G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
How False Narrative Works
By Robert Parry
Created Nov 15 2007 - 1:55pm
By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
Editor's Note: Over the past couple of decades, the Republicans have
benefited enormously from their ability to create and disseminate false
narratives through the Right's large, well-financed media apparatus.
With mainstream journalists unwilling to challenge the false narratives -
and thus put their careers at risk - American voters often go to the polls
believing things that are almost the opposite of the truth.
In this excerpt from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush
[1], the authors present a case study from Election 2000:
During Campaign 2000, conservative groups were given wide leeway in smearing
Democratic candidate Al Gore without being called to account, even when the
Vice President was falsely portrayed as a traitor.
For instance, in the weeks before Election 2000, Aretino Industries, a
pro-Republican group from Texas, ran an emotional ad modeled after Lyndon
Johnson's infamous 1964 commercial that showed a girl picking a daisy before
the screen dissolved into a nuclear explosion.
The ad remake accused the Clinton-Gore administration of selling vital
nuclear secrets to communist China, in exchange for campaign donations in
1996. The compromised nuclear secrets, the ad stated, gave China "the
ability to threaten our homes with long-range nuclear warheads."
But the ad - which aired in "swing" states including Ohio, Michigan,
Missouri and Pennsylvania - was filled with disinformation. The actual
evidence was that the key breach in national security, contributing to the
modernization of China's nuclear arsenal, occurred in the 1980s, not the
1990s.
In other words, the secrets were lost during the Reagan-Bush administration,
not the Clinton-Gore administration.
The most important compromised U.S. secret that allegedly helped China's
nuclear weapons program was the blueprint for the W-88 miniaturized nuclear
warhead, which was smuggled to the Chinese in 1988, the last year of Ronald
Reagan's presidency, according to documents later given to U.S. authorities
by a Chinese defector.
China tested their W-88-style warhead in 1992, the last year of the first
Bush administration.
Therefore, the W-88 secret was lost - and acted upon - before Bill Clinton
and Al Gore took office. Indeed, the only significant part of this
nuclear-secrets case that happened during the Clinton-Gore administration
was that a Chinese defector exposed the espionage breach in 1995.
However, when the American public first learned of the compromised secrets a
few years later, the Republicans applied fuzzy logic and a blurred
chronology to transform the lost nuclear blueprints, apparently compromised
on the Reagan-Bush watch, into an attack theme on Clinton and Gore.
Cox Report
This clever strategy could be traced back to a May 1999 report prepared by a
Republican-controlled congressional investigation headed by Rep. Christopher
Cox of California. The so-called Cox report accused the Clinton-Gore
administration of failing to protect the nation against China's theft of
top-secret nuclear designs and other sensitive data.
When released on May 25, 1999 - shortly after the Clinton impeachment battle
had ended - the Cox report was greeted by conservative groups and the
national news media as another indictment of the Clinton administration.
By then, the Washington press corps had long been addicted to "Clinton
scandals" and viewed almost any allegation through that prism, regardless of
the details.
The Cox report gave weight in the public's mind to the suspicion that there
was something far more sinister behind earlier allegations that a Chinese
government front had funneled $30,000 in illegal "soft money" donations to
the Democrats in 1996.
Cox pulled off his sleight of hand with barely anyone spotting the trick
card up his sleeve.
The key ruse was to leave out dates of alleged Chinese spying in the 1980s
and thus obscure the fact that the floodgates of U.S. nuclear secrets to
China - including how to build the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead - had
opened wide during the Reagan-Bush era.
While leaving out those Republican time elements, Cox shoved references to
the alleged lapses into the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
So, the Cox report's "Overview" stated that "the PRC (People's Republic of
China) thefts from our National Laboratories began at least as early as the
late 1970s, and significant secrets are known to have been stolen as
recently as the mid-1990s."
In this way, Cox started with the Carter presidency, jumped over the 12
years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and landed in the Clinton years.
In the "Overview" alone, there were three dozen references to dates from the
Clinton years and only five mentions of dates from the Reagan-Bush years,
with none of those citations related to alleged wrongdoing.
Cox's stacking of the deck carried over into the report's two-page
chronology of the Chinese spy scandal. On pages 74-75, the Cox report put
all the information boxes about Chinese espionage suspicions into the Carter
and Clinton years.
Nothing sinister is attributed specifically to the Reagan-Bush era, other
than a 1988 test of a neutron bomb built from secrets that the report says
were believed stolen in the "late 1970s," the Carter years.
Only a careful reading of the text inside the chronology's boxes made clear
that many of the worst national security breaches could be traced to the
Reagan-Bush era.
[One of the authors of the Cox report was I. Lewis Libby, a key
neoconservative who would later become Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff and a figure in the Plame-gate scandal, the leak of Valerie Plame
Wilson's covert CIA identity.]
Reagan Security Breaches
When federal investigators translated other documents turned over by the
Chinese defector, they learned that the exposure of nuclear secrets in the
Reagan-Bush years was even worse than previously thought.
According to a later Washington Post article, "the documents provided by the
defector show that during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large amount of
classified information about U.S. ballistic missiles and reentry vehicles."
But major news outlets didn't spell out the significance of that timing.
Other evidence suggested that conscious decisions by senior Reagan-Bush
officials may have put communist China in a position to glean these
sensitive secrets.
The rupture followed a secret decision by Ronald Reagan's White House in
1984 to collaborate with Beijing on a highly sensitive intelligence
operation. The project was the clandestine shipment of weapons to the
Nicaraguan contra rebels, in defiance of U.S. law and while the
administration was denying to Congress that such shipments were occurring.
The point man for enlisting China into the off-the-books contra operation
was Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, then assigned to Reagan's National
Security Council staff.
Reagan's White House turned to the Chinese for surface-to-air missiles for
the contras because Congress had banned military assistance to the rebel
force and the contras were suffering heavy losses from Soviet-built attack
helicopters deployed by Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
Some of the private U.S. operatives working with North believed China was
the best source for SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles. In his 1989 Iran-Contra
trial, North described this procurement as a "very sensitive delivery."
For the Chinese missile deal in 1984, North said he received help from the
CIA in arranging false end-user certificates from the right-wing government
of Guatemala. North testified that he "had made arrangements with the
Guatemalan government, using the people [CIA] Director [William] Casey had
given me."
But China balked at selling missiles to the Guatemalan military, which was
then engaged in a scorched-earth war against its own leftist guerrillas. To
resolve this problem, North was dispatched to a clandestine meeting with a
Chinese military official.
In fall 1984, North enlisted Gaston J. Sigur, the NSC's expert on East Asia,
to make the arrangements for a meeting with a Chinese representative,
according to Sigur's testimony at North's 1989 trial.
"I arranged a luncheon and brought together Colonel North and this
individual from the Chinese embassy" responsible for military affairs, Sigur
testified.
"At lunch, they sat and they discussed the situation in Central America,"
Sigur said. "Colonel North raised the issue of the need for weaponry by the
contras, and the possibility of a Chinese sale of weapons, either to the
contras or, as I recall, I think it was more to countries in the region but
clear for the use of the contras."
North described the same meeting in his autobiography, Under Fire. "Back in
Washington, I met with a Chinese military officer assigned to their embassy
to encourage their cooperation," North wrote. "We enjoyed a fine lunch at
the exclusive Cosmos Club in downtown Washington."
North said the Chinese saw the collaboration as a way to develop "better
relations with the United States." Possession of this knowledge also put
Beijing in position to leverage future U.S. policies.
While the details of a possible U.S.-China tradeoff are still unknown, the
Reagan administration did authorize a broader exchange program between U.S.
and Chinese nuclear physicists. The Chinese were given access to the Los
Alamos nuclear facility.
The Wen Ho Lee Case
Los Alamos nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee first came to the FBI's attention in
1982 when he called another scientist who was under investigation for
espionage, but Lee's contacts with China - along with trips there by other
U.S. nuclear scientists - increased in the mid-1980s as relations warmed
between Washington and Beijing, according to a New York Times chronology
that was published n 2001 after George W. Bush had become President.
The Times reported that limited exchanges between nuclear scientists from
the United States and China began after President Carter officially
recognized China in 1978, but those meetings grew far more expansive and
less controlled during the 1980s.
"With the Reagan administration eager to isolate the Soviet Union, hundreds
of scientists traveled between the United States and China, and the
cooperation expanded to the development of torpedoes, artillery shells and
jet fighters," the Times wrote. "The exchanges were spying opportunities as
well."
"On September 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China's western desert," the
Times wrote. "From spies and electronic surveillance, American intelligence
officials determined that the test was a breakthrough in China's long quest
to match American technology for smaller, more sophisticated hydrogen
bombs."
In September 1992, George H.W. Bush was still President.
In the early years of the Clinton administration, U.S. intelligence experts
began to suspect that the Chinese nuclear breakthrough most likely came from
purloined U.S. secrets.
"It's like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and
suddenly had a Corvette," said Robert M. Hanson, a Los Alamos intelligence
analyst.
Looking for possible espionage, investigators began examining the years of
the mid-1980s when the Reagan-Bush administration had authorized U.S.
nuclear scientists to hold meetings with their Chinese counterparts.
Though the American scientists were under restrictions about what
information could be shared, it was never clear exactly why these meetings
were held in the first place - given the risk that a U.S. scientist might
willfully or accidentally divulge nuclear secrets.
China-gate
But the Chinese-espionage story didn't gain national attention until March
1999 when The New York Times published several imprecise front-page stories
fingering Wen Ho Lee as an espionage suspect.
During those chaotic first weeks of "Chinagate," Republicans and political
pundits mixed together the suspicions of Chinese spying and allegations
about Chinese campaign donations to the Democrats in 1996. Clinton's Justice
Department officials then overcompensated by demonstrating how tough they
could be on suspect Wen Ho Lee.
Virtually no one in official Washington noted the logical impossibility of
Democrats selling secrets to China in 1996 that China apparently had
obtained a decade or so earlier during a Republican administration.
Instead, conservative groups grasped the political and fund-raising
potential.
Larry Klayman's right-wing Judicial Watch sent out a solicitation letter
seeking $5.2 million for a special "Chinagate Task Force" that would "hold
Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the Democratic Party Leadership fully accountable
for election fraud, bribery and possibly treason in connection with the
'Chinagate' scandal."
The fallout from the spy hysteria kept spreading. The 60-year-old Wen Ho Lee
was imprisoned on a 59-count indictment for mishandling classified material.
The Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen was put in solitary confinement
with his cell light on at all times. He was allowed out of his cell only one
hour a day, when he shuffled around a prison courtyard in leg shackles.
The case against Wen Ho Lee began to collapse, however. Prosecutors accepted
a plea bargain on September 13, 2000, with the scientist pleading guilty to
a single count of mishandling classified material.
A furious U.S. District Judge James A. Parker complained that he had been
"led astray" by the prosecutors and apologized to Lee for the "demeaning,
unnecessarily punitive conditions" under which Lee had been held. Parker
ordered Lee released with no further jail time.
Still, the Cox report's suspicions about Clinton-Gore treachery lingered and
reemerged during the final days of Campaign 2000 with the "daisy ad" remake.
The closing message was blunt: "Don't take a chance," the ad said. "Please
vote Republican."
In its appeal, the message was unintentionally ironic, since the worst
compromises of nuclear secrets to China had occurred under Ronald Reagan and
George H.W. Bush, the team that would be restored to power if the voters
followed the ad's advice.
George W. Bush's campaign also exploited the "Chinagate" suspicions, albeit
a touch more subtly, by running ads showing Gore meeting with saffron-robed
monks at a Buddhist temple in California.
So, millions of Americans went to the polls in November 2000 thinking that
Gore's temple appearance and the Chinese nuclear spying were somehow linked.
The national news media - still bristling with hostility toward Clinton and
Gore - contributed to the confusion by failing to explain to the American
public in a timely fashion that the Chinese security breaches represented a
Reagan-Bush scandal, not a Clinton-Gore scandal.
To read more, you can get your copy of Neck Deep at the publisher's Web
site, http://www.neckdeepbook.com [2], or through Amazon.com [3].
_______
About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com [4]. It's also available at Amazon.com [5], as is
his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News [6]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Robert Parry
Created Nov 15 2007 - 1:55pm
By Robert, Sam and Nat Parry
Editor's Note: Over the past couple of decades, the Republicans have
benefited enormously from their ability to create and disseminate false
narratives through the Right's large, well-financed media apparatus.
With mainstream journalists unwilling to challenge the false narratives -
and thus put their careers at risk - American voters often go to the polls
believing things that are almost the opposite of the truth.
In this excerpt from Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush
[1], the authors present a case study from Election 2000:
During Campaign 2000, conservative groups were given wide leeway in smearing
Democratic candidate Al Gore without being called to account, even when the
Vice President was falsely portrayed as a traitor.
For instance, in the weeks before Election 2000, Aretino Industries, a
pro-Republican group from Texas, ran an emotional ad modeled after Lyndon
Johnson's infamous 1964 commercial that showed a girl picking a daisy before
the screen dissolved into a nuclear explosion.
The ad remake accused the Clinton-Gore administration of selling vital
nuclear secrets to communist China, in exchange for campaign donations in
1996. The compromised nuclear secrets, the ad stated, gave China "the
ability to threaten our homes with long-range nuclear warheads."
But the ad - which aired in "swing" states including Ohio, Michigan,
Missouri and Pennsylvania - was filled with disinformation. The actual
evidence was that the key breach in national security, contributing to the
modernization of China's nuclear arsenal, occurred in the 1980s, not the
1990s.
In other words, the secrets were lost during the Reagan-Bush administration,
not the Clinton-Gore administration.
The most important compromised U.S. secret that allegedly helped China's
nuclear weapons program was the blueprint for the W-88 miniaturized nuclear
warhead, which was smuggled to the Chinese in 1988, the last year of Ronald
Reagan's presidency, according to documents later given to U.S. authorities
by a Chinese defector.
China tested their W-88-style warhead in 1992, the last year of the first
Bush administration.
Therefore, the W-88 secret was lost - and acted upon - before Bill Clinton
and Al Gore took office. Indeed, the only significant part of this
nuclear-secrets case that happened during the Clinton-Gore administration
was that a Chinese defector exposed the espionage breach in 1995.
However, when the American public first learned of the compromised secrets a
few years later, the Republicans applied fuzzy logic and a blurred
chronology to transform the lost nuclear blueprints, apparently compromised
on the Reagan-Bush watch, into an attack theme on Clinton and Gore.
Cox Report
This clever strategy could be traced back to a May 1999 report prepared by a
Republican-controlled congressional investigation headed by Rep. Christopher
Cox of California. The so-called Cox report accused the Clinton-Gore
administration of failing to protect the nation against China's theft of
top-secret nuclear designs and other sensitive data.
When released on May 25, 1999 - shortly after the Clinton impeachment battle
had ended - the Cox report was greeted by conservative groups and the
national news media as another indictment of the Clinton administration.
By then, the Washington press corps had long been addicted to "Clinton
scandals" and viewed almost any allegation through that prism, regardless of
the details.
The Cox report gave weight in the public's mind to the suspicion that there
was something far more sinister behind earlier allegations that a Chinese
government front had funneled $30,000 in illegal "soft money" donations to
the Democrats in 1996.
Cox pulled off his sleight of hand with barely anyone spotting the trick
card up his sleeve.
The key ruse was to leave out dates of alleged Chinese spying in the 1980s
and thus obscure the fact that the floodgates of U.S. nuclear secrets to
China - including how to build the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead - had
opened wide during the Reagan-Bush era.
While leaving out those Republican time elements, Cox shoved references to
the alleged lapses into the presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
So, the Cox report's "Overview" stated that "the PRC (People's Republic of
China) thefts from our National Laboratories began at least as early as the
late 1970s, and significant secrets are known to have been stolen as
recently as the mid-1990s."
In this way, Cox started with the Carter presidency, jumped over the 12
years of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and landed in the Clinton years.
In the "Overview" alone, there were three dozen references to dates from the
Clinton years and only five mentions of dates from the Reagan-Bush years,
with none of those citations related to alleged wrongdoing.
Cox's stacking of the deck carried over into the report's two-page
chronology of the Chinese spy scandal. On pages 74-75, the Cox report put
all the information boxes about Chinese espionage suspicions into the Carter
and Clinton years.
Nothing sinister is attributed specifically to the Reagan-Bush era, other
than a 1988 test of a neutron bomb built from secrets that the report says
were believed stolen in the "late 1970s," the Carter years.
Only a careful reading of the text inside the chronology's boxes made clear
that many of the worst national security breaches could be traced to the
Reagan-Bush era.
[One of the authors of the Cox report was I. Lewis Libby, a key
neoconservative who would later become Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of
staff and a figure in the Plame-gate scandal, the leak of Valerie Plame
Wilson's covert CIA identity.]
Reagan Security Breaches
When federal investigators translated other documents turned over by the
Chinese defector, they learned that the exposure of nuclear secrets in the
Reagan-Bush years was even worse than previously thought.
According to a later Washington Post article, "the documents provided by the
defector show that during the 1980s, Beijing had gathered a large amount of
classified information about U.S. ballistic missiles and reentry vehicles."
But major news outlets didn't spell out the significance of that timing.
Other evidence suggested that conscious decisions by senior Reagan-Bush
officials may have put communist China in a position to glean these
sensitive secrets.
The rupture followed a secret decision by Ronald Reagan's White House in
1984 to collaborate with Beijing on a highly sensitive intelligence
operation. The project was the clandestine shipment of weapons to the
Nicaraguan contra rebels, in defiance of U.S. law and while the
administration was denying to Congress that such shipments were occurring.
The point man for enlisting China into the off-the-books contra operation
was Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, then assigned to Reagan's National
Security Council staff.
Reagan's White House turned to the Chinese for surface-to-air missiles for
the contras because Congress had banned military assistance to the rebel
force and the contras were suffering heavy losses from Soviet-built attack
helicopters deployed by Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government.
Some of the private U.S. operatives working with North believed China was
the best source for SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles. In his 1989 Iran-Contra
trial, North described this procurement as a "very sensitive delivery."
For the Chinese missile deal in 1984, North said he received help from the
CIA in arranging false end-user certificates from the right-wing government
of Guatemala. North testified that he "had made arrangements with the
Guatemalan government, using the people [CIA] Director [William] Casey had
given me."
But China balked at selling missiles to the Guatemalan military, which was
then engaged in a scorched-earth war against its own leftist guerrillas. To
resolve this problem, North was dispatched to a clandestine meeting with a
Chinese military official.
In fall 1984, North enlisted Gaston J. Sigur, the NSC's expert on East Asia,
to make the arrangements for a meeting with a Chinese representative,
according to Sigur's testimony at North's 1989 trial.
"I arranged a luncheon and brought together Colonel North and this
individual from the Chinese embassy" responsible for military affairs, Sigur
testified.
"At lunch, they sat and they discussed the situation in Central America,"
Sigur said. "Colonel North raised the issue of the need for weaponry by the
contras, and the possibility of a Chinese sale of weapons, either to the
contras or, as I recall, I think it was more to countries in the region but
clear for the use of the contras."
North described the same meeting in his autobiography, Under Fire. "Back in
Washington, I met with a Chinese military officer assigned to their embassy
to encourage their cooperation," North wrote. "We enjoyed a fine lunch at
the exclusive Cosmos Club in downtown Washington."
North said the Chinese saw the collaboration as a way to develop "better
relations with the United States." Possession of this knowledge also put
Beijing in position to leverage future U.S. policies.
While the details of a possible U.S.-China tradeoff are still unknown, the
Reagan administration did authorize a broader exchange program between U.S.
and Chinese nuclear physicists. The Chinese were given access to the Los
Alamos nuclear facility.
The Wen Ho Lee Case
Los Alamos nuclear physicist Wen Ho Lee first came to the FBI's attention in
1982 when he called another scientist who was under investigation for
espionage, but Lee's contacts with China - along with trips there by other
U.S. nuclear scientists - increased in the mid-1980s as relations warmed
between Washington and Beijing, according to a New York Times chronology
that was published n 2001 after George W. Bush had become President.
The Times reported that limited exchanges between nuclear scientists from
the United States and China began after President Carter officially
recognized China in 1978, but those meetings grew far more expansive and
less controlled during the 1980s.
"With the Reagan administration eager to isolate the Soviet Union, hundreds
of scientists traveled between the United States and China, and the
cooperation expanded to the development of torpedoes, artillery shells and
jet fighters," the Times wrote. "The exchanges were spying opportunities as
well."
"On September 25, 1992, a nuclear blast shook China's western desert," the
Times wrote. "From spies and electronic surveillance, American intelligence
officials determined that the test was a breakthrough in China's long quest
to match American technology for smaller, more sophisticated hydrogen
bombs."
In September 1992, George H.W. Bush was still President.
In the early years of the Clinton administration, U.S. intelligence experts
began to suspect that the Chinese nuclear breakthrough most likely came from
purloined U.S. secrets.
"It's like they were driving a Model T and went around the corner and
suddenly had a Corvette," said Robert M. Hanson, a Los Alamos intelligence
analyst.
Looking for possible espionage, investigators began examining the years of
the mid-1980s when the Reagan-Bush administration had authorized U.S.
nuclear scientists to hold meetings with their Chinese counterparts.
Though the American scientists were under restrictions about what
information could be shared, it was never clear exactly why these meetings
were held in the first place - given the risk that a U.S. scientist might
willfully or accidentally divulge nuclear secrets.
China-gate
But the Chinese-espionage story didn't gain national attention until March
1999 when The New York Times published several imprecise front-page stories
fingering Wen Ho Lee as an espionage suspect.
During those chaotic first weeks of "Chinagate," Republicans and political
pundits mixed together the suspicions of Chinese spying and allegations
about Chinese campaign donations to the Democrats in 1996. Clinton's Justice
Department officials then overcompensated by demonstrating how tough they
could be on suspect Wen Ho Lee.
Virtually no one in official Washington noted the logical impossibility of
Democrats selling secrets to China in 1996 that China apparently had
obtained a decade or so earlier during a Republican administration.
Instead, conservative groups grasped the political and fund-raising
potential.
Larry Klayman's right-wing Judicial Watch sent out a solicitation letter
seeking $5.2 million for a special "Chinagate Task Force" that would "hold
Bill Clinton, Al Gore and the Democratic Party Leadership fully accountable
for election fraud, bribery and possibly treason in connection with the
'Chinagate' scandal."
The fallout from the spy hysteria kept spreading. The 60-year-old Wen Ho Lee
was imprisoned on a 59-count indictment for mishandling classified material.
The Taiwanese-born naturalized U.S. citizen was put in solitary confinement
with his cell light on at all times. He was allowed out of his cell only one
hour a day, when he shuffled around a prison courtyard in leg shackles.
The case against Wen Ho Lee began to collapse, however. Prosecutors accepted
a plea bargain on September 13, 2000, with the scientist pleading guilty to
a single count of mishandling classified material.
A furious U.S. District Judge James A. Parker complained that he had been
"led astray" by the prosecutors and apologized to Lee for the "demeaning,
unnecessarily punitive conditions" under which Lee had been held. Parker
ordered Lee released with no further jail time.
Still, the Cox report's suspicions about Clinton-Gore treachery lingered and
reemerged during the final days of Campaign 2000 with the "daisy ad" remake.
The closing message was blunt: "Don't take a chance," the ad said. "Please
vote Republican."
In its appeal, the message was unintentionally ironic, since the worst
compromises of nuclear secrets to China had occurred under Ronald Reagan and
George H.W. Bush, the team that would be restored to power if the voters
followed the ad's advice.
George W. Bush's campaign also exploited the "Chinagate" suspicions, albeit
a touch more subtly, by running ads showing Gore meeting with saffron-robed
monks at a Buddhist temple in California.
So, millions of Americans went to the polls in November 2000 thinking that
Gore's temple appearance and the Chinese nuclear spying were somehow linked.
The national news media - still bristling with hostility toward Clinton and
Gore - contributed to the confusion by failing to explain to the American
public in a timely fashion that the Chinese security breaches represented a
Reagan-Bush scandal, not a Clinton-Gore scandal.
To read more, you can get your copy of Neck Deep at the publisher's Web
site, http://www.neckdeepbook.com [2], or through Amazon.com [3].
_______
About author Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s
for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege:
Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at
secrecyandprivilege.com [4]. It's also available at Amazon.com [5], as is
his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Robert Parry's web site is Consortium News [6]
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson