly from a U.S. national weapons laboratory, classified thermonuclear weapons information that cannot be identified in this unclassified Report. Because this recent espionage case is currently under investigation and involves sensitive intelligence sources and methods, the Clinton administration has determined that further information cannot be made public without affecting national security or ongoing criminal investigations....
The Select Committee is aware of information of further PRC proliferation of missile and space technology that the Clinton administration has determined cannot be publicly disclosed without affecting national security. To fill its short-term technological needs in military equipment, the PRC has made numerous purchases of foreign military systems. The chief source for these systems is Russia, but the PRC has acquired military technology from other countries as well. Specific details on these acquisitions appear in the Select Committee's classified report, but the Clinton administration has determined that they cannot be made public....
CATIC has, on several occasions reviewed by the Select Committee, misrepresented the proposed uses of militarily useful U.S. technology. The Clinton administration has determined that the specific facts in these cases may not be publicly disclosed....
The Select Committee also received evidence of PRC theft of technology data from U.S. industry during the 1990s valued at millions of dollars. The PRC used Chinese nationals hired by U.S. firms for that purpose. The Clinton administration has determined that no details of this evidence may be made public....
The Select Committee reviewed evidence from the mid-1990s of a PRC company that obtained U.S. defense manufacturing technology for jet aircraft, knowingly failed to obtain a required export license, and misrepresented the contents of its shipping containers in order to get the technology out of the country. The Clinton administration has determined that further information on this case cannot be made public....
In 1996, Sunbase Asia, Incorporated purchased Southwest Products Corporation, a California producer of ball bearings for U.S. military aircraft. Sunbase is incorporated in the United States, but is owned by an investment group comprised of some of the PRC's largest state-owned conglomerates as well as a Hong Kong company. According to a Southwest executive, the purchase will "take [Sunbase] to the next level" of technology. The Clinton administration has determined that additional information on this transaction cannot be made public....
Other information indicates COSCO is far from benign. In 1996, U.S. Customs agents confiscated over 2,000 assault rifles that were being smuggled into the United States aboard COSCO ships. "Although presented as a commercial entity," according to the House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, "COSCO is actually an arm of the Chines military establishment." The Clinton administration has determined that additional information concerning COSCO that appears in the Select Committee's classified Final Report cannot be made public....
The Select Committee judges that at least some of the PRC's statements about its technical progress are distorted so as to increase the PRC's ability to gain access to foreign technology. By claiming substantial indigenous progress in areas ranging from supercomputers to stealth technology, the PRC can allay foreign fears that providing it with advanced technology will improve the PRC's capabilities. This tactic was used, the Select Committee believes, to overcome U.S. and Western objections to transfers of high performance computers to the PRC. The Select Committee's classified report includes further material details and examples of PRC acquisition of advanced U.S. military technology, which the Clinton administration has determined cannot be made public....
On average, the FBI has received about five security-related referrals each month from the Department of Energy. Not all of these concern the PRC. These referrals usually include possible security violations and the inadvertent disclosure of classified information. The FBI normally conducts investigations of foreign individuals working at the National Laboratories. The Clinton administration has determined that additional information in this section cannot be publicly disclosed....
The PRC will not permit any end-use verification of a U.S. HPC at any time after the first six months of the computer's arrival in the PRC The Select Committee has reviewed the terms of the U.S.-PRC agreement and found them wholly inadequate. The Clinton administration has, however, advised the Select Committee that the PRC would object to making the terms of the agreement public. As a result, the Clinton administration has determined that no further description of the agreement may be included in this report....
Other countries developing nuclear weapons and missiles have also apparently benefited from the PRC's ability to acquire advanced machine tools on the world market. As one recent Defense Department assessment noted, the PRC's "recent aerospace industry buildup and its history of weapons trade with nations under Western embargoes makes this increase in key defense capacity of great concern." The Clinton administration has determined that specific examples of this activity cannot be publicly disclosed...."
JimRob Received via email 5/31/99 Garland "...Those familiar with the Burton and Thompson Committee evidence, know that the Cox Committee basically confirmed in more detail what was already known from their investigations. This evidence was also defined by the Senate investigators in a book entitled Year of the Rat. The real question that now begs to be answered is "How complicit were organizations and individuals within our government in giving them the information?". About 100 pages that answer this question in the classified Cox report were left out of the declassified version for reasons of 'national security'. A disturbing, but good start at answering this question can be found in the declassified report appendices, which may be the most intriguing chapter in the entire report. Here, the report mentions how Loral employees were instructed by their lawyers not to answer questions and how three Loral lawyers claimed attorney certain client privileges, after Loral waived the privileges for voluntary disclosure. The report then goes on to describe three top government agencies that similarly hampered the investigation. First, the CIA impeded the investigation by tipping off Hughes with a 'courtesy' notice that the Cox Committee might interview Hughes employees. The CIA even detailed to Hughes the potential lines of questioning. The Cox Committee did not agree to the 'courtesy' notification and was concerned that the CIA had given Hughes the opportunity to destroy evidence and pressure employees to be less candid. Second, Chairman Cox testified that the Justice Department attempted to insert itself as an intermediary for information requests between the committee and all government agencies because an investigation was in progress. However, Justice did not provide other agencies with necessary progress information about their investigation. The Cox Committee spent a major part of their resources retracing Justice Department steps despite protests of harm to their investigation. The sincerity of their investigation was demonstrated one day after the Cox report was released, when Justice gave John Huang immunity for the entire campaign finance scandal in a plea bargain on an unrelated 1992 charge. Previous evidence indicated that Huang arranged most of the 7 sources of revenue traceable through 11 streams from Clinton / Gore campaigns and the DNC to individuals and organizations directly connected to the Communist Chinese military. Even more disturbing was the lack of cooperation from the Department of Defense (DOD). Defense Technology Security Administration (DTSA) employees testified that senior managers frequently overruled valid national security concerns regarding DOD positions on dual-use license applications. But the DOD refused to allow the Cox Committee to interview the six most senior DTSA managers, refused to let them interview DTSA employees unless a DOD observer was present and refused to allow DTSA employees to answer a survey by mail.
The problems illustrate how key Executive Branch agencies can easily form a tyrannical dictatorship that is not accountable to the American people or even the Congress of the United States. They also show a strong anti-American pro-Communist mentality in individuals at the very top of the CIA, DOD and Justice Departments, which are agencies that we rely on to protect our freedom. As Americans, we are falsely fooled into believing that elected and appointed officials represent our interests...."
White House Briefing Room 6/1/99 "...Q One other general has been widely quoted, a Lieutenant General Tom Griffin, who is an Army Vietnam combat veteran, asked this: He says, now, let's see here if I understand all this correctly. President Clinton has ordered our forces to engage an entrenched politically-motivated enemy, backed by the Russians on their home ground, in a foreign civil war, in difficult terrain with limited military objectives, bombing restrictions, boundary and operational restrictions, queasy allies far across the ocean -- MR. LOCKHART: Do you have a question? Q -- with uncertain goals, without prior consultations with Congress. His question -- his question is, so just what was it that Clinton was opposed to in Vietnam? Q Could you repeat the question? (Laughter.)..."
The Progressive Review 6/4/99 Sam Smith "...While even the President seems confused as to what just has been agreed to in the Yugoslavian war talks, it appears that we have just fought our first war over a bunch of paragraphs. Given that the Clinton administration is run by those more comfortable with leveraged buyouts than with war strategy, this is not surprising, but the known differences between what Yugoslavia was willing to accept before the bombing began and what has now been agreed in no way justifies the destruction of a whole country to get there. Rather it merely accentuates the criminality of US behavior in the matter....Writes Kenney: "An unimpeachable press source who regularly travels with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told this [writer] that, swearing reporters to deep-background confidentiality at the Rambouillet talks, a senior State Department official had bragged that the United States 'deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept.' The Serbs needed, according to the official, a little bombing to see reason. Kenney compares this plan to the Gulf of Tonkin incident. FAIR adds that Jim Jatras, a foreign policy aide to Senate Republicans, reported in a May 18 speech at the Cato Institute in Washington that he had it "on good authority" that a "senior Administration official told media at Rambouillet, under embargo" the following: "We intentionally set the bar too high for the Serbs to comply. They need some bombing, and that's what they are going to get." ...."
WorldNetDaily.com 6/4/99 Jon E. Dougherty "....President Bill Clinton, for instance, is a classic example of the pure political professional. This man has never owned a business or even met a payroll, yet he claims to know how to manage a $2 trillion national budget. He has never owned a home, yet he claims to know how difficult it is to find decent housing for some Americans. In fact, he's been paid with tax money all his professional life and has had every basic need met, yet he claims to relate and "feel the pain" of the average American family. How many "average American families" can be reasonably compared to the Clintons? ...."
Orlando Sentinel 6/6/99 Charley Reese "...Congress says that, because they've stolen our nuclear secrets, the Chinese can now build a better nuclear warhead. Dearly beloved, what the heck is a better nuclear warhead? Come on, from a consumer's (that's a euphemism for victim) viewpoint, if the darn thing can get to one's vicinity and explode, what further quality improvements matter? Better grade of radiation? A prettier mushroom cloud? Methinks we are in Dr. Strangelove country..... For those of us who may be on the receiving end of a nuclear missile, there is only one question: Is it a dud or does it explode? If it explodes, everything else is moot, irrelevant and not germane, as an excitable, old defense lawyer used to say when he objected to damaging testimony. Dead is dead. Radiation is radiation. Overpressure is overpressure. Fire is fire. I doubt if any of the thousands who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were upset that the bombs that killed them were primitive, experimental, unproven and lacking all the bells and whistles on today's nuclear warheads....."
6/7/99 David Horowitz "....To say, as the Senate minority leader has, that there is nothing really new in these revelations is patently absurd. Which previous administrations dismantled vital security procedures; accepted illegal monies from foreign intelligence services and then blocked investigations when the illegalities were revealed; presided over the wholesale evaporation of the nation's nuclear weapons advantage; abetted the transfer of missile technologies that can strike American cities; and opposed the development of weapons systems that could defend against such attacks? The honest answer is none...."
New Times Los Angeles 6/99 Jill Stewart "....That the beloved director of E.T. could be the object of jeering at the Museum of Tolerance, which he helped build, is emblematic of the fight surrounding massive construction proposed on 1,087 acres of wetlands and buffer acreage that sprawl below the bluffs of Westchester. The Ballona brawl has profoundly redrawn the battle lines over megadevelopment that have long divided Los Angeles, thrusting lead characters into roles that go uncomfortably against type and leaving a perplexed public wondering which side is which. On the pro-development side are major environmental philanthropists: Spielberg, the world's most successful filmmaker; David Geffen, the music industry giant with so much money that he paid $47 million cash for the fabled Warner Estate a few years back; and their partner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney financial whiz. Together, the three are among the 10 biggest contributors to, and close friends with, President Bill Clinton and Governor Gray Davis, among other powerful liberal Democrats with major environmental credentials. Despite claims to the contrary, DreamWorks has acted as the Trojan horse, opening the way for the long-delayed Ballona project. Today, developers are finally laying in sewage pipes and bulldozing extensive roadbeds to erect "Playa Vista," which will be twice the size of Century City....."
The Weekly Standard 6/7/99 David Brooks "...Let's say you've brought your kids to Washington, D.C., on their summer vacation..... Along the Mall, you notice a large building called the National Museum of American History, part of the famous Smithsonian Institution. So you figure you'll spend an afternoon there with the kids showing them more about the nation's past....But when you get to the map and scan it, you realize the truth about the National Museum of American History. It ignores or virtually ignores most of the major events in American history. This is a museum of multicultural grievance, which simply passes over any subject, individual, or idea, no matter how vital to American history, that does not have to do with the oppression of some ethnic outgroup or disfavored gender. If you start adding up the space devoted to different subjects, you discover the museum has allocated its space in all sorts of absurd ways. For example, up on the top floor there is a section on the armed forces. Six times more space is devoted to the internment of and prejudice against Japanese Americans than to the entire rest of World War II. There is no mention of Eisenhower, Patton, Marshall, or MacArthur, leaders who weren't exactly incidental to American conduct of the war. Similarly, there is but one showcase devoted to World War I. And that showcase is devoted to the role of women in the war. If you judged by the National Museum of American History, men had no role in World War I. Nor would you have any idea why World War I was fought, who was on which side, or how America came to be involved...."
Washington Weekly 6/7/99 J. Peter Mulhern "....Anyone with an appetite for empty rhetoric should be having a field day. The major powers of the industrial West have lost a war against tiny Serbia but continue to dictate terms, normally a winner's prerogative. But the farce gets richer still. The "International" War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague has indicted the sitting president of Yugoslavia for war crimes. That tribunal is, of course, the creature of the same powers that are busily bombing Belgrade. The indictment of Slobodan Milosevic means that NATO has a new war aim. Our attack on Yugoslavia will be a failure unless, in addition to the safe return to Kosovo of nearly a million refugees, Serbia accepts the NATO view that Milosevic is a criminal and repudiates him. Not since young men marched off to fight a war to end all wars has any nation taken such an absurdly inflated view of what can be accomplished by blowing things up....."
Boston Herald 6/8/99 Editorial "...Clinton must bear all the additional costs that his misleading answers imposed on everybody else in the case, she said [Judge Wright]. His lawyers put the figure at a bit less than $34,000; Jones' lawyers say it's almost $488,000. No doubt the president's defense fund will pay, whatever the outcome.... For a man who showed nothing but contempt for the law, disbarment would be appropriate.
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 6/9/99 Paul Sperry "...Say it enough and it becomes common wisdom. Two days before a special House report detailed Chinese espionage at U.S. nuclear weapons labs, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson said: ''There was lax security at the labs in the '70s, '80s and '90s.'' On May 25, the day of the report, Richardson said blame should ''start in the '70s and '80s.'' ive days after the report, he said it ''points out some very serious lapses at our national laboratories in the '70s, '80s and the '90s.'' He added: ''We need to focus on correcting a problem that spanned Republican and Democratic administrations.'' That's now the standard press line on Chinese espionage: It spanned 20 years and included both GOP and Democratic administrations.....
Curt Weldon Website 6/8/99 "... CHINESE ESPIONAGE AND NATIONAL SECURITY (from the Congressional Record, Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives) Monday, June 7, 1999 The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Green of Wisconsin)..... Mr. Speaker, it is my contention that when the administration got a preliminary view of the Cox Committee report in early January, in fact we gave it to the administration sometime around January 2nd or 3rd, they got a chance to see a document that nine of us, Democrats and Republicans, had worked on together for 7 months in a very nonpartisan way.... We gave it to the White House the first week of January and we asked for a very quick response to assist us in making that report available in a declassified version so the American people and our colleagues could read it and talk about it. As we all know, that took 5 months. But what gave me the first indication that this report was going to be spun politically was about a month later, in February. In fact it was February the 1st. Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser to the White House, issued a statement that I have a copy of to selective members of the Washington media, responding to the 38 recommendations that we made in our Cox Committee report that were still classified. Without asking any member of the Cox Commission, Sandy Berger released the White House's spin in response to those recommendations. Two days after he released that spin, I had the occasion of asking the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, in a closed National Security Committee hearing in front of 40 Members from both parties if he agreed as the head of the CIA with our findings that our security had been harmed. Now, Mr. Speaker, this was 2 days after Sandy Berger released public information about our still classified report. George Tenet said, `Congressman, we at the CIA haven't finished reading the document yet.' Which meant, Mr. Speaker, that the White House, before the CIA had even completed reading our report, was spinning it publicly to try to deflect attention away from the White House and any responsibility of this administration. That is not what the nine members of the Cox Committee did and that is not the approach we used. We did not spin anything....."
urt Weldon Website 6/8/99 ".... Since the report was released some 2 weeks ago, the administration has sent Bill Richardson, a friend of mine whom I served with in this body, out a road show traveling around the country convincing the American people that the only issue in the Cox report is Chinese espionage, the stealing of our W-88 nuclear warhead design, the stealing of our nuclear design technology. And the reason why the White House has wanted to spin the Cox Commission report in this way is because they can point to this stuff to having occurred before the Clinton administration took office. So what Richardson has been saying publicly, on national TV shows, on the talk shows on Sunday mornings is, `Look, when this administration in 1995 found out that China had stolen some of our designs, prior to us coming into office, we took aggressive steps to stop it. These problems didn't happen under the Clinton administration. They happened under previous administrations.' I am here tonight, Mr. Speaker, to challenge that notion and to offer to debate Secretary Richardson anytime anyplace in a public format on the issues that I am about to unveil...."
Curt Weldon Website 6/8/99 "... CHINESE ESPIONAGE AND NATIONAL SECURITY (from the Congressional Record, Proceedings of the U.S. House of Representatives) Monday, June 7, 1999 The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Green of Wisconsin)..... Mr. Speaker, it is my contention that when the administration got a preliminary view of the Cox Committee report in early January, in fact we gave it to the administration sometime around January 2nd or 3rd, they got a chance to see a document that nine of us, Democrats and Republicans, had worked on together for 7 months in a very nonpartisan way.... We gave it to the White House the first week of January and we asked for a very quick response to assist us in making that report available in a declassified version so the American people and our colleagues could read it and talk about it. As we all know, that took 5 months. But what gave me the first indication that this report was going to be spun politically was about a month later, in February. In fact it was February the 1st. Sandy Berger, the National Security Adviser to the White House, issued a statement that I have a copy of to selective members of the Washington media, responding to the 38 recommendations that we made in our Cox Committee report that were still classified. Without asking any member of the Cox Commission, Sandy Berger released the White House's spin in response to those recommendations. Two days after he released that spin, I had the occasion of asking the Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, in a closed National Security Committee hearing in front of 40 Members from both parties if he agreed as the head of the CIA with our findings that our security had been harmed. Now, Mr. Speaker, this was 2 days after Sandy Berger released public information about our still classified report. George Tenet said, `Congressman, we at the CIA haven't finished reading the document yet.' Which meant, Mr. Speaker, that the White House, before the CIA had even completed reading our report, was spinning it publicly to try to deflect attention away from the White House and any responsibility of this administration. That is not what the nine members of the Cox Committee did and that is not the approach we used. We did not spin anything....."
urt Weldon Website 6/8/99 ".... Since the report was released some 2 weeks ago, the administration has sent Bill Richardson, a friend of mine whom I served with in this body, out a road show traveling around the country convincing the American people that the only issue in the Cox report is Chinese espionage, the stealing of our W-88 nuclear warhead design, the stealing of our nuclear design technology. And the reason why the White House has wanted to spin the Cox Commission report in this way is because they can point to this stuff to having occurred before the Clinton administration took office. So what Richardson has been saying publicly, on national TV shows, on the talk shows on Sunday mornings is, `Look, when this administration in 1995 found out that China had stolen some of our designs, prior to us coming into office, we took aggressive steps to stop it. These problems didn't happen under the Clinton administration. They happened under previous administrations.' I am here tonight, Mr. Speaker, to challenge that notion and to offer to debate Secretary Richardson anytime anyplace in a public format on the issues that I am about to unveil...."
Curt Weldon Website 6/8/99 "...Today we have the Secretary telling us that our labs are secure. I can tell you right now, Mr. Speaker, there are no controls on e-mails that are being sent out of our labs at this very moment. They will tell you they have a software system that looks for keywords, that if an e-mail is sent to Beijing or some other city and a keyword is in that e-mail, it raises a flag and that person then will be investigated. Raising a flag after the e-mail leaves the laboratory does us no good, Mr. Speaker. So for Richardson to say that secure measures are in place today is wrong, it is factually wrong, it is not correct, and he needs to be honest with the American people...."
David Espo, Associated Press "....Bitterly evoking the Colorado school massacre, President Clinton accused House Republicans today of pushing a watered- down gun-control bill "plainly ghostwritten'' by the National Rifle Association...."It is wrong to let the NRA call the shots on this issue,'' the president said at an afternoon roundtable discussion with civil rights and law enforcement officials. "If the American people care about it, if we can still remember Littleton - it hasn't even been two months - then we ought to speak up and be heard. This is a classic, horrible example of how Washington is out of touch with the rest of America.''...."
WALL STREET JOURNAL, Michael Ledeen, 6/10/99 "...Shortly before Chinese President Jiang Zemin's arrival in Washington in the fall of 1997, the White House was pushing the State, Defense and Energy departments to support a presidential certification of China as a nuclear nonproliferator and to sign off on the creation of an "information exchange and technical cooperative reciprocal arrangement" on ostensibly civilian nuclear technology. This arrangement would give the Chinese easy access to American civil reactor sites, provide them with detailed information on how the U.S. handles fissionable materials, and give them access to operational data on U.S. nuclear sites. Jonathan Fox, an attorney on the arms-control staff of the Defense Special Weapons Agency, wrote a memo stating with certainty that China was a nuclear proliferator and that the proposed arrangement was "a technology transfer agreement swaddled in the comforting yet misleading terminology of a confidence-building measure. On Oct. 24, 1997, Mr. Fox was called out of an interagency meeting to receive an urgent telephone call. According to three people to whom he gave a contemporaneous account of the phone conversation, he was given an ultimatum from superiors in the Office of Non-Proliferation Policy in the Department of Defense: either revise the memo and recommend in favor of the agreement, or look elsewhere for employment. (Mr. Fox himself declined to comment on the matter.) Within an hour, all the critical language had been deleted, and the memo now simply concluded that the agreement "is not inimical to the common defense or the security of the United States." Worried that his earlier draft might fall into unfriendly hands, Mr. Fox's superiors insisted that somebody else sign the new memo. ...."
WALL STREET JOURNAL, Michael Ledeen, 6/10/99 "...Mr. Fox is not the only weapons expert in the government to have been instructed to lie or remain silent about the true consequences of sending military technology to China. Notra Trulock and his colleagues were told by their superiors at the Department of Energy hat they should stop annoying people with accounts of Chinese espionage at Los Alamos. Similarly, professionals in the Pentagon such as Michael Maloof and Peter Leitner were told to keep quiet about the approval of high-tech licenses that would strengthen Chinese military power. Both of them spoke out; others remain silent. But even when the professionals stick by their principles, their superiors have chosen to substitute facts with politically expedient disinformation. On at least two occasions, military experts who argued against high-tech exports to China later discovered that their recommendations had been altered in the Pentagon's computerized data base...."
AP 6/10/99 "...Text of President Clinton's address to the nation about the end of NATO bombing in Yugoslavia, as transcribed by the Federal Document Clearing House:.... I can report to the American people that we have achieved a victory for a safer world, for our democratic values, and for a stronger America..."
AP 6/10/99 "...We also preserved our critically important partnership with Russia. Thanks to President Yeltsin, who opposed our military effort, but supported diplomacy to end the conflict on terms that met our conditions..."
Indian Country Today 6/10/99 David Melmer "... It was a long time coming, but the courts must now decide whether or not the federal government was derelict in its trust responsibility to 300,000 American Indian people. The largest class action lawsuit in history is about Individual Indian Money accounting procedures..... District Judge Royce Lamberth ordered an investigation and report on the condition of the records throughout the BIA system. The appointed special master submitted the report to the court June 2 with the provision it would not become public before Judge Lamberth ordered it opened. Jim McCarthy, spokesperson for the plaintiffs, said they expect the report to show that records were kept in barns and other buildings that were condemned, verifying massive disarray. He also said the report will show continued destruction of records. The IIM trust fund problem carries the label of the largest, longest, financial scandal in the nation, according to Cobell and attorneys for the Native American Rights Fund. The 300,000 account holders demand accountability. Cobell accused the BIA and Department of Interior of losing, misplacing or destroying documents that could reconcile lost funds. According to the Cobell, the loss amounts to billions of dollars. "Justice is just around the corner for Native Americans," said Robert Peregoy, counsel for the plaintiffs. "It was estimated that it would cost $281 million just to reconcile those IIM accounts and at the end of the day any information they came up with would be virtually worthless because of the missing, lost and destroyed records," he said. The money belongs to individuals, not the federal government, but is managed in trust by the U.S. Treasury and administered by the Department of Interior...... "The federal government in actuality has no idea how much of our money it has; how much of our money it should have; how much of our money it has lost; or how much of our money that could easily be and may be stolen every single day.....The government readily admitted documents were lost and a change in the reconciliation is required. In fact, in affidavits from former members of Solicitor's Office in the Department of Interior, the assertion is that some of the records were deliberately destroyed. This accusation is strongly denounced by Babbitt and Gover. The road to trial is paved with controversy and mountains of legal paperwork including a contempt charge against Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt, Assistant Secretary Kevin Gover and Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin. Judge Royce Lamberth issued the contempt charges for failure to follow a court order to submit documents...... Babbitt and Gover were subjected to harsh criticism from Congress. Former Chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee John McCain, R-Ariz., criticized the BIA for its handling of the trust funds and when Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, R-Colo., became chairman of the same committee he continued the barrage of criticism......."
Stratfor 6/12/99 "...800 GMT, 990612 - A Russian military source told Itar-Tass on June 12 that U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott "played for time by dodging the concrete question of Russian participation in the KFOR operation" in the overnight talks in Moscow. The U. S. generals "insistently tried to convince" Russians NATO was not going to enter Kosovo earlier than Saturday evening, the source said. Reportedly, the Russian Defense Ministry had received information from a trusted source by 2200 GMT on June 11 that the alliance had launched the KFOR operation. "In this situation, we could no longer trust our partners and decided to send a forward unit of Russian paratroopers into Kosovo, " the source said...."
Washington Times 6/11/99 Kenneth R. Timmerman "....The White House has been spinning the Cox Report into a Department of Energy scandal, in a desperate attempt to spread the blame to previous administrations for loose security procedures at our national nuclear labs. While this selective reading of the Cox report is convenient, it sweeps under the rug the report's most devastating conclusion: the total destruction of our national security export control system by President Clinton and his administration. "The broader and more damaging issue is the wholesale auctioning of sensitive American technology to the highest bidder," says Congressman Curt Weldon, one of five Republicans who sat on Committee..."
Reuters 6/11/99 "....President Clinton, basking in the NATO air victory in Kosovo Friday, disputed those who said last year's Monica Lewinsky scandal had eroded his moral authority to marshal U.S. support for the war. Asked in a television interview whether his critics were wrong to assert that the sex-and-impeachment case had whittled away public trust, Clinton replied, "Oh, I think so.'' ...."But I have been trustworthy in my public obligations to the American people, and I have been trustworthy in my dealings with them,'' Clinton said....."
The Times (London) 6/12/99 Ben Macintyre "...WITHIN hours of his ringing victory speech yesterday, President Clinton's triumphalism was beginning to ring hollow amid political criticism and an embarrassing rivalry over whose troops should enter Kosovo first....... "In Kosovo, we did the right thing, we did it the right way and we will finish the job," Mr Clinton said. "Because of our resolve the 20th century is ending not with helpless indignation, but with hopeful affirmation of human dignity and human rights for the 21st century." But the celebratory mood in the White House found few echoes in Congress or the rest of the country. During a congressional debate on military financing, Republicans bitterly attacked the President's claims of success. "We have killed civilians. That is not a win. Hundreds of thousands of people are refugees. That is not a victory," Randy Cunningham, a Republican Representative said. Others insisted that the expenditure, destruction and loss of life could have been avoided by different military tactics. "After 11 weeks of bombing we have a settlement we probably could have achieved at the beginning. If this is a victory, what would defeat look like?" asked Representative Mark Souder......"
The Washington Post 6/11/99 Cindy Skrzycki "....The debate between the business community, which thinks it has the right to know about the science that goes into rules that it must comply with, and the researchers who want their work protected from prying eyes was set off by a 1997 Environmental Protection Agency proposal to tighten air-pollution rules at considerable cost to industry. After the EPA rule change was proposed, Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) pressed the agency for the Harvard University study that helped it draw its conclusions about the need for a new air-quality rule. But EPA refused to request the data for Shelby. "What the heck? Can you imagine the arrogance?" Shelby said, who responded with the disclosure legislation..... Shelby said there are safeguards in the current Freedom of Information Act that protect the privacy of patients, trade secrets and other sensitive information..... He said the new OMB rule would "empower the people to have access to the data." He chided the scientific community for appearing "to view federal funding as an entitlement" and for assuming the public is "too stupid to understand their research" and likely to misuse it....... Robert Hahn, director of the Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, and Linda Cohen, an economics professor at the University of California at Irvine, suggest tailoring access to the documents. They believe there should be access to the information that results in regulations that have significant economic impact -- such as the EPA's 1997 ozone and particulate matter standard, which would make current air-pollution rules more stringent -- and an independent agency should be created to replicate the results of research before any standard becomes final. "Give the data to a completely disinterested party and see if they can replicate the results," said Randall Lutter, former OMB economist and an AEI resident scholar...."
New York Times 6/11/99 "...Although the political future of Kosovo is left vague in the settlement that ended the war, U.S. and NATO officials say they envision an international protectorate that will, in theory, be part of Yugoslavia but that may become independent after a few years. As refugees return and society is rebuilt, a senior NATO official said Thursday, Kosovo will become virtually "walled off" from Yugoslavia. People living in Kosovo wouldn't serve in the Yugoslav Army or pay taxes to Yugoslavia; a new police force and judiciary would have to be created without Yugoslav influence; the currency probably would be the Deutsch mark or the U.S. dollar, and trade would turn south and west toward Albania, Macedonia and Montenegro instead of north to Serbia. None of these points are spelled out in the settlement signed by President Slobodan Milosevic. In framing a political solution to the war, NATO has been careful to state that Kosovo will remain within Yugoslavia. The emphasis on keeping the territorial integrity of Yugoslavia and not allowing Kosovo to break away immediately was an essential ingredient for winning the support of Milosevic and the Russians to a peace agreement. But the resolution passed Thursday by the U.N. Security Council includes the phrase "taking full account of the Rambouillet accords," a signal that can be interpreted that, down the road, independence is a probability, Clinton administration officials said...."
The New York Times 6/13/99 John Broder "...Even as the Administration publicly projected no sense of urgency, adopting the same tone as NATO's leadership, the continuing presence of Russian troops at the airport near Pristina, Kosovo's capital, and their welcome by Serbian residents of the area contrasted starkly with the White House's depiction of the development as a mistake, a trivial matter or a mere enigma...."
6/14/99 AFP "....In a press conference Clark said: "The bombing was simply a mistake. The target we were seeking was not the Chinese embassy. That building was misidentified. It was just unfortunately an accident."....Clark informed NATO Secretary General Javier Solana in a written report that the Chinese embassy was bombed in error because the Alliance was relying on inaccurate maps of the area, an anonymous NATO source told AFP at the end of May....."
6/14/99 Joseph Sobran "...Clinton's habitually slippery language, even when he isn't lying outright, is the chief reason so many people regard him with exasperated distrust. He takes credit for the sunshine and passes the buck when it rains. His phenomenal evasive powers were pushed to the limit by the Lewinsky scandal. Having escaped removal from office, he now treats his partisan rescue as exoneration of his honor. His impeachment, as he told Dan Rather, is not a "badge of shame." It merely gave him the opportunity to "defend the Constitution." So he was lying in a noble cause, pursuant to his oath of office. Similarly, Clinton says, "I strongly believe our continuing engagement with China has produced benefits for our national security." So, presumably, did our alliance with the Soviet Union during World War II, which resulted in Soviet spies acquiring the secrets of the atomic bomb.....And now, after the Cox committee's extensive report on Chinese espionage in this country, he dares to say -- or "strongly believe" -- that his policy of coddling China has enhanced "our national security." That's "our," the heartfelt pronoun, as in "our children." The words "I strongly believe," coming from Clinton, usually preface a new attempt to spin the news his way. William Richardson, his energy secretary, adds, "I can assure the American people that their nuclear secrets are now safe at the labs." Does that mean that those secrets have been recovered from the Chinese agents before they could be digested? Apparently so. Perish the thought that our "secrets" are no longer secret. They have somehow been brought home to their secure nest. All's well that ends well..... The Lewinsky scandal carried the lesson that Clinton, in exposing himself to possible blackmail, never gave a thought to "our national security." He seems to have assumed that national security ceased to be a serious matter when the Cold War ended. Now Clinton pledges to cooperate with Congress to "protect our national security" -- just as he pledged to cooperate with the Starr investigation...."
AFP 6/15/99 "...The media organisation Reporters sans Frontieres (Reporters without Borders, RSF) Tuesday criticized NATO for "distorting the truth," and giving "false information and impossible-to-check figures," about the war in Yugoslavia In a report called "War in Yugoslavia, NATO's media blunders," the group, which is based in Paris, questioned whether it was a matter of "mistakes" or if the alliance made "deliberate attempts at disinformation." "False information, exorbitant and impossible-to-check figures and the use of debatable historical references have strengthened doubts about the goodwill of certain western political and military leaders," RSF said in a communique. In one example, the group cites NATO confirmation concerning the death of ethnic Albanian leader Fehmi Agani along with five others...."
Hong Kong Standard 6/13/99 Phillip Cunningham "...The Nato bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade may not have been the result of carefully coordinated strategy--but it was no accident either. That is the gist of a sneak preview of the still-classified investigative report that the United States will present to the Chinese Government by way of apology. Ezra Vogel, director of the Asia Centre at Harvard University and a former senior intelligence official of the Clinton administration is in Hong Kong awaiting arrangements to visit top officials in Beijing in the wake of anti-US animosity stirred by the attack on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade on 7 May. Dr Vogel gave a dinner talk at the University of Science and Technology on 7 June which contradicted the Western media story that the bombing was an accident due to outdated maps. Instead Dr Vogel's views were closer to those expressed by the Chinese government and independent investigators at the Chinese-language weekly Yazhou Zhoukan (Asia Weekly), which published a controversial report on the bombing entitled "Exposing the lies of the old map story"..."
Hong Kong Standard 6/13/99 Phillip Cunningham "...Dr Vogel's views: --There was an official cover-up and the map story was part of it. --There was a bureaucratic battle over where to assign blame, with the White House and the State Department prevailing over the Central Intelligence Agency and Defense Intelligence Agency to obtain data for the yet-unreleased official report. --The embassy bombing was a major setback to Sino-US relations in the magnitude of theTiananmen crackdown and the effects will be felt for a long time to come. --Blame will be assigned to lower-ranking people. --The security side of the embassy was precisely hit, and the Chinese embassy, like all embassies, has a lot of electronic equipment. The implication is that strong electronic signals made the embassy a hot spot for Nato bombers. --It was probably the military who did it, perhaps responding to vigorous electronic activity in the building. --Chinese popular anger, while enhanced by government manipulation of the media, was real. --President Clinton's first apology was misunderstood for cultural reasons. The president, who first spoke about the bombing during a tour of tornado-devastated Oklahoma, was perceived as insincere in part because of the casual clothes he was wearing. The possibility that the bombing was no accident is shocking and clearly has serious implications for Sino-US relations...."
Hong Kong Standard 6/13/99 Phillip Cunningham "...Chinese reports were quick to point out that the embassy was hit by three bombs from three different angles. Mr Shimatsu spoke to the National Imaging and Mapping Agency and was told the Chinese embassy was correctly marked on the map. Wang Jianmin, a staff writer for Yazhou Zhoukan, wrote a related story about two bomb attacks on the embassy. A Belgrade resident, identified only as Zoran, said the embassy was hit twice--the first attack with two missiles, the second with one. The second attack came after news of the embassy being hit was broadcast on Yugoslav media...."
5/28/93 Office of the Press Secretary Statement by the President "...Yesterday the American people won a tremendous victory as a majority of the House of Representatives joined me in adopting our plan to revitalize America's economic future. Today, members of Congress have joined me to announce a new chapter in United States policy toward China. China occupies an important place in our nation's foreign policy. It is the world's most populous state, its fastest growing major economy, and a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council. Its future will do much to shape the future of Asia, our security and trade relations in the Pacific, and a host of global issues, from the environment to weapons proliferation. In short: our relationship with China is of very great importance.... To implement this policy, I am signing today an Executive Order that will have the effect of extending Most Favored Nation status for China for 12 months. Whether I extend MFN next year, however, will depend upon whether China makes significant progress in improving its human rights record.....The Administration is now examining reports that China has shipped M-11 ballistic missiles to Pakistan. If true, such action would violate China's commitment to observe the guidelines and parameters of the Missile Technology Control Regime. Existing U.S. law provides for strict sanctions against nations that violate these guidelines. We have made our concerns on the M-11 issue known to the Chinese on numerous occasions. They understand the serious consequences of missile transfers under U.S. sanctions law. If we determine that China has, in fact, transferred M-11 missiles or related equipment in violation of its commitments, my Administration will not hesitate to act....."
11/14/1994 Office of the Press Secretary "...Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:) Pursuant to section 204(b) of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (50 U.S.C. 1703(b)) and section 201 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1631), I hereby report to the Congress that I have exercised my statutory authority to declare a national emergency and to issue an Executive order that consolidates the functions of two existing Executive orders, eliminates provisions that have been superseded by legislation, and expands certain existing authorizations in order to enhance our ability to respond to the threat of weapons of mass destruction-related proliferation activities around the world.... My Administration continues to believe that the harmonized proliferation sanctions legislation it included as part of the proposed new Export Administration Act represents the best means of maximizing the effectiveness of sanctions as a tool of U.S. nonproliferation policy while minimizing adverse economic impacts on U.S. exporters. Until such harmonized sanctions legislation is enacted, however, I believe that it is appropriate as an interim measure to take the steps described above to consolidate and streamline the restrictions of the former nonproliferation Executive orders...."
3/21/95 Office of Press Secretary "....Additionally, section 401(c) of the National Emergencies Act (NEA) (50U.S.C. 1601 et seq.) requires that the President, within 90 days after the end of each 6-month period following a declaration of a national emergency, report to the Congress on the total expenditures directly attributable to that declaration. This report, covering the 6-monthperiod from August 19, 1994, to February 19, 1995, is submitted in compliance with these requirements. 3. Since the issuance of Executive Order No. 12924, the Department of Commerce has continued to administer and enforce the system of export controls, including anti boycott provisions, contained in the Export Administration Regulations. In administering these controls, the Department has acted under a policy of conforming actions under Executive Order No. 12924 to those required under the Export Administration Act, insofar as appropriate...... Effective September 30, 1994, the Department of Commerce revised thecontrol language for MTCR items on the Commerce Control List, based on the results of the last MTCR plenary. The revisions reflect advances in technology and clarifications agreed to multilaterally. On October 4, 1994, negotiations to resolve the 1993 sanctions imposed on China for MTCR violations involving missile-related trade with Pakistan were successfully concluded. The United States lifted the Category II sanctions effective November 1, in exchange for a Chinese commitment not to export ground-to-ground Category I missiles to any destination..... In February 1994, the Department of Commerce issued a Federal Register notice that invited public comment on ways to improve the Export Administration Regulations. The project's objective is "to make the rules and procedures for the control of exports simpler and easier to understand and apply." This project is not intended to be a vehicle to implement substantive change in the policies or procedures of export administration, but rather to make those policies and procedures simpler and clearer to the exporting community. Reformulating and simplifying the Export Administration Regulations is an important priority, and significant progress has been made over the last 6 months in working toward completion of this comprehensive undertaking...... 5. The expenses incurred by the Federal Government in the 6-monthperiod from August 19, 1994, to February 19, 1995, that are directly attributable to the exercise of authorities conferred by the declaration of a national emergency with respect to export controls were largely centered in the Department of Commerce, Bureau of Export Administration. Expenditures by the Department of Commerce are anticipated to be $19,681,000 most of which represents program operating costs, wage and salary costs for Federal personnel and overhead expenses...."
NRA website 6/15/99 NRA Press Release "…The White House has embarked on a deliberate campaign of deception and misinformation, in a "win at all cost" effort to impose more federal restrictions on lawful, peaceful gun owners, charged Wayne LaPierre, Executive Vice President of the National Rifle Association. Referring to comments made this morning by White House spokesman Bruce Reed, LaPierre said, "When Bruce Reed was in short pants and Bill Clinton was running for Governor of Arkansas, the NRA was on Capitol Hill lobbying for passage of the national instant background check on firearm purchases. For the Clinton-Gore Administration to attempt to take credit for that instant check is deceitful. When the law was passed in 1993, it was the NRA who supported the mandatory instant check system, while Bill Clinton and Al Gore opposed it." …"
NRA website 6/15/99 NRA Press Release "…LaPierre also blasted the Administration's claims today, after the White House stated the background check had stopped more than 400,000 felons and prohibited persons from purchasing a firearm. Making such an attempt has been a federal felony, subject to ten years in prison, since 1968. "If that's true, where are the prosecutions?" LaPierre asked. "The truth is they had zero prosecutions in 1996, zero in 1997, and one in 1998." "They've only prosecuted 11 people nationwide in two years for illegally giving a gun to a juvenile. With that kind of dismal record of enforcing federal law, it's no wonder Bill Clinton and Al Gore are trying to mask their record with lies and misinformation," LaPierre said…."
Defending America 6/15/99 David H. Hackworth "…Wait a military minute. We spend 4 billion bucks, risk our Green Berets' and jet jockeys' lives, and the Ruskies do an end run and march into Kosovo before us? They get the parades, flowers and cheers that were beamed by television around the world -- and we pick up the tab. This just doesn't add up. But come to think of it, nothing in the "war that wasn't a war" makes much sense. Let's review the deal. President Clinton does a peace dance with indicted war criminal Slobodian Milosevic, a guy he called Hitler, in which Milosevic stays the main man. Kosovo still belongs to him. Serb soldiers, the ones who drove out the refugees, will be at the border welcoming them back home…. The veteran Clinton spin team -- which flimflammed Monica into a stalker, Paula into trailer-park trash, and labeled Bill's womanizing and the selling of secrets to China as dirty tricks by right-wing extremists -- will ram a hype hose down the nation's throat and turn the water all the way up.
Washington Times 6/16/99 Kristina Stefanova "….Reporters Without Borders, a free-press advocacy group, accused NATO yesterday of deliberate disinformation about Kosovo during the 2-and-a-half-month bombing campaign against Yugoslavia….Another example of misleading information the report cites is the attack on a convoy of Albanian refugees, which resulted in 75 deaths. At first, German Defense Minister Rudolf Sharping accused Serbian planes of the bombing. The next day NATO acknowledged it had bombed the civilians, claiming the attack was made because military vehicles were presumably in the area. Greek and French journalists who were on the scene the same day quoted refugees as saying the convoy had been bombed several times. It was five days later when NATO said it had dropped nine bombs on the convoy. "Other features of Western communication are approximate figures, debatable historic references and the use of vocabulary that has the aim of making the adversary appear monstrous," the report said. NATO spokesman Jamie Shea and German officials repeatedly compared Mr. Milosevic to Hitler, and British Prime Minister Tony Blair systematically used the term "genocide". RSF also points out that NATO officials made "practically no mention of 'collateral damage' -- only of 'legitimate targets' such as television buildings and relay stations, post offices, power stations and bridges -- without provoking any major movements of protest."…."
http://www.senate.gov 6/15/99 U.S. Senator James M. Inhofe "…Gary Hoitsma, press secretary to U.S. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), today responded to two wildly erroneous statements made today by White House spokesman Joe Lockhart concerning Inhofe's effort to prevent further abuses of the recess appointment power. First, Lockhart stated that the White House has "done an excellent job in notifying Congress" about recess appointments. "In making the unexpected appointment of Mr. Hormel on the last day of a brief five-day Senate recess, the White House did a lousy job of notifying Congress," Hoitsma said. "They notified the Majority Leader less than 24 hours before the appointment. "If that is their idea of 'excellent,' they should talk to Senator Byrd. In 1985, Byrd held up over 5000 Reagan nominees for two months to protest inadequate notification of recess appointments. Byrd's holds were lifted when Reagan agreed to notify Congress in advance of a recess for any future recess appointment. This is all we are asking of President Clinton for future recess appointments. He should agree, just as Reagan did in 1985." Second, Lockhart said "what Sen. Inhofe is engaged in here is akin to ideological extortion." >P> "No. What Sen. Inhofe is engaged in here is protecting the Senate from future abuses of power by this President," Hoitsma said. "It would be more accurate to say that the President's stealth-attack appointment was akin to ideological tyranny. The recess appointment power should not be used simply to avoid controversy or to circumvent the constitutional power and responsibility of the Senate." …."Associated Press 6/16/99 Laurie Kellman "…With a promise from President Clinton to notify senior lawmakers before making recess appointments, a key Republican senator said today he will stop blocking approval of pending nominations. Sen. James Inhofe said in a statement the holds he placed on nominations were ``never designed to undo the appointment of'' Clinton's ambassadorial appointment of an openly gay businessman. The Oklahoma Republican said he acted ``to uphold the Senate's proper role in the 'advice and consent' process.'' Over the Memorial Day congressional recess, the president circumvented the Senate by appointing James Hormel of San Francisco ambassador to Luxembourg…."
CBS Online 6/16/1999 "….After a series of reports blasted the Energy Department for lax security at U.S. nuclear weapons labs, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson will announce the nation's first "security czar," who will be charged with insuring the security of those labs, CBS News has learned. Richardson is expected to name General Eugene Habiger, a just-retired four-star general who was the head of STRATCOM, and oversaw Air Force and Navy nuclear forces, CBS News Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reports. The official announcement is expected at a 2:30 p.m. ET press conference Wednesday. The nation's nuclear weapons labs aren't even close to solving their security problems, according to an independent panel headed by former Republican Sen. Warren Rudman. "I don't think this is just a security problem, this panel found an accountability problem," Rudman said….. the following glaring security problems: * It took four years to fix a broken doorknob that was stuck open, allowing access to sensitive areas. * One employee was dead for a year before officials realized classified documents were still assigned to him. * Another employee confessed to installing an illegal wiretap but was not prosecuted. Just last month, Richardson declared the espionage crisis at U.S. nuclear weapons labs was over. "I can assure the American people their nuclear secrets are safe," Richardson said. Responded Rudman: "I just find that statement incomprehensible and I'm just not sure why he's saying it!" …"
Agence France-Presse 6/16/99 "… Kosovo separatist guerrillas are expected to agree in the next few days to demilitarise, NATO said Wednesday, but warned this does not mean a total disarming of the rebels. British Lieutenant General Michael Jackson, head of the international peace-keeping force in Kosovo, KFOR, said: "The UN Security Council resolution makes it absolutely clear that this organisation (KLA) is to be demilitarised." "I expect that in the next two to three days the leadership of this organisation will sign an agreement which is being worked out between them and the representatives of our (KFOR) force," he added. In Brussels, NATO said the aim of the June 10 Security Council resolution was to demilitarise and not disarm the Kosovo Liberation Army. That would mean confiscating its heavy weapons but leaving fighters with their lighter arms to allow them to eventually carry out police functions…."
6/18/99 Lee Davidson Deseret News "…The Clinton administration says that its 1996 creation of Utah's Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument wasn't really secretive. "This was not done in secret. For the last several weeks leading up to the proclamation, there was an actual vigorous debate involving the Utah delegation, the governor of Utah and many people," Interior Department solicitor John Leshy said Thursday at a congressional hearing. That flabbergasted Reps. Jim Hansen and Chris Cannon, R-Utah. Cannon retorted, "I congratulate you for keeping a straight face while you said that." The debate came over a bill sponsored by Hansen that would require more public hearings and studies before a president can create a monument. Hansen quoted White House documents, which he obtained by subpoena, that ordered secrecy. He also went through a chronology showing Utahns didn't hear rumors about the monument until a Washington Post story 11 days in advance - and the White House said for days thereafter that any monument was years away from creation. In fact, Hansen said the White House only finally confirmed solid plans to Utah officials for the monument "at 2 a.m. on the day that the monument was created." …."
The Washington Times 6/18/99 Mark Levin "…Deep Throat's stenographer, Bob Woodward, has written another book about scandals--laced with the usual purported statements from scores of unnamed sources. And The Washington Post ran excerpts on its front page for three days--which has generated considerable interest among political and media elites. I recall, however, that when Gary Aldrich's book, "Unlimited Access," hit the bookstores, the mainstream media all but ignored his shocking accounts of high-level misconduct. Instead, they questioned the unnamed sources of some of his information. Tremendous latitude was granted Mr. Woodward when he wrote a book in which he recounted wide-ranging discussions with former CIA Director William Casey. The problem was that Mr. Casey was apparently in a coma when the conversations supposedly occurred. Mrs. Casey disputes that Mr. Woodward had access to her husband when he was in the hospital--and the hospital apparently has no records of Mr. Woodward's visits. When Mr. Woodward's book was published, Mr. Casey had passed away, thereby leaving us with only Mr. Woodward's version of events. Moreover, Rush Limbaugh raised a key question of journalistic ethics the other day when he asked how Mr. Woodward could justify with-holding information about the Clinton scandals from the public in order to benefit financially from its later release in a book…..Perhaps the most telling insight we gain from all of this is that journalist Woodward--like Judge Wright with her contempt citation, and NBC with the Juanita Broaddrick rape allegation--withheld their information from the public until after it could affect the outcome of Mr. Clinton's impeachment trial. That, Mr. Woodward, is the rest of the story…."
The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...Too many commentators are missing the point about the national security significance of the Cox Report and its revelation of China's theft of U.S. nuclear secrets. It is time to face the truth: This president and this administration are singularly culpable for orchestrating a politically inspired coverup to advance policies they knew were causing harm to U.S. national security. Let's not be distracted by the self-serving Clinton spin: everybody does it; that it all happened during previous administrations; that there is equal blame to go around on all sides, that Bill Clinton acted quickly and properly when he found out. All of this is wrong, a dishonest smokescreen designed to divert attention from the real issues. It is also an attempt to dissuade people from actually reading the Cox Report and discovering for themselves that the Clinton spin is a delusion...."
The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...Sixteen of the 17 most significant major technology breaches revealed in the Cox Report were discovered after 1994. The notion that Presidents Carter, Reagan and Bush knew the extent to which China's efforts to steal U.S. nuclear and military technology were successful is fantasy...."
The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...At least eight (and maybe more) of these breaches actually occurred after 1994 and after it was well-known to the Clinton administration that China had been illegally proliferating arms technology to rogue countries around the world. Among these breaches--occurring on the Clinton watch--are many of those that go the farthest in advancing China's potential as a direct nuclear threat to the United States. These include:
(1) The transfer of the so-called Legacy Codes containing data on 50 years of U.S. nuclear weapons development including more than 1,000 nuclear tests.
(2) The sale and diversion to military purposes of more than 600 high-performance computers enabling China to enhance its development of nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and advanced military aviation equipment.
(3) The compromise of nuclear warhead simulation technology enhancing China's ability to perfect miniature nuclear warheads without actual testing.
(4) The compromise of advanced electromagnetic weapons technology useful in the development of anti-satellite and anti-missile systems.
(5) The transfer of missile nose cone technology enabling China to substantially improve the reliability of its intercontinental ballistic missiles.
(6) The transfer of missile guidance technology enabling China to substantially improve the accuracy of its ballistic missiles.
(7) The compromise of super-secret space-based radar technology giving China the ability to detect our previously undetectable submerged submarines.
(8) The compromise of some other "classified thermonuclear weapons information" which "the Clinton administration" (not the Cox committee) "has determined...cannot be made public."
The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...President Clinton, who was given a copy of the Cox Report on Jan. 3, lied to the American people on March 19 when he conveyed the message he was unaware that anyone suspected there were breaches of nuclear-related secrets during his presidency. ..."
The Washington Times 6/20/99 James Inhofe "...The Clinton administration coverup was recently exposed in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Notra Trulock, the Energy Department's former director of intelligence, who had first briefed Mr. Berger in April 1996, testified he was prepared to brief members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees as late as July 1998, but was denied permission to do so by Acting Energy Secretary Elizabeth Moler, a political appointee. Miss Moler reportedly ordered Mr. Trulock not to conduct the briefing because she said the information would be used to hurt Mr. Clinton's China policy. When Miss Moler refuted this testimony and claimed she did not recall gagging Mr. Trulock in this way, I asked both officials if they would voluntarily submit to a polygraph test. Both agreed at the hearing, but when pressed several weeks later, only Mr. Trulock was readily willing to cooperate and go through with taking the test. As a result, it is obvious to me Mr. Trulock was telling the truth and Miss Moler was not, confirming rather conclusively that there was indeed a politically inspired coverup...."
Nation 6/12/99 Christopher Hitchens "....The White House "line of the day" says that Chinese espionage is nothing new and was known to occur under previous, Republican administrations. In that case, they had every reason to be vigilant, when all the evidence shows they were not...."
Nation 6/12/99 Christopher Hitchens "....The President says that he was not told of any espionage until March 19 this year. Not only does this tell against the smug claim of previous awareness of the problem, but it flatly contradicts Sandy Berger's claim to have been briefed by Energy Department intelligence as far back as July 1997 and to have passed on the briefing to Clinton "within a day or two." ...."
6/23/99 Rueters NewsEdge "...Politicians can lie to the public because President Clinton did it and got away with it, an influential South African regional leader was reported Wednesday as saying. "It is accepted and it is not unusual anywhere in the world. It wasn't the end of Bill Clinton's life," Ndaweni Mahlangu, newly elected premier of Mpumalanga province told journalists.....The premier's comments provoked a stream of calls into local radio stations denouncing him. The opposition Democratic Party called for the ruling African National Congress (ANC) to discipline Mahlangu for his comments...."
The Hindustan Times 6/14/99 Robert Fisk "...Nato officers began to realise the discrepancy between their own claims and the reality within hours of the start of the Yugoslav military withdrawal. In just the first stage of the Serbian retreat, they logged 250 tanks moving out of Kosovo - all undamaged - and at least 40,000 men. This was supposed to be the troop strength of the entire Third Army; several thousand soldiers left in the next three days. All of which casts serious doubt on Nato´s wartime propaganda. On 17 April, for example, Nato spokesman Jamie Shea was boasting that the alliance was "knocking the stuffing out of Milosevic" while Gen Wesley Clark, the Nato commander, said on 27 May that after 27,000 Nato sorties, his pilots had conducted "the most accurate bombing campaign in history."....."
Yediot Achronot (Israel) 6/18/99 Shimon Shiffer "...Netanyahu plans in the book he is currently writing to publish several details that will considerably embarrass the president of the United States. In one of the chapters Clinton will earn the title 'International Swindler'. And this is the story. In September '98, Yom Kippur Eve, Clinton and Netanyahu met for a conversation in the White House, during the course of which Netanyahu agreed to attend the conference at Wye Plantation with Yasser Arafat on condition that Clinton would act to immediately release the spy Jonathan Pollard. Clinton, according to Netanyahu and his closest advisors, agreed to the condition. Netanyahu explained to him that this gesture would help him to get the support from his constituents for the painful part of the agreement he expected to sign - continuation of the withdrawal from the territories. 'Bibi went to Wye knowing that Clinton would immediately release Pollard with the signing of the agreement with the Palestinians,' the advisors of the departing prime minister said this week.......At the end of the conference, at 5:00 AM, after arrangements had already been made for the signing ceremony, Clinton put his hand on Netanyahu's shoulder and asked him to step aside with him so he could tell him a few things. One of those present in the room saw Clinton and Netanyahu as they spoke from a distance. 'Netanyahu turned pale, and Clinton hugged him.' The man said this week. When Netanyahu returned to the center of the room, he told his advisors and ministers that Clinton had announced to him that he could not honor his promise to release Pollard. 'We were shocked,' said one of them. 'We thought that Bibi should go back to Clinton and tell him: 'if that is the case then there is no agreement with the Palestinians. You lied to me.' Our problem was that we did not want to find ourselves again in the terrible situation that both in Israel and the world Netanyahu would be presented as a liar, and would not talk at all about the real liar...."
National Review 6/28/99 John O'Sullivan "...It is, in fact, quite hard to find actual expressions of anti-Chinese or anti-Asian racism in public statements by Republicans or anyone else. The nearest thing to an allegedly bigoted remark came from Alabama's Sen. Richard Shelby, who described the Chinese spies behind the stealing of U.S. technology as "crafty." This was seized upon as an, er, crafty employment of an ethnic stereotype about Asians. But since the spies undoubtedly were crafty -- that comes with being a spy -- the bigotry could well repose in the minds of those who heard the word "crafty" and instantly leapt to the conclusion that Shelby must have intended an ethnic slur. Even before Sen. Shelby had committed his faux pas, however, Amb. Richardson had denounced those who were supposedly questioning "the patriotism of Asian-Pacific Americans and sowing the seeds of a darker xenophobia" because of the spy scandal. But his denunciation, bravely issued to a meeting of Chinese-Americans in New York, contained no hard evidence of anti-Chinese racism. And when the Los Angeles Times sought to fill this gap with anonymous anecdotes of "ethnic profiling" in America's nuclear-weapons laboratories, these turned out to be less than totalitarian. For example, "Snickering and hushed laughter broke out in a roomful of computer users as a person with a Chinese surname was introduced to lead a session on computer security." ....Most accounts blame Americans first. They leave no doubt that the racism of ordinary Americans -- made worse by politicians who incite and aggravate it -- is to blame. Richardson's speech, for instance, defended Asian-Americans against unnamed American racists. A spokesman for Beijing similarly blamed the spy scandal on "typical racial prejudice." Then Maurice Meisner declared in the Los Angeles Times that "opportunistic American politicians now portray Chinese in stereotypical fashion. The increasingly dominant images are of 19th century vintage: Chinese are crafty, deceitful, villainous and half-crazed automatons manipulated by evil rulers. It has become ever more difficult for Americans to see Chinese as fellow humans," etc., etc. There is a neat symmetry here. Meisner's picture of Americans might almost be of "half-crazed automatons manipulated by evil rulers." But the reader will search in vain for any evidence supporting such a picture...."
New York Times 6/27/99 James Risen Jeff Gerth "...The White House was told about China's apparent theft of American nuclear weapons technology in July 1995, soon after it was detected by the Energy Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, several officials said. Until now, the Administration has left the impression that the White House first learned about the matter in April 1996, when Samuel R. Berger, then President Clinton's deputy national security adviser, was briefed on the case by Energy Department officials. But interviews with current and former officials show that warnings about possible Chinese nuclear espionage received high-level attention within the Clinton Administration early in the Government's investigation of the matter...."
Reuters 6/27/99 "...Republican and Democratic senators criticized Sunday the Clinton administration's handling of allegations of Chinese nuclear spying. Reacting to a New York Sunday Times report that the White House was told of the technology loss in 1995, an angry Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Republican from Utah, told Fox News Sunday, ''That's the kind of crap that really shouldn't go on. I'm sick of it and that's one reason I'm running (for president).'' ....``The scandal is there -- the revelations of Chinese spying -- and then starts the cover-up, the obfuscation and that makes it 10 times worse. Clearly the White House has not been forthcoming about what the president knew, when he knew it, when (National Security Adviser) Sandy Berger knew it,'' said McCain. ....Sen. Joseph Lieberman, a Democrat from Connecticut, said he thought that the White House handling of the allegations had been inadequate. ``From everything that I know the administration ... either knew about it or should have known about it. The 'should have' is because some of the experts at our labs in the Department of Energy reached a conclusion based on what they saw from Chinese nuclear testing that the Chinese must have obtained, probably obtained, information on our W-88 warhead,'' he said on Fox News Sunday..... ``Looking back at it, this is critical enough. The president should have been told then, there's no question about it,'' he said...."
Reuters 6/25/99 "...President Clinton said Friday he misspoke earlier this year when he said no security breaches occurred at U.S. nuclear research laboratories during his administration. A congressional report last month said China had acquired U.S. secrets about seven nuclear weapons and the neutron bomb through 20 years of espionage. China has denied it stole U.S. nuclear secrets. ``First of all, there has been a 20-year problem with lax security at the labs,'' Clinton said at a press briefing. ``And what I said was that I didn't suspect that any actual breaches of security had occurred during my tenure.''..... ``But I think my choice of wording was poor. What I should have said was I did not know of any specific instance of espionage, because I think that we've been suspicious all along,'' Clinton said. ``I have to acknowledge I think I used a poor word there,'' he added. ``We did not have any specific instance, as we now do, of the off-loading of the computer,'' Clinton said....."
AFP 6/28/99 "...The Clinton administration was first told China may have stolen US nuclear secrets nine months earlier than it originally admitted, a newspaper said. Throughout the uproar over allegations that China stole secrets to every key US nuclear warhead made since the 1970s, Republicans have claimed the White House failed to react quickly or strongly enough to the charges. The White House says it learned of the possible spying in April 1996. But unnamed current and former US officials told the New York Times the administration was informed of the apparent theft in July 1995....."
New York Post 6/28/99 Deborah Orin "...The latest revelation by The New York Times that the first tipoff came in 1995 also raised new doubts about the truthfulness of Clinton's claim earlier this year that no one told him of any suspicions of such spying. "A scandal is there, the revelations of Chinese spying, and then starts the cover-up and obfuscation, and that makes it 10 times worse," Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) told Fox News. "Clearly, the White House has not been forthcoming about what the president knew, when he knew it ... There's no doubt that there [were] tremendous lapses or even, frankly, misconduct." McCain's criticism was echoed not just by other Republicans but also by Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), who said news reports showed that the administration "either knew about it or should have known about it." ..."
The Associated Press 6/27/99 William Mann "...- Senators reacted bitterly Sunday to a report the Clinton White House knew of Chinese nuclear espionage earlier than it has acknowledged. "That really shouldn't go on," said GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, who plans to run for president. "I'm sick of it." ...."Looking back at it, this is critical enough...that the president should have been informed. There's no question about it," said Lieberman, D-Conn. The White House acknowledged Sunday it was alerted to suspicions of Chinese espionage in 1995 but did not learn about details until 1996, as the administration has maintained. ....The New York Times reported Sunday that in July 1995, Hazel O'Leary, then energy secretary, told then-White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta and other officials about evidence that China may have stolen nuclear secrets. Word filtered out to other officials in ensuing months, the newspaper said, citing interviews with current and former officials. It said a new report on the case issued by the president's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board refers to meetings among Energy Department, CIA and White House officials in the second half of 1995. Sandy Berger, deputy national security adviser in 1995 who now holds the top job, has said he did not tell Clinton of the matter until Berger was briefed thoroughly in July 1997. On Sunday, the White House denied any formal interagency contack over the issue before April 1996, when the Energy Department first briefed Berger. Counsel Jim Kennedy said prior discussions of the matter - such as the July 1995 contact - constituted preliminary and informal notification. O'Leary's talk with Panetta, Kennedy said, was "simply an informal heads-up to the White House." ...."
Media Research Center CyberAlert 6/28/99 Brent Baker "....At Clinton's late afternoon press conference on June 25 FNC's Wendell Goler, who asked him back on March 19 about spying during his term, pressed: "Let me ask you once again do you still maintain that you were not told anything about these Chinese efforts to spy at the nation's nuclear labs during your administration?" Clinton answered by stressing how spying by China has been ongoing for twenty years, but then he got to commenting how his March 19 reply: "What I said was that I didn't suspect any actual breaches of security had occurred during my tenure. Since then we have learned of the off-loading of the computer by Mr. Lee, from the secured computers into his personal computer. That's something we know now that I didn't know then. But I think my choice of wording was poor. What I should have said was I did not know of any specific instance of espionage because I think we've been suspicious all along. And I have to acknowledge I think I used a poor word there. We have been suspicious all along generally. We did not have any specific instance as we now do of the off-loading of the computer..." Actually, on March 19 Clinton did not say "that I didn't suspect any actual breaches of national security." He answered: "Can I tell you there has been no espionage at the labs since I've been President? I can tell you that no one has reported to me that they suspect such a thing has occurred." And in response to another question he maintained: "To the best of my knowledge, no one has said anything to me about any espionage which occurred by the Chinese against the labs, during my presidency." ....Now to last Friday. Clinton's grudging admission that he misled the American people as "my choice of wording was poor." In fact, he was again misleading people by suggesting that the "off- loading of the computer" is the only specific instance during his watch. But as Paul Sperry pointed out in the June 9 Investor's Business Daily: "The declassified version of the House [Cox] report identifies 11 cases of Chinese espionage since the late 1970s. Eight took place during President Clinton's years in office....In other words, the vast majority of the leaks over the past 20 years have sprung on Clinton's watch....The House report doesn't disclose the full extent of Chinese espionage in the Clinton years. Citing 'national security' reasons, the White House censored roughly 375 pages, including several recent cases." So, the networks had plenty of angles to pursue Friday night, but they bunted: ABC's John Cochran, CBS's Scott Pelley and CNN's John King all ignored China. FNC's Wendell Goler included Clinton's answer in his Fox Report story and NBC's Claire Shipman gave it 24 seconds in a piece about how "Bill Clinton laid out a bold and ambitious agenda for just 18 months left in office today."
Washington Times 6/27/99 Jack Kemp "..."Milosevic's capitulation to NATO demands?" "NATO proved right?" My goodness, what delusions are emanating from inside the Washington Beltway; what fabrications are being perpetrated on the American people. The truth of this war is the exact opposite of the establishment's portrayal. It was an unnecessary, and in my opinion illegal and unconstitutional, war from the beginning. It failed on every score to achieve the goals articulated to justify it, exacerbated the very problems it sought to remedy and created new problems that will plague America and the Balkans for years to come. It was, in short, a debacle, an "international Waco," which no amount of "spinning" by NATO and the media can erase. We could have had the same, or perhaps even a better deal at Rambouillet if we had been willing to, in Winston Churchill's words, "jaw jaw instead of war war!" President Clinton, spurred on by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in particular, led NATO to start an unprovoked and unjustified war out of pique because the Yugoslavian government, as would any other sovereign nation, refused to consent to two provisions of the Rambouillet proposal that were insisted on by the Atlantic Alliance: (1) that Belgrade allow a foreign military alliance (NATO) to occupy every square inch of its sovereign territory, billet its forces wherever it desired and receive immunity before the fact against "any claims of any sort" that might arise out of alliance activities (including criminal acts by NATO personnel); and (2) that Belgrade concede to a referendum after three years that would almost certainly have guaranteed independence for Kosovo and thus wrench it out of the Yugoslav Federation. Far from capitulating to these NATO demands, which constituted an unambiguous assault on Yugoslavian sovereignty, Belgrade withstood 79 days of brutal bombing, while the Milosevic government ruthlessly exploited the opportunity to engage in killing and brutality by pillaging and conducting wholesale displacement and deportation of Kosovar Albanians, only a fraction of whom are ever likely to return to their homes. Far from stopping a humanitarian disaster, the NATO bombing provoked one. The Yugoslavian Parliament finally agreed to withdraw most of its troops from Kosovo only after NATO agreed to a peace accord that explicitly reaffirms Yugoslavian sovereignty and conspicuously omits both of the two unacceptable demands from Rambouillet....."
Investor's Business Daily 6/29/99 "...To hear President Clinton tell it, the country owes its present economic prosperity all to him. So too a higher budget surplus. In fact, he says the fiscal policies of the Reagan-Bush era were ''reckless.'' Hogwash. For someone who decried playing politics just a few days ago, Clinton wasted no time in sharpening up the partisan needle. ''In the 12 years before I took office, reckless fiscal policies quadrupled our debt, bringing us higher interest rates, higher unemployment, higher inflation.'' Huh? When President Reagan took office, the unemployment rate topped 7%. By the time he left, it was under 6%. In 1980, the yield on the 30-year U.S. bond was 13.91%. On his leaving, it was 6.69%. And inflation? It grew 10.3% in 1981, and only 4.1% in 1989. As for the higher debt, Clinton should look to the actions of the Democrat-controlled houses of Congress in the last 12 years. They spent more than Reagan wanted. ee chart). Plus, he thinks it's all his doing that the federal government will run a surplus this year that's $20 billion more than expected in February - $99 billion, not $79 billion. The 15-year surplus is expected to be $1 trillion more under these new projections. Far from thanking his economic team, he ought to tip his hat to the policy foundations President Reagan put in place, Bush carried on ort of) and the Republican Congress built upon when it took control in 1994. ..."
Stratfor 6/29/99 "...In an address to the Council on Foreign Relations on June 28, U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright said NATO's air strikes in Kosovo should not be used as a precedent for intervention in other conflicts. "Every circumstance is unique," said Albright. With regards to NATO intervention in future conflicts, Albright added, "I would caution against any such sweeping conclusions." She called NATO a European and Atlantic alliance and expressed the hope that NATO intervention in Yugoslavia would deter future conflicts. Albright's comments reflect an evolving analysis, in Washington, of the Kosovo conflict and its ramifications. Washington's public spin of Operation Allied Force was that NATO, unanimous in aim and approach, successfully bombed Yugoslav forces into submission. And while this unmitigated victory temporarily aroused hostility in Russia and China, both Moscow and Beijing have more to gain from cooperating with the West than from confronting it, and will soon come around. The reality now tacitly acknowledged by Albright is somewhat different. First, NATO most certainly was not and is not unanimous regarding either the goals of the Kosovo campaign or the methods employed to achieve it.....Washington has been forced to reconsider its official spin that NATO successfully bombed Yugoslavia into submission. Bomb damage assessment inside Kosovo has shown just how little damage NATO inflicted on Yugoslav forces, raising the question of just why Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic did capitulate. The point is, Milosevic did not capitulate, but rather accepted a compromise settlement that NATO later successfully, if duplicitously, spun into an unmitigated victory in Kosovo... Finally, Russia and China - each with a host of their own "Kosovos" in which Western involvement would be most unwelcome, are not simply "getting over" their hostility to U.S. hegemonic behavior in Kosovo. Far from it, the two have accelerated plans for their strategic alliance...."
Washington Post 7/2/99 Charles Krauthammer "...After 15 years, the Democrats have apparently given up their opposition to a "star wars" missile defense for the United States. A law committing the United States to building such a defense passed Congress by overwhelming majorities. And President Clinton, who had vetoed such legislation in the past, will sign it. This was no Democratic conversion to toughness. This was Democratic acquiescence to blinding reality. The reality is that: (1) Rogue states such as North Korea and Iran are building nuclear missiles soon to be aimed at the United States, and (2) The United States is utterly defenseless to shoot them down. For the better part of this decade, the Clinton administration has denied both ends of this reality. First, it claimed that the threat was distant....The administration now recognizes that its own CIA estimates of the threat were hopelessly wrong and that the congressionally mandated Rumsfeld Commission was right when it warned last July of the imminent capacity of rogue states to develop the means to attack the United States. The other feat of reality-denial involved American defenselessness. Democrats liked to argue, alternatively, that American defenselessness is (a) paradoxically a good thing or (b) divinely -- technologically -- ordained. Defenselessness was good because it made for "strategic stability" with the Soviet Union.....Less than three months later, on June 10, an Army THAAD missile intercepted a ballistic missile launched from 120 miles away. This was precisely what Baldwin claimed was unfeasible: destruction by collision, a bullet hitting a bullet. Reality bites, even for Democrats..... Is Clinton really serious? Former Pentagon expert Frank Gaffney, an ABM hero who has campaigned on its behalf for 15 years (we should name the first system after him), warns that a recent Clinton-Yeltsin agreement to renegotiate the ABM treaty has the makings of a trap. The ABM treaty, amended or not, can only hinder the building of an American defense. For example, because of the administration's interpretation of the treaty, THAAD could only test against a missile going no more than five kilometers per second. But North Korea's new missile goes seven to eight kilometers per second. This THAAD won't catch up to it. Even worse, the ABM treaty prevents the Navy's Aegis ships (which could carry mobile ABMs) from using satellite information to track incoming long-range missiles. This deliberately and unnecessarily degrades the Aegis system, our best hope for a cheap, fast, near-term national defense...."
http://www.hackworth.com/28jun99.html 6/28/99 David Hackworth "...During NATO's air campaign against Yugoslavia, millions of folks around the world got a daily television fix on how NATO air power was smashing the Serbian Army. Silver-tongued spinmeister Dr. Jamie Shea said things such as "We're knocking the stuffing out of Milosevic," and, NATO "is conducting the most accurate bombing campaign in history." The statistics he presented at the end of the fight were awesome: NATO pilots flew more than 35,000 sorties: 96.6 percent of their bombs hit their targets: 60 percent of Serb artillery and 40 percent of Serb tanks were damaged or destroyed; the Serb Army in Kosovo was battle-rattled after taking thousands of casualties and deserted their bunkers like post-Monica White House staffers. Now that NATO has troops on the ground in Kosovo along with a few tell-it-like-it-is reporters, it should have been an easy task to match the briefing stats with the burned tank hulks and white crosses. But this hasn't been the case. So far, the grunts and scribes have found only a dozen destroyed vehicles and guns, no military cemeteries, no signs that Serb units were pummeled. Something's wrong. This insane demolition job cost American taxpayers billions of bucks, so where's the Mother of All Army Junkyards? The Serb generals couldn't have swept that kind of reported battle destruction into a foxhole before scooting back to Belgrade. Blown-up 50-ton tanks, miles of twisted artillery barrels and 5,000 graves don't just disappear with the wave of a general's baton. Yet the body counters have found only the shot up carcasses of three 1960s- model tanks, a lot of blown-up army buildings clearly vacated before the bombs fell, and carpet-bombed forested areas that look like cyclones twisted through them. Ten battle-damaged tanks were observed heading north when the Serbian army pulled out along with 254 combat-ready tanks, thousands of missiles, cannons, armored vehicles, trucks and 60,000 defiant, smartly dressed and well-equipped troops -- exactly 50 percent more grunts than the spinners said were deployed in Serbia's Kosovo province in the first place...."
Reuters 6/29/99 "...Almost 40% of physicians say they have exaggerated a patient's condition to an insurance company to make sure the patient has coverage for needed treatment or time in the hospital, according to a survey conducted by the American Medical Association (AMA). The national sample of physicians showed that ``physician deception of third party payers is prevalent and may be rising,'' AMA investigators announced at the annual meeting of the Association for Health Services Research in Chicago, Illinois. The forms of ``deception'' included exaggeration of severity of the patient's condition in order to avoid early discharge from the hospital, changing the billing diagnosis to help secure services, and reporting symptoms that the patient did not have in order to obtain coverage and treatments...."
USA TODAY 7/1/99 Steven Komarow "...Many of the figures used by the Clinton administration and NATO to describe the wartime plight of Albanians in Kosovo now appear greatly exaggerated as allied forces take control of the province. "Yes, there were atrocities. But no, they don't measure up to the advance billing," says House intelligence chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla. Instead of 100,000 ethnic Albanian men feared murdered by rampaging Serbs, officials now estimate that about 10,000 were killed. 600,000 ethnic Albanians were not "trapped within Kosovo itself lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves dug by their executioners" as President Clinton told a veterans group in May. Though thousands hid in Kosovo, they are healthy. Kosovo's livestock, wheat and other crops are growing, not slaughtered wholesale or torched as widely reported. Kenneth Bacon, spokesman for Defense Secretary William Cohen, says the best estimates available were used..... Then why exaggerate? "In order to justify this thing, they needed to tap that memory of the Holocaust," says Andrew Bacevich, professor of International Relations at Boston University....The "missing men" -- young Albanians who were believed killed -- are home with no jobs. NATO forces are struggling to keep them from seeking retribution.....Mike Hammer, spokesman for the National Security Council, says there was no effort to mislead. The administration found that "as you go through a campaign like this, there is a great deal of uncertainty." Even lower numbers justify action, he says. "We needed to move because of the campaign of ethnic cleansing that could not be allowed to stand."...."
http://www.wsws.org/articles/1999/jul1999/kos-j06_prn.shtml 7/6/99 Barry Grey "…In recent days scattered reports have emerged in the American media of the inflated and misleading character of claims by US officials of Serb atrocities against the Kosovan Albanians. On June 28 the Detroit Free Press carried an article by foreign correspondent Lori Montgomery, datelined Prizren, which bore the headline, "Rapes not a policy in Kosovo: Assaults were individual acts by Serbs, evidence indicates." ….That evening NBC Nightly News carried a segment by foreign correspondent Andrea Mitchell on the same theme. Mitchell characterized the war-time reports of Kosovan deaths as a "gross exaggeration" and said officials now estimate the civilian death toll in Kosovo since the onset of NATO bombing last March 24 to be between 3,000 and 6,000. These reports have been simply ignored by the "newspapers of record"—the New York Times and the Washington Post—which enthusiastically backed the bombing of Yugoslavia and retailed the government claims of mass murder, rape and genocide that were used to justify the war and manipulate public opinion….. Within days of the onset of NATO bombing, Clinton described the ensuing Serb attack as an attempt to wipe out the Kosovan Albanian population. In a radio address from the Oval Office on April 3 he said the "cold clear goal" of Milosovic was to "keep Kosovo's land while ridding it of its people." Twelve days later he told the American Society of Newspaper Editors that Milosovic was "determined to crush all resistance to his rule even if it means turning Kosovo into a lifeless wasteland." On May 5, in a speech at Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany, he added to the list of Serb crimes the setting up of concentration camps, something that never occurred. In a Memorial Day address on May 31 he compared Milosevic to Hitler, saying his government "like that of Nazi Germany rose to power in part by getting people to look down on people of a given race and ethnicity, and to believe they had... no right to live." On June 11, on the eve of the deployment of NATO troops into Kosovo, Clinton described the actions of the Serbs as "an attempt to erase the very presence of a people from their land, and to get rid of them dead or alive." Since the withdrawal of Serb forces, Clinton's rhetoric has become, if anything, more unrestrained. Even as NATO was quietly lowering its estimates of ethnic Albanian deaths, Clinton repeatedly said the evidence of death and destruction in Kosovo was "even worse than we imagined." In a June 20 interview on Russian television he said, "We were only trying to reverse ethnic cleansing and genocide." Two days later, in a speech to KFOR troops in Macedonia, he spoke of "young girls [being] raped en masse." …"
WorldNetDaily 7/13/99 Charles Smith "…Clearly, the Commerce Dept.'s vain attempt in 1998 to dispute the fact COSTIND was not a Chinese Army unit was another White House spin effort that failed. COSTIND, to Defense Secretary Perry, was indeed a military unit, commanded by General Ding and manned by "officers and soldiers" of the PLA. In 1998, the Commerce Dept. denied access to all China-Gate documents, citing national security, on the grounds that they could "neither confirm nor deny" their existence. In response, this reporter filed suit in Federal Court, located in Richmond, Virginia, seeking the withheld information. Previously released information, forced from the Clinton administration using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), clearly showed meetings between Commerce officials and COSTIND. For example, one document described an August 1994 meeting in Beijing that included COSTIND General Shen, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, and Loral CEO, Bernard Schwartz. The evidence showed that the Commerce Dept. was withholding details on "military" exports directly to the Chinese Army. The Commerce Dept. is not authorized to issue export licenses to military end-users… The Clinton/China military relationship included the "Eight Point Plan" to transfer a state-of-the-art air defense system directly to the People's Liberation Army Air Force (PLAAF). The air defense technology transfer to the PLAAF, according to 1998 GAO testimony on U.S. military sales to China, required a waiver signed by President Clinton…."
The Washington Times 7/12/99 Bill Sammon "…Vice President Al Gore, who in 1992 said America was in "the worst economy since the Great Depression," is now quietly acknowledging the current economic boom began midway through the Bush administration…. "The economic expansion that began in April 1991 is now the second longest on record," said a recent report by the White House Office of Management and Budget. "If the expansion continues through February 2000 -- as virtually all private- and public-sector forecasters expect -- it will become the longest running expansion ever." But in October 1992, 18 months after the boom began, Mr. Gore insisted the economy "is in trouble." During a debate with Vice President Dan Quayle, then-Senator Gore denounced Bush-Quayle economic policies.
"The experience that George Bush and Dan Quayle have been talking about includes the worst economic performance since the Great Depression," said Mr. Gore, hammering home a campaign theme he first articulated months earlier….."
Washington Times 7/5/99 "…(1) After learning in April of 1995 from their monitoring of Chinese nuclear test explosions that China had apparently acquired classified design information about the United States' most sophisticated nuclear warhead, the W-88, why did Department of Energy (DOE) weapons scientists and counterintelligence officials delay for an entire year -- until April 1996 -- reporting this alarming information to the White House? (2) Given that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officials learned of the same development in 1995 as well, why would that agency not advise the White House? Those questions have now been answered. In fact, DOE counterintelligence officials did not wait nearly so long. Nor did their CIA counterparts. As early as July 1995, DOE Secretary Hazel O'Leary conveyed her department's suspicions to no less a senior White House official than Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, according to an article in the New York Times. Within days, CIA Director John Deutch, a former deputy secretary of defense, told Mr. Panetta that the CIA had independently gathered intelligence confirming the suspicions of DOE officials; namely, that China had stolen secret information about the W-88….. In November of 1995, a convinced Mr. Deutch personally briefed White House National Security Adviser Anthony Lake -- who implausibly asserts that he cannot recall the briefing, although the White House acknowledges there is a record of it. In any event, Mr. Lake claims to have failed to brief the president. Moreover, Mr. Panetta, the government official who probably spent more time with Mr. Clinton than anybody else at the time, admitted to the Times that he failed to mention to the president what Mrs. O'Leary and Mr. Deutch told him in July 1995…..Imagine that. CIA Director Deutch informs the the White House Chief of Staff in July 1995 that his agency suspects Chinese nuclear espionage involving America's most advanced nuclear warhead. After the sober-minded Mr. Deutch becomes convinced of the nuclear espionage, he personally briefs the president's national security adviser. Five months later, DOE counterintelligence officers gave then-Deputy National Security Adviser Sandy Berger what they termed an "explicit" and "detailed" briefing. And none of these three --neither Mr. Panetta, nor Mr. Lake nor Mr. Berger -- ever considered the information sufficiently alarming to brief the president. (At one point, within days after the scandal exploded in early March this year, Mr. Berger, who became national security adviser in early 1996, claimed to have briefed the president in April 1996, but the White House now insists the president was not briefed until July 1997, after DOE officials briefed Mr. Berger a second time.) Either these three senior White House officials are among the most incompetent aides ever to serve a U.S. president, a prospect that, admittedly, is difficult to believe in Mr. Panetta's case. Or they are lying…."
New York Times 7/16/99 William Safire "… Bromwich's 569-page report dumping on the F.B.I. and claiming innocent ineptitude on high is stamped "top secret" because it might jeopardize an ongoing failure at Justice. The two of its deep, dark secrets … are covered in Elizabeth Drew's new book that has a chapter about the successful obstruction of the Thompson committee investigation, "The Corruption of American Politics." One is the Hong Kong source of the $400,000 contribution of Indonesia's Sieong, most of it routed to the Democratic National Committee through his resident alien daughter…. Another secret was sent the committee only after its hearings were over. It alleged that Ms. Hsia had recruited someone in California's state government to be "an agent" for China. In the Bromwich sandwich, eight more bits of intelligence information concealed from Congressional oversight are deliciously embedded, but not for the public to see until after the next election…."
DrudgeReport 7/14/99 "…First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton says in a sworn statement that she had nothing to do with the gathering of FBI files on employees of the Bush and Reagan administrations….. 5. I did not hire, nor did I direct or recommend the hiring of, Craig Livingstone for any position, including his position of Director of the White House Office of Personnel Security, and I do not know Mr. Livingstone's mother…."
Judicial Watch 7/15/99 "…But, in court papers filed Monday, Mrs. Clinton sought desperately to try to block her deposition by saying she was too high a government official to be deposed. In addition to filing a loophole-ridden sworn declaration, Mrs. Clinton’s brief contends that "‘as a general proposition, high-ranking government officials are not subject to depositions’" and that she not have to testify so she can "‘have time to dedicate to the performance of [her] government functions.’" This argument fails for a number of reasons, chiefly because Mrs. Clinton is not a government official. She is, however, a defendant and all defendants are deposed. "If the Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the President is subject to being deposed, then certainly the President’s wife, who is not even a government official, can be deposed…. Judicial Watch has sworn evidence and documents tying Mrs. Clinton directly to Filegate... The evidence includes but is hardly limited to: – An authentic FBI document and sworn testimony showing Hillary Clinton hired the former bar bouncer Craig Livingstone, the individual who helped obtain the Republican FBI files... – Linda Tripp’s testimony that FBI file information was being uploaded onto White House computers to be shared with the Democratic National Committee -- on the orders of Hillary Rodham Clinton…"
Public Diplomacy Query 7/10/99 Freeper Born in a Rage "… TN-none given, Title: TEXT: Energy Department Boosts Security at Nuclear Facilities Date: 11-13-97 Secretary of Energy Federico Pena announced several actions to strengthen the safeguards and security at the Department's defense nuclear facilities. The measures include deployment of new technologies, involvement of Navy SEALs in training for "force-on -force" exercises, and additional involvement and advice from outside experts. The report, which summarizes more than 2,000 classified pages, identified the need to continue to improve protection at four sites-- Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (evaluated in May 1997), Rocky Flats (evaluated in April 1997), and Los Alamos National Laboratory (evaluated in May 1997). According to the report, these sites do not have "vulnerabilities that would have allowed an adversary to penetrate the facility, but rather that one or more of the layered elements of the protection system surrounding a very important asset had an exploitable weakness." At the remaining sites, the combination of multiple layers of protection-- including security clearances, access controls, sophisticated alarm systems and highly trained and armed protective forces-- provide an adequate safety margin. The oversight review concludes that there is no immediate security danger at any DOE site…."
Public Diplomacy Query 7/10/99 Freeper Born in a Rage "…TN-none given, Title: Text: White House's Samore on China Nuclear Issue Date: 3-18-99 The Clinton Administration plans to stick with its policy of engagement with China, despite that country's theft of American nuclear weapons technology, said a top White House official... But, he added, the U.S policy of engagement with China "is premised on the expectation that China-- like other countries-- will seek to aquire sensitive U.S information and technology through clandestine means... The Clinton Administration, Samore said, has done more to strengthen lab security in the past year than all previous Administrations have done over the past 20 years... "
THE WASHINGTON TIMES 7/22/99 John McCaslin "...President Clinton misspoke yesterday when he said he was the first president to invite John F. Kennedy Jr. to the White House. Christopher Matthews, a former Washington bureau chief of the San Francisco Examiner and now host of a television talk show, recounted a 1971 White House visit by Jacqueline Kennedy and her two children. President Nixon invited President Kennedy's widow and children, Caroline, 13, and John Jr., 10. The occasion was the unveiling of portraits of JFK and Jackie. Mr. and Mrs. Nixon showed the Kennedys around the home where the children had once romped. The family then had dinner, a story John F. Kennedy Jr. later related on Mr. Matthews' cable-television show..... The Kennedy clan -- including John Jr. -- also gathered at the White House in 1981 for a ceremony hosted by President Reagan, who presented a gold medal to Mrs. Robert F. Kennedy in honor of her husband's service to the country. In a news conference yesterday, Mr. Clinton said he was the first to invite Mr. Kennedy to the White House. "John Kennedy had actually not been back to the White House since his father was killed until I became president. . . . He came back to the Oval Office where he saw the desk that he took the famous picture in, you know, coming through the gate for the first time since he was a little boy. . . . "I asked him if they'd like to go upstairs and he said he would. So I took him upstairs and showed him the residence, which he had not seen since he was a tiny boy," Mr. Clinton said. "I think that he really wanted to kind of come to terms with all of it. And I think he and Caroline, they were delightful young people and they had a great time here that night and Hillary and I loved having them here. It was quite a great night...."
New Republic 9/14-21/98 Andrew Sullivan "...There can be little doubt that if Bill Clinton were a prime minister in a parliamentary system he would no longer be in office. It is a convention in British politics, for example, that a minister can survive even the tawdriest of scandals, or direst of careers, but, if he clearly lies to the House of Commons, he has no option but to resign. A lie in this context is not merely a hedging of the truth, a ducking of a question, or an act of omission-because the Brits have long understood that these kinds of lies are sadly inextricable from much of political life. What a lie here means is an untruth spoken directly and knowingly in a formal capacity to the political nation. The reason for this convention is a simple one. If a politician is capable of self-consciously lying to his peers and electorate, then nothing he says from that point on can be reliably believed. Once that happens, politics becomes impossible because trust has been destroyed, both at home and abroad. Domestic politics is as threatened as national security. It doesn't matter what the lie is about. What matters is that it is premeditated and clearly proven. What matters is that the politician knows it is a lie when he says it, and operates not from a position of political engagement, but from political dishonesty....."
JWR 7/21/99 Peter Wehner "...On June 25, President Clinton held a news conference during which a reporter asked if he took any personal responsibility for polarizing the country and generating antagonism. The president accepted none. Instead, he said, "I think generally in our country's history, that people who are progressive, people who try to change things, people who keep pushing the envelope, have generally elicited very strong, sometimes personally hostile, negative reaction. You read some of the things people said about President Roosevelt in retrospect, because of the magnificent job he did, and because of the historic consequences of the time in which he served and what he did for America, we tend to think that everybody was for him. That¹s not true." ..."
JWR 7/21/99 Peter Wehner "...In a June 11 interview, PBS's Jim Lehrer asked Clinton about Senator Chuck Hagel's assertion that the president has debased the currency of trust and that he'll never get it back. In response, Clinton said that "elements of the other party" have devoted the better part of the last seven years to "attacking me personally because they knew the American people agreed with my ideas." About his critics he said, "they have just been mad ever since I won because a lot of them really never believed there would be another Democrat in their lifetime." They are left with nothing but "personal attacks" when the country does well, "but that's not good for America. I don¹t attack them personally." The president went on to say that "on one occasion, much to my eternal regret, I gave them a little ammunition. But I have been trustworthy in my public obligations to the American people. And I have been trustworthy in my dealings with them."..."
NY Times 7/23/99 Robert Pear "...The Congressional Budget Office said Thursday that President Clinton had grossly underestimated the cost of his proposal for Medicare coverage of prescription drugs. Dan L. Crippen, director of the budget office, also told Congress that Clinton had overstated the savings that could be achieved by his proposals to redesign Medicare and encourage competition in the traditional fee-for-service program. When Clinton unveiled his drug proposal on June 29, he said it would cost $118 billion over 10 years. The Congressional Budget Office says now that the cost would be $168 billion. The budget office number is higher by $50 ..."
Washington Weekly 7/26/99 Rep Bereuter House of Representatives 7/19/99 "…Mr. Speaker, following the public release of the Final Report of the Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China, more commonly referred to as the Cox Committee report, there have been attempts to discredit the work of the select committee. As one of the nine members of the select committee, this Member would like to reemphasize the truly bipartisan nature of the select committee and underscore that every finding made by the Cox committee in its report is fully corroborated with evidence detailed either in the public report itself or in the classified version. The Cox committee report is not and has never claimed to be a comprehensive report, nor was it ever meant to be one…..In the course of our investigation, far more disturbing information came to light that took us into unanticipated directions. Even as we were trying to close the select committee's operations, new revelations kept being brought to our attention by whistleblowers. It became clear that a very deep institutional problem had existed for some time in some of our Federal agencies and particularly the Department of Energy and its national laboratories, there at least since the late 1970s. I believe that these lapses of security at the DOE weapons laboratories taken together resulted in the most serious espionage loss and counterintelligence failure in American history. Moreover, these lapses facilitated the most serious theft ever of sensitive U.S. technology and information. Clearly, what the select committee revealed is very disturbing. Americans should be angry that their own government's lax security, indifference, naivete and incompetence resulted in such serious damage to our national security. The loss of sensitive nuclear weapons information to China is a national embarrassment and an incredibly important loss…."
The most recent distortion circulated in Washington and in the national media is a document written by Dr. James Gordon Prather entitled 'A Technical Reassessment of the Conclusions and Implications of the Cox Committee Report.' It was released personally by the Honorable Jack Kemp after Empower America, the organization to which Mr. Kemp belongs and which sponsored Dr. Prather's research, refused to endorse the final document. The Prather document was also the subject of a Wall Street Journal article and one of Robert Novak's columns last week. Dr. Prather claims that our select committee erred in finding that Chinese espionage penetrated U.S. weapons labs. Indeed he claims there was no evidence of Chinese espionage, that the real culprit is the Clinton administration's policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament and opening up the Nation's nuclear secrets to the world. That is pure nonsense. Of course there was espionage…… For example, the Prather document essentially dismisses the charge that China stole design information for the neutron bomb with the help of Taiwan-born Peter Lee. This dismissal is based on a deliberately selective reading of our report, faulty assumptions and a disregard for other information which is still classified. The Prather document called this theft charge (quote) 'ridiculous' (unquote) and opined that the Cox Committee, in its zeal to be bipartisan, claimed the Chinese stole neutron bomb information (quote), 'because the alleged spying happened on Reagan's watch, not Clinton's watch.' (unquote). Notwithstanding Dr. Prather's interpretations, Peter Lee pled guilty to willfully passing classified U.S. defense information to PRC scientists and to providing false statements to a U.S. government agency…."
AP 7/24/99 Terence Hunt "…President Clinton, mingling with big-money Democratic donors, described the Republicans' tax-cutting plan in doomsday terms Saturday, saying it would ``imperil the future stability of the country.'' ``It doesn't make sense,'' Clinton said in his weekly radio address, asserting that the GOP program would soak up money needed to fix Social Security, Medicare and other social programs. In reply, a top Republican praised the $792 billion tax cut passed last week as returning surplus federal money to the people to keep it from being spent in Washington ..."
South China Morning Post 7/27/99 Jimmy Cheung Quinton Chan "...Fears raised by the Cox report had eased amid a growing belief in the United States that Hong Kong had not been abused as a trans-shipment centre for strategic goods, an SAR official in Washington said. Commissioner for Economic and Trade Affairs Jacqueline Willis said Congressman Chris Cox changed his position after meeting Chief Secretary for Administration Anson Chan Fang On-sang in the US last month.... But Mr Cox's secretary, Paul Wilkinson, said he had not heard of a change of attitude from the congressman....."
Associated Press 7/26/99 Barry Schweid "...The United States is prepared to use force to protect civilians against genocide in Africa and elsewhere under certain specified conditions, President Clinton's national security adviser said Monday. Sandy Berger, an architect of the air war against Yugoslavia over Serb mistreatment of Kosovo civilians, set out three conditions for similar American intervention in strife-torn Rwanda or any other nation where a government undertakes a "systematic effort to eliminate a people.''.... However, Berger said, the United States would be prepared to step in if three conditions were met: There was a systematic effort to eliminate an ethnic group; the United States had a national security stake; and the U.S. military had the capacity to act...."Had the United States done nothing,'' Berger said, "an entire people would have been erased.'' ..."
***Media Research Center CyberAlert*** 7/27/99 Vol Four No 131 "...5) The Associated Press put words in Clinton's mouth last week so readers would have no idea Clinton made a false assertion about JFK Jr.'s visit to the White House. ....The broadcast evening shows never mentioned Clinton's false claimand while both GMA and This Morning pointed out the Nixon visit, neither castigated Clinton for his misinformation. On Today, Matt Lauer blamed the dead guy: "It could have been just that John Kennedy Jr. was being especially gracious to his host, President Clinton, and made him feel as if this was a special visit.") The August 2 Weekly Standard revealed some dissembling from the AP. An excerpt from the magazine's "Scrapbook" page: When did the White House start doing free spin for the WhiteHouse? Sonya Ross's initial AP stories duly repeated as fact Clinton's misty-eyed claim to be the first President to invite John Kennedy Jr. back to the White House. Once his prior visit tothe Nixon White House had been reported elsewhere, AP amended its dispatch -- not to report Clinton's whopper, however, but to help the White House press office obscure it. The new improved AP story read: "It was during Clinton's first term, in 1994, that Kennedy visited the White House for the first time as an adult, when Kennedy was serving on an advisory committee on schools, Clinton said." But Clinton said no such thing; this paraphrase was a lawyerly evasion, courtesy of AP.It got worse. Even this new version failed to account for JFKJr.'s visit, as an adult, to the Reagan White House in 1981. Thus, the final (unbylined) AP dispatch on the subject: "It was during Clinton's first term, in 1994, that Kennedy visited the White House inner sanctum for the first time as an adult, Clinton said. "No he didn't say it that way, either. Had Clinton phrased it as AP did for him, it would indeed have been true, in a Clintonian sort of way. Maybe AP should just start drafting the President's remarks for him...."
Associated Press 7/27/99 Alice Ann Love "...Women stand to lose more than men if government surpluses aren't used to bolster Medicare, the Clinton administration is contending in an attempt to stir up opposition to a big tax cut Republicans want. At a White House event today, President Clinton and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton plan to frame the alternatives this way, according to administration documents: ``Invest in a stronger Medicare program for our mothers and grandmothers, or give away the entire surplus on a risky and irresponsible tax scheme.'' The Clintons plan to highlight a study by a women's advocacy group showing that women rely more than men do on Medicare -- the nation's health insurance program for the elderly and disabled -- mainly because the average woman lives longer and has a lower income...."
AP 7/27/99 "...Clinton also used the celebration of the Legal Services Corp.'s birthday to chastise the group's congressional critics as shortsighted, and to laud the service of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, as a legal aid attorney and board member of the group. "You and I know there are still a lot of poor folks out there,'' Clinton said during an East Room salute to the congressionally-chartered group, which has been under annual attack in the Republican-led House for four years. "There is a need, a crying need, for the Legal Services Corporation,'' Clinton said. A House Appropriations subcommittee voted last week to roughly halve the Legal Service budget to $141 million. The same House panel also voted to halve funding last year, but that vote was later reversed by the full House..... In April, it admitted that a few regional offices had overstated their workloads. And in June, an independent investigation showed that the organization's five largest offices also reported 75,000 cases they couldn't document. The Baltimore and New York City offices reported twice as many legal cases as they should have, according to a General Accounting Office report, while offices in Chicago, Los Angeles and Puerto Rico overstated their caseloads by small margins. Cases were double-counted, cases that should have been closed were counted as open, and cases paid for from nonfederal sources were included with the federal count, the audit said...."
Inside Politics (Washington Times) 7/28/99 Greg Pierce "..."And, by the way, don't believe Mr. Clinton when he claims, as he did in his Saturday radio address, that 'the GOP tax cut is so large it would require dramatic cuts in vital areas, such as education, the environment, biomedical research, defense and crime fighting,' " the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial yesterday. "As [the Congressional Budget Office] shows, since 1990 domestic spending (not including entitlements) has increased by 5 percent a year; that's roughly double the rate of inflation." ...."
Reason website 7/28/99 Cox Reports Interviewed by Michael W. Lynch and Jeff A. Taylor 8/9 99 Reason: The White House spin, which was picked up by many news organizations, is that this espionage is a long-running problem dating back for at least three administrations. In your estimation, how much blame is borne by the Clinton administration? Cox: Our report states that the magnitude of the problem was not known until 1995. As a result, the critical time period has been the last four years. Questions properly have been raised over whether the response has been adequate. I am outraged as chairman of this select committee that Congress was kept so much in the dark. Sitting to my left during our 34 hearings was the ranking Democrat on the Intelligence Committee; sitting to my right was the chairman of the Intelligence Committee. I guarantee you, because I saw the looks on their faces and heard the anger in their voices, that they had never heard these things before.
Boston Herald 8/3/99 Margery Eagan "...There are several theories on why Hillary Clinton has blamed her husband's chronic philandering on the dead: ....Hillary is after the adulterers' vote, significant in New York. Thanks to Hillary, husbands caught in flagrante can now claim that after flashbacks of Mother chasing Nana with the frying pan, they had no choice but to seduce intern after intern after intern after intern..... ``And if she knew all along he had this `weakness' caused by his poor dead mother and the grandmother who loved him, why allow James Carville and his ilk to trash Paula Jones? Why go on the `Today' show (after the Lewinsky story broke) and blame a vast right-wing conspiracy? ``You know, everybody makes mistakes,'' says Milton, author of ``The First Partner.'' ``But the Clintons don't feel they should ever pay a price for their mistakes . . . It's so dispiriting.'' ..."
http://asia.yahoo.com/headlines/030899/world/933671460-90803091157.newsworld.html 8/3/99 AFP "...The head of the UN interim administration in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, on Tuesday backpedalled over comments he made the day before that "11,000 people died" in the province in the Serb military operation against ethnic Albanians. His spokeswoman, Nadia Younes, said Kouchner's "statement reflected what many people believe to be the potential number of victims, based on reports of mass graves in Kosovo received to date from all sources." She added: "Most of these reports are, as yet, unconfirmed by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY). ..."
Itar-Tass 8/4/99 "...Head of the U.N. mission to Kosovo Bernard Kouchner said he had made a big mistake by overestimating casualties in the Kosovo war. Two days ago Kouchner said that 11,000 people died in the Kosovo war by quoting the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia. "I had had so many meetings with peoples and it seems to me that this number corresponds to reality, but I was wrong," he recognised. On Monday, the U.N. mission head visited one of the mass burials in the north of Kosovo. An official of the International Criminal Tribunal on the former Yugoslavia, Paul Risley, said that it is too early to name the total number of killed Kosovars, adding that according to certain international organisations, a total of 7,000 people died in the Kosovo war...."
Stratfor.com 8/4/99 "...1834 GMT, 990804 Yugoslavia - Bernard Kouchner, head of the UN mission to Kosovo, has retracted statements made on August 2 that as many as 11,000 ethnic Albanians had been killed in Kosovo, saying the figure was an overestimation. He stated, "I had had so many meetings with people and it seems to me that this number corresponds to reality, but I was wrong." An official of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, Paul Risley, said it was premature to give a solid figure, but that some international organizations had put the number at a total of 7,000. ...."
http://originalsources.com/OS8-99MQC/8-5-1999.1.shtml 8/5/99 Mary Mostert "...In a recent commentary, we discussed a report of NBC's Andrea Mitchell in which she said that the number of Albanians killed in Kosovo during the war appeared to be in the three to six thousand range, not 100,000 as Secretary of Defense William Cohen and others were predicting." Even before the bombing started, I warned that the public was not being told the truth by the Clinton Administration. (See: http://originalsources.com/OS3-99MQC/3-11-1999.1.shtml-Peacekeeping: Albanians Terrorize Kosovo, Clinton Threatens to Bomb Milosevic)The Serbs had been demonized by the Clinton Administration and by CNN especially, once again taking the Muslim, Nazi, Nationalism side of an argument, while CLAIMING to be supporting "humanitarianism." Coming just as the Cox report was about the be released, the bombing of Yugoslavia seemed an easy way to get Clinton's reprehensible behavior in a variety of situations off the front pages. Obviously, Clinton and Albright thought a couple of days of bombing would make the Serbs give up. It didn't. .....In fact, I was threatened a few times that all kinds of things would happen to me if I didn't stop my skepticism of those numbers. My favorite number, which not even NATO is now defending, was Jamie Shea's statement that "100,000 babies" had been "born in refugee camps to Albanian women." (See: http://originalsources.com/OS5-99MQC/5-26-1999.1.shtml- NATO Says 200,000 Albanian Women Gave Birth to 100,000 Babies in Two Months?) ....The FBI sent a team over to investigate two of the seven sites listed in the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic for war crimes, one where the indictment said six persons were murdered and the other 20. The team included 65 persons and including graphic artists and demolition experts. They took 107,000 pounds of equipment, but we have seen no reports that they discovered any new mass graves in the few weeks that they spent there. "Although there have been reports that a hundred or more other sites have been reported, the FBI team came home on July 1. This suggests that there was not as much demand for their services as the news stories suggest. An AP story on June 18 said that at least 10,000 Albanians were killed in more than 100 massacres, but as yet very few mass graves in addition to those listed in the Milosevic indictment have been have been identified in news stories...."
New York Post 8/5/99 Editorial "...Surely "everyone" remembers the study from a few years ago that "proved" power lines caused cancer, right? Well, it now comes to light that not only was that study wrong, it was a fraud. The Office of Research Integrity recently found that researcher Robert Liburdy committed "scientific misconduct" by "intentionally falsifying and fabricating" data to buttress his hypothesis on the cancer-causing impact of electromagnetic fields. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Liburdy received $3.3 million in federal grants - primarily for his now-discredited study...."
Wall St. Journal 8/5/99 Sallie Baliunas "...Last month's heat wave has prompted by-now-predictable warnings about, as Time magazine's cover puts it this week, "New Concerns on Global Warming." Computer simulations say the "greenhouse effect" should have raised the temperature globally by about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) in the past 100 years. But actual temperatures have not cooperated with the computer models. Temperature records show a rise of 0.5 degree Celsius over the century, peaking before 1940. The average surface temperature then decreased until the 1970s (when the doomsayers were warning of an impending ice age) and has since risen a modest 0.2 degree Celsius. Because more than 80% of the manmade carbon dioxide has entered the air since the '40s, the early-century warming of 0.5 degree must be natural. One reason for the failure of the models is that they overlook an important natural factor that probably influences temperatures: the changing sun. In 1610 Galileo began the telescopic observations of sunspots that make up our modern view of the sun. Sunspots are cooler, darker areas of strong magnetic fields. The number of sunspots peaks and the direction of the field changes every 11 years or so, making a 22-year magnetic cycle. In the 1980s NASA satellites collected data that showed the sun was brightest during peak sunspot periods. The length of the magnetic cycle is closely related to its amplitude; thus the sun should be brightest when the sunspot cycle is short....As for the past 20 years, when climate models say increasing carbon dioxide should have caused a clear global warming in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, NASA satellites have been recording the temperature there. The satellite measurements are thought to be precise to 0.01 degree Celsius, and have been verified by independent samplings made by balloon-borne instruments. Result: The readings show no increasing global warming trend. Computer models predict exaggerated warming trends for the recent past; presumably they do for the future as well. Surface readings, likewise, show too small a warming compared to the model results......In 1990, after the George C. Marshall Institute released a report that included evidence on the sun and climate change, Jerry Mahlman, then director of the fluid dynamics laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, scoffed that it was "noisy junk science." This know-nothing approach is counterproductive. New discoveries about the causes of climate change, like a varying sun, are the key to creating better models. Introducing the sun's impact in the models has shown that human effects on temperature are much smaller than first projected, and perhaps insignificant compared with natural temperature changes. Those who are worried about global warming can cool down...."
Fox News 7/29/99 Reuters "...A federal judge Thursday ordered President Clinton to pay $90,000 for contempt of court for denying having sex with Monica Lewinsky in his testimony in the Paula Jones sexual harassment lawsuit.... "The court takes no pleasure in imposing contempt sanctions against this nation's president and, no doubt like many others, grows weary of this matter,'' Wright wrote in her order. "Nevertheless, the court has determined that the president deliberately violated this court's discovery orders, thereby undermining the integrity of the judicial system, and sanctions must be imposed to redress the president's misconduct and to deter others who might consider emulating the president's misconduct,'' the judge wrote...."
Inside Politics (Washington Times) 7/29/99 Greg Pierce "...."With little public notice, the EPA time and again has used slipshod science to justify new anti-pollution rules, then defended the rules to the hilt, even if that defense came at the expense of its own scientists," USA Today says. The latest example: a gasoline additive mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency poses a health risk, according to a blue-ribbon panel. The agency accepted the findings and said it will find an alternative to the additive. "But the report didn't contain new research. The panel just collected studies long available to the EPA. The agency either was too busy cheerleading the fuel additive to examine that research seriously or willfully ignored it," the newspaper said in an editorial...."
AP (Version) 7/29/99 Larry Margasak "... The money is in addition to the $850,000 the president has paid Mrs. Jones to settle her sexual harassment lawsuit, although he never admitted any wrongdoing. Clinton can use his legal defense fund to pay for the court sanction. .... Clinton said the relationship did not fall under the definition of ``sexual relations'' provided by Mrs. Jones' lawyers during his deposition, and that his testimony was legally accurate. The judge wrote in her contempt ruling, ``It is difficult to construe the president's sworn statements ... as anything other than a willful refusal to obey this court's discovery orders.'' ..."
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY 7/29/99 Editorial "...Is it just us? Doesn't anyone care that the president and first lady think the American people are stupid? They must, given their recent spate of public pronouncements. Take President Clinton's plea Tuesday to save Medicare by asking women to oppose the Republican tax cut. ''I ask you to help me send the word to the Congress that let's do first things first. Let's fix Medicare. The women of America especially need it,'' he said at the White House. His wife joined him at the dog-and-pony show. Here's their logic. Because women live longer, they use Medicare more. Plus, women generally get more medical care than men. .... What makes Clinton's deception all the more galling is that he's making this pitch to women. In case anyone's forgotten, his regard for women is what got him impeached. He's shown he cares not one whit about women personally. They're just objects he can use to gratify himself. It must be OK because Hillary's at his side - always ready to forgive him . . . because it'll advance her career. ..."
THE WASHINGTON TIMES Ben Barber 7/30/99 "...White House spokesman David Leavy on Thursday adamantly denied a new International Public Information (IPI) system would be directed at American audiences. IPI is a secret Clinton administration program to control public information disseminated by the departments of State and Defense and intelligence agencies. It is meant to "influence foreign audiences in a way favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign-policy objectives," according to a draft IPI charter obtained by The Washington Times. But critics claim that IPI will be used for domestic propaganda "That is totally inaccurate," Mr. Leavy said. "The IPI initiative is designed to better organize the government and the instruments we have to support our public diplomacy, military activities and economic engagement overseas. There is no impact on the domestic press."..... But a former deputy chief of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA) under three presidents said he fears the IPI plan would mean U.S. propaganda aimed at foreigners would be used to influence American elections Gene Kopp, who served under Presidents Nixon, Ford and Bush, said the elections of President Kennedy and President Carter were directly influenced by leaks of USIA foreign public-opinion polls showing a decline in U.S. prestige abroad...."
WorldNet Daily 8/2/99 Joseph Farah "... Well, I'm still mad. For three weeks my worst suspicions about the Clinton White House have been confirmed. WorldNetDaily broke a political scandal bigger than Watergate, and the American press establishment offered up a collective yawn. I've called some of the top reporters and editors in the country to explain what we have here. When I tell them who I am (a guy who has run major metropolitan daily newspapers for years) and what my story is (that we have documentation that the White House initiated an Internal Revenue Service audit against us for political reasons), they seem genuinely interested. Then they never call back. You tell me what I should think about this. All my professional life I have actively debunked the idea that there is a press conspiracy out there actively suppressing the truth. Instead, I explain as an insider, that the real problem with the press is that everyone just thinks alike -- which leads to a lot of bad decisions and poor news judgment. But this! I can't explain this kind of tunnel vision, this kind of self-censorship, this kind of news negligence with my usual rap about the sorry state of the newsroom culture...."
Reuters 7/30/99 Steve Holland "...- President Clinton said Thursday it was intolerable that the patriotism of U.S. scientists of Asian-Pacific heritage has been questioned in the wake of the Chinese spy probe. ``Asian Pacific American scientists and engineers have long made major contributions to our country, to our national security, and to our unmatched scientific enterprise,'' Clinton said in a written statement.... ``Security matters are of the highest priority in my administration, but history has shown the damage to the lives of our citizens and to our society that results from the destructive grip of prejudice, suspicion and discrimination. Racism and stereotyping have no place in our 'one America' in the 21st century,'' Clinton said. ..."
Heritage Foundation 7/29/99 Baker Spring "...On July 23, 1999, President Bill Clinton signed the National Missile Defense Act (H.R. 4) into law and established as the policy of the United States the decision to deploy a national missile defense system as soon as technologically possible. H.R. 4 does not include specific steps, however, to implement this historic policy. In order to deploy a missile defense system, the U.S. military must be able to test the systems currently under development against the types of missiles that may be launched against the United States or its allies. Today, the clearest threat of attack emanates from North Korea, which surprised the military community last August by launching a Taepo Dong-1 rocket over Japan. Unfortunately, the Clinton Administration's current policy bars the testing of certain defense systems against target missiles resembling the Taepo Dong-1....."
Heritage Foundation 7/29/99 Baker Spring "... In 1995, when the Clinton Administration announced its intelligence estimate that no hostile Third World country would be able to launch a ballistic missile similar to the Taepo Dong-1 within the next 10 years, it affirmed its policy to limit the capability of U.S. missile defense systems to meet this long-range threat. Consequently, its current policy bars the NTW and THAAD systems from being tested against target missiles that resemble the Taepo Dong-1. To begin testing against such missiles, Congress should insist that the Administration remove its restrictions on testing....."
Washington Times 7/29/99 Ben Barber "...Mr. Clinton in April issued Presidential Decision Directive 68, ordering the creation of the International Public Information (IPI) system, designed to make sure that all government agencies disseminating information abroad share a single message. A draft charter obtained by The Washington Times says the purpose of IPI is "to prevent and mitigate crises and to influence foreign audiences in ways favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives." Officials of U.S. defense, intelligence, diplomatic and other agencies met for the first time yesterday at the State Department to go over the draft charter, said a source who spoke on the condition of anonymity..... Future meetings of an IPI "core group" developing the new information system are to be chaired by Morton Halperin, head of policy planning at the State Department. The draft charter says information aimed at U.S. audiences should "be coordinated, integrated, deconflicted and synchronized with the [IPI] to achieve a synergistic effect." The former senior official complained that the charter "did not distinguish what would be done overseas and what would he done at home. . . .It talks about a news war."...."
http://www.senate.gov/ 7/27/99 U.S. Senator James M Inhofe "....U.S. Sen. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.) said today President Clinton is employing word games and abusing the constitutional lawmaking process to cover-up his administration's ideologically-driven opposition to protecting the American people from ballistic missile attack. "Every American must understand that the Clinton-Gore administration strongly opposes the deployment of a national missile defense system," Inhofe said. "They must also understand the President's position has not changed in spite of signing a bill into law last week which calls for the deployment of such a system. "In the spirit of redefining what the meaning of 'is' is, the President has brazenly chosen to interpret this new missile defense law in a manner contrary to its intended and stated purpose. In so doing, he makes a mockery of the Constitutional lawmaking process and once again illustrates the threat posed by his incessant deception, manipulation and dishonesty." Inhofe was referring to President Clinton's actions Friday in which the President a) signed into law a bill calling for the deployment of a national missile defense system; and at the same time, b) issued a statement claiming the bill actually called for no such thing. ..."
http://www.senate.gov/ 7/27/99 U.S. Senator James M Inhofe "....The Missile Defense Act, which passed the House and Senate earlier this year, sought to clearly define U.S. policy on missile defense. The bill states in its entirety that "it is the policy of the United States to deploy as soon as technologically possible an effective national missile defense system capable of defending the territory of the United States against limited ballistic missile attack (whether accidental, unauthorized, or deliberate) with funding subject to annual authorizations of appropriations and the annual appropriation of funds for national missile defense. It is the policy of the United States to seek negotiated reductions in Russian nuclear forces." In his statement on signing the bill, Clinton claims that "by specifying that any national missile defense deployment must be subject to the authorization and appropriation process, the legislation makes clear that no decision on deployment has been made." Inhofe: "In fact, it makes no such thing clear. It is a ludicrous and preposterous interpretation to suggest that the language of the bill means 'no decision on deployment has been made.' The whole point of the bill is to make an affirmative national decision on deployment. The references to 'authorizations' and 'appropriations' are nothing more than policy-neutral statements of fact about the legislative process. For the President to argue differently is shameless."
http://www.senate.gov/ 7/27/99 U.S. Senator James M Inhofe "....Also in his statement, Clinton asserts with a straight face that the second sentence of the two-sentence bill "puts Congress on record...reaffirming my Administration's position that our missile defense policy must take into account our arms control and nuclear nonproliferation objectives." Inhofe: "In fact, it does nothing of the sort, for if it did, I and many others would not have supported the bill in the first place. The purpose of this bill is to state that our nation's missile defense policy is decided in favor of deployment 'as soon as technologically possible.' The policy does not need to 'take into account' anything else. The stated goal of seeking negotiated reductions in Russian nuclear forces is a wholly separate statement of policy, not a contingent one. ...."
Wordnetdaily 8/2/99 Geoff Metcalf "...Notwithstanding the consistent unrelenting flood of propaganda, "the U.S. public has refused to back President Clinton's foreign policy." Some of you might question, "What foreign policy?" The fact is the administration has its collective panties in a bunch in the wake of this apparent inability to sell the gospel according to Bill-Jeff... Well, the latest abuse of power under the color of authority is "using resources that are aimed at spinning the news." Thanks to the wizardry of presidential decision directives, the president can (and does) create new policies and the agencies to implement his will. Congress impotently sits in the shadows alternately clucking and quivering. Up jumps the International Public Information (IPI) system, created in April by Presidential Decision Directive 68. This potential disinformation tool isn't bad enough as a bureaucracy, so it is to be run by Morton Halperin, formerly "Senior Director for Democracy" at the National Security Council and now head of policy planning at the State Department -- an all around anti-constitutional wonk.
Wordnetdaily 8/2/99 Geoff Metcalf "...This IPI working group met for the first time last Wednesday. It is yet further evidence of the evil that unbridled ambition can wrought without sufficient checks and balances. The IPI charter, still classified top secret, reportedly synthesizes the functions of agencies like the old USIA and Radio Free Europe. Those agencies were supposed to be aimed overseas, to sell New Deal propaganda. The leaked text of the draft charter is written in typical bureaucratese-speak. However, if that fictional "reasonable person" reads between the lines of the form, the substance is clear. Under the purview of IPI overseas information (propaganda) will "be coordinated, integrated, de-conflicted and synchronized with the (IPI) to achieve a synergistic effect" at home. What the heck does that mean? Simply stated, we will have the dubious distinction of paying (with OUR tax dollars) for our own indoctrination. Cool ... and Machiavelli smiled....The Washington Times got their hands on a copy of a draft charter which states the purpose of this outfit is "to prevent and mitigate crises and to influence foreign audiences in ways favorable to the achievement of U.S. foreign policy objectives." Anonymous insiders report that honchos from defense, intelligence, diplomatic and other assorted alphabet soup groups gathered at the State department to review the draft charter...."
Wordnetdaily 8/2/99 Geoff Metcalf "... Presidential Decision Directive 68, which ordered the creation of the International Public Information was designed to make sure that all government agencies disseminating information abroad share a single message...... One former senior official dared complain that this charter "did not distinguish what would be done overseas and what would be done at home. ... It talks about a news war." BINGO! The devil is always in the details. The IPI charter does not distinguish between overseas information and domestic information because the intention is to slap a tighter bridle on domestic critics..... This administration has routinely and consistently proved to be corrupt, disingenuous, duplicitous, untruthful, mean-spirited, and manipulative. The same president was just fined for having lied to a judge under oath. Lying has been proven to be the one life-long axiomatic consistent of the man...."
Associated Press 8/8/99 Anne Gearan "...The Clinton administration, dismayed by the success of anti-American propaganda worldwide, is striking back with an information offensive of its own: a State Department unit that will control the flow of government news overseas, especially during crises. The new International Public Information group, or IPI, will coordinate the dissemination of news from the State Department, Pentagon and other U.S. agencies.....In the recent Kosovo war, the Pentagon, State Department and White House poured out information each day but no single agency tried to assemble it so that the United States spoke with a coordinated message overseas. The group came about partly in response to the spread of unflattering or erroneous information about the United States received abroad via electronic mail, the Internet, cellular telephones and other communications advances. ...President Clinton signed a directive April 30, in the thick of the Kosovo war, that set out plans for IPI, although the White House did not formally announce the group's existence or role. An unclassified mission statement obtained by The Associated Press described IPI's role: ``Effective use of our nation's highly developed communications and information capabilities to address misinformation and incitement, mitigate inter-ethnic conflict, promote independent media organizations and the free flow of information, and support democratic participation will advance our interests and is a critical foreign policy objective,'' the document said...."
AP Washington 8/99 Lawrence Knutson "...President Clinton promoted a support system to help youngsters graduate from ``the playground to the college classroom,'' announcing $120 million in grants Saturday intended to put higher education within their reach. Even as ``Operation Gear Up'' gets under way, Clinton said it is threatened by the Republicans' $792 billion tax-cut package...."
Reuters 8/7/99 "...House majority leader Tom DeLay of Texas said Saturday Republicans will use the Social Security surplus as a bargaining chip to force President Clinton to approve their proposed $792 billion tax cut. ``If the president wants to spend more money than what we want to spend in keeping a balanced budget, he'll have to go the Social Security surplus,'' said DeLay in an interview with CNN's ``Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields'' program...."
Associated Press 8/7/99 "...Some call the U.S. legal system a ``sporting'' way of seeking justice, with winners and losers as well as promises that lawyers will keep their clients' secrets. But where does the truth come in? ....Coulter said the adversarial legal system ``has become an end in itself for most lawyers,'' adding that she saw nothing wrong with a lawyer suggesting a client confess to the authorities. Bright countered that as a defense lawyer, ``my responsibility is to make it clear to them ... they don't have to confess to anybody.'' Stanford law professor Deborah L. Rhode said, ``Truth is a value, but it's not the only value. We are also concerned about individual rights. We need someone to challenge the government's case. Protecting the guilty really does protect the innocent.'' President Clinton took a verbal beating from panelists for his actions during the Lewinsky scandal. ``Bill Clinton, everybody knew immediately, I think, that he was lying,'' Butts said...... "
Washington Times 7/29/99 Ben Barber "...White House spokesman David Leavy on Thursday adamantly denied a new International Public Information (IPI) system would be directed at American audiences. IPI is a secret Clinton administration program to control public information disseminated by the departments of State and Defense and intelligence agencies...."I am concerned this could happen again under the IPI plan," said Mr. Kopp, currently a Washington lawyer. "The administration is transferring all assets, except broadcasting, to State, where they will not be separated in any way. It will be very difficult to separate what is disseminated in the United States and overseas." He said that the opportunity for abusing the system will be great. "The temptation to spin this stuff in a partisan way will be very strong -- probably irresistible," he said. "The other ominous feature is that this includes the intelligence agencies. They are in the business of misinformation. God only knows where that goes." ..."
THE WASHINGTON TIMES 8/9/99 Greg Pierce "...John Podesta, the White House chief of staff, squirmed and repeated his answer like it was a mantra, but he refused to say whether President Clinton actually accepts a judge's conclusion that he lied to her court...After reading from the judge's ruling, Tim Russert, host of NBC's "Meet the Press," said: "Those are very strong words -- contempt of court, misleading, obstructing the judicial process. In this era of accepting responsibility, will the president now accept the judge's words as true?" Mr. Podesta replied: "The president has said he will pay the fine, and his lawyers have said that he will pay the fine. . . ." Mr. Russert tried again. And again. And again. And again....Mr. Russert: "Why can't you take the next step and say -- " Mr. Podesta: "He's accepted responsibility, Tim." Mr. Russert: "And said he lied under oath?" Mr. Podesta: "He's accepted the responsibility for his actions, for this judgment. He's going to pay the fine and, you know, we could spend all next year talking about this, too, but I think it's better to focus on the work of the American people and the job that the president's doing for the American people to keep this economy strong and to move forward." ..."
U.S. Newswire 8/9/99 Rob Geist "...The Southeastern Legal Foundation (SLF), an Atlanta-based public interest law firm which filed a formal ethics complaint with the Arkansas Supreme Court Commission on Professional Conduct last September, today condemned what it called "the loss of ethical authority over the legal profession" by the American Bar Association for featuring attorney Bill Clinton during its 1999 convention in Atlanta. "As an attorney, Bill Clinton has violated key provisions of Arkansas' ethical standards governing the practice of law, any one of which may result in his disbarment upon conviction," said L. Lynn Hogue, chairman of SLF's Legal Advisory Board and an attorney licensed in the state of Arkansas. "It is with a profound sense of disappointment that the national platform offered by the ABA Convention will undoubtedly appear to the American people as tacit approval for the actions of an attorney recently held in civil contempt for misrepresentation under oath." ....The Foundation has collected more than 15,000 signatures on its "Citizens' Motion to Disbar William J. Clinton, Esq." since last September, which it will forward to the Arkansas commission overseeing the ethical standards of law practice in the state. "We urge the ABA to clarify its position with regard to the civil contempt citation, because the American people, along with thousands of honorable, ethical attorneys, deserve to know the ABA supports the fundamental tenets of an honest bar," said Hogue...."
PRNewswire 8/8/99 RNC "...Eleven days after being fined $90,000 for contempt of court in the Paula Jones lawsuit, President Clinton will speak to the American Bar Association today, and the Chairman of the Republican National Committee -- an attorney himself -- says the event ``will permanently lower the bar'' for the organization. ``Every member of the legal profession ought to be outraged that the ABA has lowered its standards to host Bill Clinton less than two weeks after he was found to have lied under oath, withheld evidence and obstructed justice,'' said RNC Chairman Jim Nicholson. ``The job of the American Bar Association is to uphold the highest standards of the practice of law and build the public's respect for our system of justice. By inviting Bill Clinton to give the keynote address at the Opening Assembly of the Annual Meeting, the ABA has reneged on that responsibility, and shown itself to be a partisan precinct organization for the Democrat party instead.. ``What kind of message does it send to the public and the profession when the keynote speaker at the Opening Assembly of the Annual Meeting is a man who, just two weeks ago, a federal court adjudged to be guilty of 'contempt of court,' and giving 'intentionally false' testimony?'' ..."
Cleveland Plain Dealer 8/7/99 Alex Dragnich "..."A propagandist cannibalizes an already existing stream; in a land where there is no water he digs in vain." - Aldous Huxley - I was reminded of Huxley's remark when it was recently disclosed that President Bill Clinton had set up a new group designed to influence "foreign audiences" in support of U.S. foreign policy and to counteract propaganda by enemies of the United States. It is of more than passing interest that Clinton issued the secret directive ordering the creation of the International Public Information group in the midst of his bombing of Yugoslavia. By that time it was clear to him that nearly all countries around the globe were critical of what we were doing. Not only the world's largest countries - China, India, Russia - but also medium and small nations were condemning the unprovoked attack on the Serbs. Even in the NATO countries much of the public disapproved. And in the United States, while it did not get on the evening newscasts, columnists across the political spectrum called the bombing an aggression against a sovereign state. It is in the Kosovo blunder where the Huxley quote is particularly apt. Enemy propagandists were able to "cannibalize an already existing stream." Our policies provided them with the ammunition that IPI, if it had existed, could have done little or nothing to counter. On the other hand, if U.S. actions had been seen as just and fair, enemy propagandists would "dig in vain." ..."
From AFIO [Association of Former Intelligence Officers] 8/11/99 "...In London, General Sir Michael Rose, former Commander of UN troops in Bosnia, dismissed the NATO bombing campaign as a tragic failure. Rose said that British politicians and NATO were running a propaganda campaign to persuade people that the air war met its objective. In the UK as well as in continental Europe and the US there are deep differences of opinion on many levels concerning the unilateral war on Yugoslavia, including the efficacy of airpower alone versus the need for ground forces or combined arms. The NATO air war strategy is said to have made the Yugoslav anti-guerilla campaign worse and expanded the humanitarian tragedy in Kosovo while doing next to nothing to interfere with it. The bombings were said to have been the trigger for much of the ethnic cleansing as well as many of the refugees. In Washington, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the Hon. Porter Goss, recently stated that, although there was no doubt that brutal actions and massacres took place, many of the figures used by the Administration and NATO in describing the wartime plight of Albanians in Kosovo now appear to be greatly exaggerated. "Yes, there were atrocities. But no, they don't measure up to the advance billing." For example, "600,000 Albanians were not trapped within Kosovo lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves" (President Clinton). Though thousands hid in Kosovo during the Yugoslav anti-KLA insurgent operations, they are found to be healthy.
Kosovo's livestock, wheat and other crops are growing, not slaughtered wholesale or torched as reported earlier. Also, most of the "missing men," the 100,000 young Albanians who were reported to have all been killed, can be found at home - - but without jobs, sometimes engaged, along with KLA elements, in terrorism against Serb and Gypsy minorities as well as moderate Muslims in the province...."
The American Spectator Online 8/13/99 R. Emmett Tyrell, Jr "...The American Bar Association is a self-appointed arbiter of lawyerly ethics. Supposedly reigning soberly high above the swales of politics, the ABA claims in its constitution that its purpose is "to promote throughout the nation the administration of justice and uphold the honor of the profession of law." It boasts of its devotion to high moral conduct in the law. Meeting in August 1973 it condemned the conduct of President Richard Nixon. Of course at the time Nixon had not been convicted of any wrongdoing in Watergate -- the proximate cause of the ABA's wrath. Rather, the organization's argument was that Nixon and his aides -- only some of whom were lawyers -- had failed "to maintain the highest standards of ethical conduct," an obligation laid down in the ABA's Code of Professional Responsibility. Along comes Bill Clinton, whose reckless ways have made him the second American President to be impeached. Owing to his moral turpitude he has been found in contempt of court by Judge Susan Webber Wright for giving testimony in her court that she deemed "intentionally false." As Judge Wright sees it, that false testimony was part of Clinton's "attempt to obstruct the judicial process." The ABA did not condemn this conduct. So far as I have been able to ascertain it has not even taken note of that behavior. Rather it invited Clinton to address its national meeting the other day. The ABA also invited Clinton's crony, the convicted felon Web Hubbell, to speak. Hubbell, you will remember, was found guilty of cheating his law partners among other indelicacies. What did Clinton speak on? He spoke ON Congress. And what of Hubbell? He inveighed against the Independent Counsel who was responsible for establishing his guilt....."
LAT 8/14/99 A C Miller "..."Reinventing government" is linked so closely to Vice President Al Gore that he often jokes its nickname, REGO, is "Gore spelled sideways." But a new report by the General Accounting Office obtained by The Times turns Gore's sweeping claims of transforming government upside-down. Although Gore says that the program has "saved the American people over $137 billion," the GAO report concludes that the National Partnership for Reinventing Government claims credit where credit is not due. ... The GAO concluded that it could not document nearly $22 billion of $30 billion in the savings it had analyzed. Investigators determined that money was counted twice, expenses were overlooked and some savings were reported years before they occurred. "In general, the savings estimates we reviewed could not be replicated, and there was no way to substantiate the savings claimed," the GAO reported....Gore's office, offered a chance to respond, referred phone calls to the Office of Management and Budget, which came up with the savings estimates. OMB spokeswoman Linda Ricci said the agency had not seen the final report but questioned its conclusions. "It seems they are focusing on arcane issues of accounting rather than giving credit to the success of the administration's reinventing strategy, which has improved the operation of government while saving the taxpayers money," she said....The report lays most of the blame not with Gore but with the Office of Management and Budget, which came up with the cost-savings estimates. OMB could not give the GAO the paperwork to show how it had reached its conclusions--a practice Ricci said was routine in "responsible budgeting." ...."
Investors Business Daily 8/15/99 "...ENERGY SECRETARY BILL RICHARDSON has promised since spring that heads would roll over the espionage at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. But when the results of a department probe came in, all he did was urge "appropriate action" be taken against three employees. Doesn't he get it? When the extent of the treachery at Los Alamos was revealed, Richardson talked tough. It was a welcome change in tone from the White House's blase evasions and excuses. He kept up the tough talk even as his department's inspector general began to look into the matter. The IG identified three lab employees who fouled up, and still Richardson sounded tough. "There was a total breakdown in the system, and there's plenty of blame to go around." So, does Richardson take tough action? Hardly..... To us, jail time sounds appropriate. Or if nothing criminal or treasonous can be probed, dismissal sounds appropriate. If these three workers are responsible in part for the hemorrhage of our nuclear secrets tough punishment is called for. But all Richardson can find the political courage to do is call for "appropriate" action. It's true that Richardson can't fire the three workers. They are paid by the University of California, which runs the lab. But his word would carry a lot of weight with the UC authorities. If Richardson said, "Fire them" they would get the ax.
Yet, Richardson has hidden behind the pabulum of appropriateness. By doing so, he has given officials a pass to do what bureaucrats do best: obfuscate the issues and duck responsibility. And by all appearances, the bureaucrats are going to take that pass. "I will consider what actions to take, consistent with the policies and procedures of the laboratory and the University of California," said lab director John Browne...."
Judicial Watch 8/13/99 Larry Klayman "...Judicial Watch, in its ongoing Filegate civil lawsuit, recently uncovered written descriptions of Clinton White House photos of Bill and Hillary Clinton with Craig Livingstone, the former bar bouncer who obtained over 900 FBI files for the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton has pretended not to have known who Craig Livingstone was, even though there is overwhelming evidence she hired him for his White House job. The photo descriptions, which come from Clinton White House records, further demonstrate that Mrs. Clinton's denials relating to Craig Livingstone and Filegate are false. The descriptions include the following information: Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sec. Donna Shalala talk with Rosie O'Donnell and Paula Poundstone in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall Presidential Box... Craig Livingstone is present in the box. Hillary Rodham Clinton arrives [at] the Senate Russell Building. She is accompanied by Craig Livingstone The President greets an intern next to Craig Livingstone. President Clinton is presented with a statue of Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi by Yogesh Gandhi... The President talks alone with Craig Livingstone about the statute. President Clinton Greets David Bowie and his band in the outer Oval Office. The band poses for pictures in the Oval Office. Craig Livingstone is present. The Clinton White House should have produced copies of these photos under court process. We alerted the Clinton White House as soon as we found this new evidence among the tens of thousands of pages they produced. Now they refuse to the turn the photos over. Judicial Watch will ask the Court to order these photos produced because they help expose the truth about Hillary Clinton's involvement with Craig Livingstone. ..."
New York Times 8/16/99 Steven Erlanger "...The United States and its allies charged with peacekeeping in Kosovo are establishing a system to control the news media in the province that would write a code of conduct for journalists, monitor their compliance with it and establish enforcement mechanisms to punish those who violate its rules. A draft plan of operation for Kosovo's Department of Media Affairs, which already has been established, was drawn up earlier this month by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, calling for a staff of 50 people. It has been circulating on a restricted basis to member countries, who have been asked to nominate suitable personnel. A copy was provided to The New York Times by someone disturbed by the contents. International news media groups also have heard about it and already have expressed criticism..... On the other hand, he said, the department is charged with preventing "the abuse of the media, especially radio and television, so it can't be used to urge people to go out in the streets and create riots." But in Montenegro and Serbia, which together make up Yugoslavia, Clinton administration officials are actively engaged in supporting politicians and news media outlets opposed to the continued rule of the elected Yugoslav President, Slobodan Milosevic. In Serbia they are helping the opposition to organize large street demonstrations intended to press Milosevic to resign....He cited a forthcoming study of foreign media management in Bosnia by professor Monroe Price of Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, who wrote, "The time to intervene or control propaganda is when brutality is imminent," not to protect the political environment afterward. "The line between information intervention and censorship becomes blurred," Price wrote. "One of the great dangers of international action to restrict free speech is that it provides apparent democratic justification for any nation to use its police power to close down media outlets." ..."
Smith-Wesson.com 8/15/99 L E Schutz "...Smith & Wesson has long been a proponent and active participant in firearms training to create safe, responsible firearms owners and users. The Smith & Wesson Academy was founded 30 years ago and has trained individuals from all 50 states and 50 foreign countries. Most of the law enforcement officers in the State of Massachusetts have at some time in their career been involved with Smith & Wesson training efforts. Several years ago, we completed a $3 million expansion of our Springfield training facility in order to meet the demand for high quality training for private citizens across the country. Firearm education is in everyones best interest. Smith & Wesson, through its training facility has worked closely with the City of Springfield and its mayor in a number of areas to promote the safe use and storage of firearms, including participating with the citys Violence Prevention Task Force which last year put gun locks on hundreds of firearms at no cost to the owners.... Smith & Wesson can only promote and support education where such efforts are accepted. Far too many community leaders are adamant in not supporting firearm educational programs. The same educational processes that are utilized to address other social issues such as AIDS, teenage pregnancies and the misuse of drugs and alcohol need to be applied to firearms also. To do any less is to admit that one is not serious about addressing the issue. Those individuals and groups that oppose educational efforts to inform children and adults about the rights, wrongs and responsibilities of firearms usage and storage must share the blame for every firearm accident or misuse that occurs...."
Investor's Business Daily-EDITORIALS 8/18/99 "…In his first news interview after being convicted of making illegal campaign contributions, Chung put flesh on the story we all suspected: The White House would do anything for cash for Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign. That included crimes. Chung said federal employees solicited and accepted campaign donations on federal property, at least one White House staffer lied under oath in the probe of the scandal, and Democratic Party officials tried to extort more money from Chung. If you believe Chung, the president, first lady and several top party officials knew Chung got his money from Chinese nationals, but ignored this illegality in favor of the cash. Here are the details from Chung: ***Chung wanted Hillary Clinton to meet with him and Chinese nationals. When he made that request, the first lady's secretary told Chung Mrs. Clinton owed a lot of money to the Democratic National Committee for a White House party. Chung offered to give $50,000. He got his meeting. ***At the meeting, Chung handed a check to Mrs. Clinton's chief of staff, Maggie Williams, in her government office. Williams flipped open the unsealed envelope and saw the check. Under oath, Williams denied knowing what was in the envelope. ***At the meeting, he asked Mrs. Clinton's secretary if the first lady knew he gave the money on her behalf. "Absolultely," said the secretary…."
Washington Weekly 8/19/99 Dinesh D’Souza "…Ronald Reagan sat at a small wooden table at his Santa Barbara ranch and signed into law the largest tax cut in American history. The landmark legislation slashed income taxes by 25 percent across the board over three years. Although controversial at the time, the Reagan tax cut is today regarded by many economists as the catalyst that helped produce the largest and longest economic boom in the 20th century. . . . . Not surprisingly, President Clinton takes credit for the peace and prosperity of the 1990s. But Mr. Clinton is no more responsible for the current boom than Al Gore is responsible for inventing the Internet. Is it possible to name a single Clinton policy that plausibly could have generated today's economic good news? The reality is that Mr. Clinton inherited the low inflation, technology-driven, post-Cold War economy. His modest achievement has been to leave it alone. His political success is entirely due to the fact that, since 1994, when the Republicans swept Congress, Mr. Clinton has governed as a born-again Reaganite. If history does not remember him primarily for his sexual and financial scandals, he is likely to be recalled as the reluctant custodian of the Reagan revolution. …"
Chicago Tribune 8/16/99 Salim Muwakkil "…Some cynical wag once quipped that the only people who hate hypocrisy are those too young to realize its necessity. That world-weary wisdom must explain how the Clinton administration can flaunt its hypocrisy so easily. It helps us understand how an administration so dedicated to arms sales abroad can condemn the spread of guns at home with such enthusiasm. It also accounts for the ability of administration officials to urge dialogue over violence, even as they eagerly substitute bombs for words in an ongoing air war with Iraq. According to the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, the United States is by far the leading exporter of weapons, with more than 55 percent of the worldwide market--way up from 16 percent in 1988. During Clinton's first year in office, U.S. arms sales more than doubled. From 1993 to 1997, the U.S. sold, approved or gave away $190 billion in weapons to virtually every nation on Earth…..This is just the kind of amoral profiteering that American gun-control advocates recently have placed in their sights. Chicago and at least 20 other jurisdictions across the country now are targeting gun dealers and manufacturers in lawsuits seeking to recover the medical and social costs of gun violence. The suits charge that gun merchants' search for profits makes guns too widely available. Perhaps someone has convinced Clinton administration officials that Americans look at foreign policy as an amoral realm without ethics. That may be why they openly talk the talk of peace at home, while walking the walk of war elsewhere. And because so few of us know (or care) much about foreign policy, the "experts" tell us entertaining stories to keep us pacified. I'm sure many of us can remember those terror tales about evil Iraqis who lied about U.S. spies among United Nations weapons inspectors. We were told that these agents of Saddam Hussein lied to carry out their dictator boss' sinister desire to gas the world. But how many of us remember that those Iraqi stories turned out to be true-life tales when news accounts revealed the spies indeed were part of the inspection team? …."We must decide now, as a nation, whether we are going to allow our culture of violence to continue on into the next millennium," said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno after the latest bullet-riddled carnage in Los Angeles. We need, she added, to develop "a commitment to tolerance and to peaceful resolution of our disputes."
If the Clinton administration genuinely wanted to send a message about peaceful resolutions, it could easily stop the bombing campaign that has pummeled Iraq virtually every day since December 1998. The latest outrage involved U.S. warplanes bombing a site at a 4th Century monastery that was set up as a gathering place from which to view the solar eclipse….."
The Weekly Standard 8/23/99 David Tell "…A couple of weeks ago, Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press read his audience choice bits of U.S. District Judge Susan Webber Wright's latest and perhaps final decision in the Paula Jones litigation. Bill Clinton, Wright had written on July 29, has "violated this Court's discovery orders by giving false, misleading, and evasive answers that were designed to obstruct the judicial process." Then Russert asked his guest, White House chief of staff John Podesta, whether the president would "now accept the judge's words as true."
Well, Podesta replied, "he will pay the fine." And "he has accepted responsibility." And he is returning to his "work for the American people." And "I don't really have much more to say." Russert smiled politely and pressed on ….Her July 29 ruling chastises Clinton in language noticeably milder than that she employed on April 12, when she first found him in contempt of court. The penalty she now imposes on the president for his lies–an assessment of some $90,000 in lawyer's fees and expenses–represents a tiny fraction of the $5.5 million he proved willing to spend last year on the private attorneys who advanced those lies. They are advancing them still, incidentally, which is why Podesta was so slippery on Meet the Press: Robert Bennett's most recent formal submissions to Judge Wright announce that Clinton "does not concur with the findings of the Court." Not that it seems to matter all that much. The president commits perjury and obstruction of justice and is given what amounts to a parking ticket. He is tried in the court of politics on those same charges–impeached–and is acquitted. He devotes an entire year of his administration to a brazen official defense of his undeniable private crimes, and the Gallup Poll likes him better for it. Is public dishonesty no longer to be discouraged? …."
The Weekly Standard 8/23/99 David Tell "… "…consider Steele's legal argument against Isikoff on its own terms. Her lawyers assert that to expect truth from a reporter's confidential source is to impose "new, never-before-stated contractual obligations" on this most basic of journalistic relationships. A news organization must "explicitly bargain and contract for only truthful information" from its interview subjects. Failing that, those interviewees are authorized to deceive. And if a news organization then reveals such deception–and embarrasses the deceiver in the process–it is liable for damages. Got that? You have a legally enforceable right to whisper lies, penalty free, to the press. A federal judge, we are sorry to report, is still pondering this preposterous theory after more than a year, without conclusion. …"
NewsMax.com 8/16/99 "…Chung also stated in the interview that the two faxes he received from Hazel O'Leaary inviting him to attend the Africare charity function, and were subsequently taken back from Chung, were not the faxes submitted for evidence by O'Leary to the FBI: CHUNG: OK? And this is what happened. I got a letter later on from the attorney general, Janet Reno, and said to me, only a few words to say thank you, it's not enough. I also like to show to you what the original letter is, and what the letter FBI showed to me. They retrieve all of them. They're different. O'REILLY: So, when the gentleman came in and took the faxes away from you, the African-American gentleman, the faxes that the FBI asked for, they gave them different faxes? CHUNG: That's what I say to the FBI, it's different…."
Kansas City Star 8/17/99 Mark Bredemeier "…Ah, America. Where else could a 75-year-old World War II veteran accuse the world's most powerful leader of draft dodging while standing alongside a former '60s radical pleading for the release of Leonard Peltier? But if the VFW's polite response evidences the maturity of a wiser generation, the American Bar Association's decision to invite Clinton to speak to its convention last week provides more fodder to those who contend that the ABA has become more interested in political causes that in such things as truth and justice. I never joined the ABA, even out of law school. Once again I am reminded why. Just 11 days after being the first president fined for contempt of court and lying under oath, Clinton was feted by the nation's largest organization of lawyers as the keynote speaker of its annual meeting in Atlanta. Clinton was preceded three days earlier by Arkansas crony and convicted felon Webster Hubbell. In a measure of good taste, though, convention planners did scratch the Monica Lewinsky "dunk tank." ….More than a decade ago, the ABA became embroiled in bitter debates over abortion and affirmative action. Today the group parrots the Democratic line on gun control and tobacco litigation. More repugnant is the ABA's biased approach to the judicial confirmation process. As a lawyer, I fear the most damaging consequence of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair will be the lingering perception among witnesses that telling the truth under oath is now optional. Since the rules really didn't apply to the chief executive in a special investigation, witnesses will muse, "Why should they apply to me and this little ol' lawsuit?" The fact is, Bill Clinton's deposition testimony was not "just about sex" any more than any witness's testimony is "just about" infidelity, or the terms of a contract or the color of a traffic signal. Lying under oath cannot be tolerated in a system of self-government dependent on personal accountability. …"
Washington Times/ Inside Politics 8/18/99 Greg Pierce "…Vice President Al Gore's "reinventing government" project claimed $21.8 billion in savings that it lacked evidence to support, inflated savings by double-counting cost cuts, and took credit for savings that may have been the result of other efforts to streamline government, the General Accounting Office says. Project officials also neglected to take into account expenses that offset some of the savings, said the GAO, the auditing and investigative arm of Congress…… Rep. Dan Burton, Indiana Republican and chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, said the report released Monday shows that Mr. Gore "greatly exaggerated the success of his National Partnership for Reinventing Government." "It looks like they were reinventing accounting rules," said Mr. Burton, who requested the GAO study…."
Investors Business Daily 8/20/99 "…President Clinton was whining to his liberal elitist friends at the American Bar Association convention in Atlanta on Aug. 9 that the Senate has not confirmed enough judges for him. The sky was falling when he spoke to the ABA about a ''mounting vacancy crisis'' and a ''rising emergency'' that threatens the administration of justice. As with so many other matters relating to this man, the facts tell a different story. My father always said that everything has a frame of reference. The best way to put Clinton's judicial selection record in perspective is to compare it to the record of President Reagan, the previous two-term president. Their records are amazingly similar. Clinton has appointed 309 judges, compared to Reagan's 310 at the same point in his presidency. In the presidents' first six years, Clinton appointed judges at about the same annual rate as Reagan, 50 vs. 49. Even looking only at the years each president faced an opposition Senate, the record is the same. The Republican Senate has confirmed an average of 43 Clinton nominees per year, and the Democratic Senate confirmed an average of 43 Reagan nominees per year. Clinton is actually ahead of Reagan….."
UPI 8/20/99 "…Bowing to pressure from the State Department, the New York Times has issued a formal correction to a story that claims $1 billion of international assistance was misappropriated by corrupt leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina. But the Times, which has contacted several news agencies to complain bitterly about their handling of the story, still maintained in its correction today and a separate story about the controversy that the basic premise of the report is correct. ``The story is basically sound, there is widespread corruption in Bosnia,'' the Times foreign editor, Andrew Rosenthal, told United Press International. ``But we found three factual errors in the story that have no relevance.'' ….Rosenthal told UPI that two American officials and an official from the United Nations sought out his reporter in Sarajevo, Chris Hedges, and volunteered the details of a 4,000-page report that purportedly laid out the extent of the corruption and misappropriation of funds. Given the planned ``leak'' of information to the Times, Rosenthal expressed dismay at State Department spokesman James Rubin's ``mock indignation.'' …"