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III: The Charges and What Followed
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McCain and the Media
Corporate Media & Consolidation
Robert Scheer: It's absurd for the New York Times to cast him as a tool of corporate media, when he's been in the forefront of trying to rein it in.
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Sold to Mr. Gordon, Another Bridge!
Alexander Cockburn: The New York Times's credulous reporting of flimsy "evidence" regarding Iranian weapons in Iraq is enabling Bush's anti-Iran propaganda drive.
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Point, No Counterpoint: The Conservative Beat
Eric Alterman: The New York Times editors do a service by covering right-wingers: It would make sense to similarly cover progressives. Why don't they?
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MoDo, Deconstructed
Simon Maxwell Apter: Maureen Dowd's political analysis is devilishly smart and viciously funny--but the New York Times columnist really should spend less time on the couch.
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The Times Is Us
Eric Alterman: In wartime, you lose the luxury of choosing your allies: The Bush Administration's attacks on the New York Times are attacks on us all.
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Stooges for the Establishment
Robert Scheer: Five unrepentant media giants, complicit in the hidden agendas of government leakers, now pay the price for their unethical reporting on Wen Ho Lee.
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A Misguided Crusade
Robert Scheer: The New York Times exposes its own misguided and unethical campaign to make a terrible reporter a First Amendment saint.
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McCain and W.
Robert Scheer: McCain's not a perfect replica, but Oliver Stone's Bush bio-pic reminds us they're two spoiled screw-ups who divided and conquered the country for their high-rolling pals.
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Boston Tea Party, 2008
Robert Scheer: Fear-mongering pundits and pols question the patriotism of lawmakers and taxpayers who oppose the bailout. They've got it all wrong.
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Financial Fascism
Robert Scheer: Henry Paulson isn't proposing the nationalization of private corporations--he wants a corporate takeover of government.
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Obama: Find Your Inner Populist
Robert Scheer: To win this election and save the country, Obama must renounce the scoundrels from both parties who plunged us into economic crisis.
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McCain and the Mortgage Meltdown
Robert Scheer: John McCain's fingerprints are all over our current financial crisis.
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Alaska's Windfall Profits
Robert Scheer: Why is it a good thing for Alaskans to get a cut of exorbitant oil company profits, but not the rest of us, if we are all part of one nation?
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The Cold War President
Robert Scheer: He lacks the chops to deal with our economic crisis, so McCain's best strategy is to run as the President who'll fight the next cold war. Scary thing: he might win.
In fact, the material that Gerth and Risen referred to as "secret data" was not classified as secret when Lee downloaded it; rather, it carried the low-level designation "protect as restricted data" (PARD), which meant it could be sent to colleagues through registered US mail. Some of the material was reclassified as "secret" after Lee's firing, but never as "top secret." As to "compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal," that charge was dismissed as absurd by top weapons experts, who provided affidavits to Lee's defense attorneys. Former Los Alamos director Dr. Harold Agnew, a top adviser on nuclear weapons to five Presidents, testified that "if the People's Republic of China had already obtained these codes, or were to obtain these codes, it would have little or no effect whatsoever on today's nuclear balance."
When the government finally got around to arresting Lee, in December of 1999, it charged him only with the improper handling of files--and stretched to include the claim that the mishandling had been done "with the intent to injure the United States" and "secure an advantage to a foreign nation." But the indictment made no reference to the theft of the W-88 warhead data, which had led to his excoriation in the Times, and the prosecutors told the court they did not plan to make the case that Lee ever actually passed any secrets to a person or nation. (By contrast, former Director of Central Intelligence John Deutch, who downloaded some of the nation's top secrets to his home computer, has not yet been charged with any crime and remains a free man.)
For nine months after his arrest, Lee remained in prison without bail, while his attorneys mounted an aggressive effort to disprove the government's case against him. Finally, in August, after the lead FBI agent, Robert Messemer, admitted he'd misled the judge on several topics--including the claim that Lee had lied to a colleague to gain access to his computer--and witnesses came forward to say that much of the allegedly secret material was in the public domain, the judge agreed to bail for Lee.
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