The Nation

"I think the movement is beginning to wake up," Valerie Mullen, an 80-year-old anti-war activist from Vermont, exclaimed as she surveyed the swelling crowd of people protesting against the economic, international and military policies of the Bush Administration.

While activists always like to declare victory when a decent crowd shows up to demonstrate for causes dear to their hearts, Mullen was not alone in expressing a sense of awe at the size of the crowds that showed up in Washington for weekend protests against corporate globalization, a seemingly endless "war against terrorism" and US military aid to Israel.

District of Columbia police officials estimated that 75,000 people from across the country joined four permitted protest marches in Washington Saturday, while San Francisco police estimated that close to 20,000 people took part in what local officials identified as one of the largest peace rallies that city has seen in years. Thousands more joined demonstrations in Seattle, Houston, Boston, Salt Lake City and other communities.

Some scandals find traction in Washington, others fizzle. The Taiwangate affair--which involves a $100 million secret Taiwan government slush fund that financed intelligence, propaganda, and influence activities within the United States and elsewhere--seems to be in the latter category at the moment. The beneficiaries of the lack of attention include three prominent Bush appointees at the State Department who, before joining the Bush administration, received money from this account. And one of these officials, John Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, submitted pro-Taiwan testimony to Congress in the 1990s without revealing he was a paid consultant to Taiwan. His work for Taiwan, it turns out, was financed by this slush fund.

On April 2, The Nation reported that news stories out of Asia, citing leaked classified documents, showed that former Taiwan President Lee Teng-hui had established an illegal covert fund when he was in office and that several million dollars from it apparently were used to pay for a pro-Taiwan lobbying campaign in Washington mounted by Cassidy and Associates, a powerful lobbying firm. The clandestine account, according to the Asian media reports, underwrote the travels of Carl Ford, Jr., a former senior CIA analyst who was a consultant to the Cassidy and Associates effort. The Pacific Forum, the Honolulu-based armed of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, also received money--perhaps $100,000--from the slush fund, when James Kelly, a past National Security Council officer, headed the Forum. Forty-thousand dollars of that money, CSIS confirmed, was sent to Harvard to cover the costs of a fellowship for a former Japanese defense official. In May 2001, Bush appointed Ford to be assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research, and Kelly to be assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs. (For more details, see the "Capital Games" dispatch preceding this one, "Taiwangate?--Bush Appointees Linked to Secret Slush Funds.")

On April 5, The Washington Post published a similar story, reporting that Taiwanese officials said the fund had paid $30,000 to John Bolton for research papers he wrote in the mid-1990s on how Taiwan could win readmission into the United Nations.

In most western democracies, matters of war and peace are treated as serious political issues, and substantial numbers of elected officials are willing to stand and be counted for anti-war positions.

In Great Britain, for instance, almost one-third of the members of Parliament - including 122 members of Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labor Party - have openly expressed discomfort with Blair's moves to support a US-led attack on Iraq.

In the United States, matters of war and peace are less well established as political issues; and, for the most part, elected officials are unwilling to stand tough even for the most logical and necessary anti-war positions.

Army Secretary Thomas White, a former high-ranking Enron, told reporters a few days ago that "if I ever get to the point....where the Enron business represents a major and material distraction...then I wouldn't stay" at the Pentagon. In Washington, such a statement is often seen as the first step in a graceful exit strategy. Few people, after all, leave office admitting involvement in wrongdoing. They skedaddle because they have become "a distraction." Perhaps White, who was a key man at one of Enron's most shenanigan-ridden divisions, is preparing to jump before being pushed--which would assist the Bush gang's ongoing effort to maintain its distance from the Enron scandal.

Speculation about White's fate aside, what was most interesting about his hourlong session with reporters at the Pentagon--his first extensive comments on the Enron scandal--was that the most damning information about White and Enron went unaddressed. White's remarks focused on his failure to disclose he had held on to Enron stock options after he was required to sell them off and on his trip to Aspen, a stop taken while traveling on military business so he could sign papers related to the sale of his $6.5 million house there. White has drawn the wrath of Democratic Senator Carl Levin and Republican Senator John Warner for not revealing the full extent of his Enron holdings. He has also been criticized for not forthrightly acknowledging all the contacts he and his wife had with his former Enron colleagues after he took office in May, which included discussions at the time Enron was collapsing and White was selling off Enron stock.

These matters are fair game. But they don't hit White where he is most vulnerable: his past at Enron, which White refused to discuss at the press conference. From 1998 to 2001, White was vice-chairman of Enron Energy Services, which sold energy to large enterprises and also traded energy. (In 2001, he made $31 million from Enron.) This division has been accused of overstating its profits by hundreds of millions of dollars through the use of funny-numbers accounting that sometimes involved Enron's now-infamous secret partnerships. EES was Enron at its most Enronish.