Wen Ho Lee (1939- ), an American physicist who worked on nuclear weapons at Los Alamos, was accused in 1999 of being a spy for China. Even though the government had no proof, they kept him in solitary confinement for 278 days. The New York Times assumed his guilt and printed his name before he was even charged.
The government in trying to prove his guilt :
- Carried out 1,000 interviews worldwide.
- Tried to trick him into giving secrets to a (fake) Chinese military official.
- Searched the county dump from end to end.
- Searched his house and those of his family.
- Searched all the computers he used.
- Questioned him over 20 times.
- Gave him a lie detector test. When he passed, the FBI told him he failed to shake him into signing a confession. He refused.
Lee spent over a million dollars to defend himself in court against the government.
Thirteen other scientists knew the same secrets, visited the same institute in China and met the same scientists as Lee. Yet the government did not suspect them. They were white, Lee was Taiwanese American. The FBI denied racial profiling.
During this time the government issued the Cox Report. In part it suggested that everyone in America who was Chinese or Chinese American was a possible spy for China.
Sharing a common ethnicity is not a top reason people become spies. Ideology, blackmail, money and even sex are more common. No one who spied on America for Japan during the Second World War was ethnically Japanese. Just as Robert Hanssen was not ethnically Russian.
Lee was born in Taiwan, not communist China. He came to America in 1964 at age 24 to get his PhD. He has lived in America ever since, becoming a citizen in 1974. He met his wife at the Rose Bowl, got married and had two children. After 20 years at Los Alamos he had hit a glass ceiling and was thinking of working overseas, but China was not on his list of countries.
The government went over his life with such a fine-tooth comb they did find something wrong: he downloaded a file to make a backup. There is no reason to believe it ever fell into the wrong hands. None of what he downloaded was top secret at the time.
John Deutch, a former CIA director, had done the same sort of thing. His only punishment was to lose his security clearance for a time. Deutch is a Russian Jewish American born in Belgium with friends in high places.
What led to all this: In 1995 a Chinese official approached the CIA and showed that China knew enough to make a knock-off of the W88, then the most advanced American nuclear warhead (pictured). Lee had worked on the design of the W88 by creating computer simulations of it.
Lee later took the government and five news organizations to court for making his name public before charging him. In 2006 they settled out of court for $1.6 million (140,000 crowns) before it got to the Supreme Court.
Source: Frank Wu: “Yellow” (2003).
See also:
Whoa Abagond…. If you leave that pic up there they might put you away. Fact is Obama made it legal now to throw any American in a federal prison with no trial , no jury, no due process. I’m sure you know … but it’s the NDAA law he signed. He’s got a pretty dangerous pen.
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The US has a recurrent history of incarcerating or detaining suspected subverters based on racial profiling.
Even after the Japanese-American internment, the McCarthy era also targetted many Chinese Americans as communists. My mother worked for the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover from 1957 – 1960 and they had thousands of files on normal Chinese-Americans, including people in my father’s family (whom she was dating at the time).
The USA does not often benefit from this. After the US govt put Hsue-Shen Tsien under house arrest for 5 years, he went on to develop the rocket program for China. He was never discovered to have committed any subversive activity against the USA.
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When a country has done so much dirt to people of all nations, such as the united states, they become very paranoid.
September 11th 2001, their chickens came home to roost.
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By the way I realize that picture is probably public so I was just kidding. I hear you on that @Sondis. I wasn’t a Bush supporter either and he is the one and his posse who got the ball rolling on taking our civil liberties away with the Patriot Act. It seemed like a no brainer at the time but it set a bad track for people in power in the future. Maybe Obama won’t act on some of these laws but how bout the next one or 20 years from now.
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Sondis,
When a country has done so much dirt to people of all nations, such as the united states, they become very paranoid.
September 11th 2001, their chickens came home to roost.
I seriously hope we see more chickens coming home.
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This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever gotten a crystal-clear, no-nonsense picture of the We Ho Lee matter. Relying only on what the media cared to report about Lee, you only got what they wanted you to get – everything else was, for a lack of a better word, nebulous.
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Sondis: September 11th 2001, their chickens came home to roost.
Brothawolf: I seriously hope we see more chickens coming home.
Brothawolf just advocated terrorism..
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@kiwi
Can you immediately take the opportunity to educate the person asking the question? You could express that it is insulting to ask a native-born American that kind of question. You could say that you feel more loyal to New Jersey or to your university in Ohio. Or you could ask them where their ancestors came from and ask them if they feel more loyal to their ancestor’s country.
Thing is — you might also get asked this by recent Chinese immigrants, foreign students or tourists this kind of question. They need a different kind of education. You might get asked this question if you travel to Europe or Asia as well.
BTW, have you been to other non-Asian countries and met local Asians there? I have been to Brazil and Argentina twice and encountered many local citizens of Japanese / Chinese / Korean / Filipino descent there. l have also met many in Asia from places like Peru, South Africa, Mauritius, France, Guyana, New Zealand, etc. Just wondering how you broach the subject of small talk with them.
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@ Jefe – you should read racism 101 – POC are not obligated to educate others. If they choose to, they can, but honestly, people should educate themselves. It doesn’t take an education about racism – it takes an education in basic manners. It’s just that most people excuse themselves from asking impertinent questions about others if they feel they are superior.
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I think I have read about every book there is on the subject (at least many of them), have done research projects on the topic and I also have decades of experience overseas with non-Americans as well. Education goes both ways and it is not just about white people or about Americans.
People are certainly not obligated to educate, but it does not mean that they shouldn’t. Yes, people should educate themselves, but sometimes they need help. You are not obligated to offer it, but you can’t expect everyone to learn what they need to know from television and video games.
Even the blogger here could use some education here and there. In fact, we need to educate each other.
Impertinent questions don’t just come from people who have a superiority complex. They can come from just about anyone.
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@Sondis
”When a country has done so much dirt to people of all nations, such as the united states, they become very paranoid.
September 11th 2001, their chickens came home to roost.”
Well said. I agree. It isn’t right that Wen Ho Lee was convicted of being a spy for China.
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I didn’t know about this .What this gentleman had to experience. This was just unfortunate and insulting and just plain wrong. The American government is just plain jacked up.
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And it’s seems to me kind of racist on the part of the United States government.
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@Peanut
That has happened to me plenty by immigration officials returning to the USA. Typical questions include is “What are you doing coming to the USA?” “Do you have any family here?” “How long are you staying?”etc. etc. It has happened more than once that immigration officers accused me of having a fake passport.
I am technically returning to my home country. Why are any of these questions relevant?
When returning from Niagara Falls, the immigration officer accused me of having a fake passport. She bent up my authentic passport so that it looked all beat up. She asked me not only my address, and where I worked, but what hospital I was born in, the address of the hospital I was born in, etc. She called over a colleague / supervisor, etc. to join the interrogation and redirect the people behind me to another line (we were in a car).
After about a half an hour, she let me pass, but she excused her actions by saying that there are many people trying to enter the USA illegally and she had to do what she did.
Tell me no profiling was going on.
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I think that East Asians, especially when in positions of power, are far more crueler, narrow minded, self-guided, bigoted, and racist then Whites on many scales. The problem with identifying and trying to pull another race (asians) in some oppressed colored box, as the writer of this blog post states, is that a lot of these other races inside don’t really sympathize or see anything in common with other people different then them unless it is to their advantage to do so.
The problem with this blog post is that it engages in the same binary world view of an oppressor group vs a non-oppressor group; this is a big mistake and it doesn’t take into the account the past history and racist tendencies of Asians. Since Asians are not a powerful bloc with enough numbers to influence anything in America, they don’t express their innate tribalistic nature or arrogant disregard for anyone different then themselves. Not yet anyway, a real trip to Japan will give anyone a hint of how Asians function when they are a dominant race and that’s just a glimpse. They are even racist and cruel towards Whites even when they have any little power;; one needs to simply look at examples like the Baton death march, Unit 741, the Mongol purges. This is a level of primal behavior that in some ways surpass even violent Whites.
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BTW someone should write a post about how even games such as the Warhammer (Fantasy/49k) series or any big science fiction universe primarily feature protagonists and even enemies, that are primarily of some Eurocentric flavor.
One example of focusing primarily on Europeans (or Whites), as the only people or world views that matter, is the popular Warhammer fantasy series. I know that this is negligible and not important as REAL LIFE eurocentrism, but it is a minor example of focusing only on a Euro view of things even when it involves fantasy things, games or tales. This universe and game takes place supposedly in a medieval like setting with dragons, demons, vampires, knights, rifleman, foot soldiers, orcs, goblins, it’s basically this world pre-industrial revolution. One thing that has been an issue with the story line is with the depictions of other human entities/races that reside within the Warhammer world.
Everything is written from the perspective of the human (European) protagonists despite them being one of the mediocre weaker races; the books does an excellent job at depicting the demons, Orks, Chaos, Undead adversaries with excellent detail and fantastic lore that almost meets the level of real life fables and legends. However the creators and the players leave out other human races as not important such as the land of Cathay (China) or the land of Araby (Middle East). The series makes only a brief mention of them being some sort of advanced civilizations but not actually important or playing much of a big role as the actual adversaries such as the Chaos, Undead, Elves or as the medieval Europeans (Britannia)
One Asian guy raised this issue and then complained how stereotypical and unimportant the Cathay faction was in the world despite that they were a related human race and were supposedly more advanced. Nothing really happened, and this is despite the fact that China was light years ahead of Europe during the medieval era/settings and people such as Marco Polo, from Venice (the nexus of European civilization during this time period) were stating the Chinese were admitting they were far more advanced then Europe.
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@ Xera
I agree with Kiwi.
Asians are hardly saints but whites are way worse. The Mongols killed about 30 million people. White racism has killed at least 60 million people through genocide and slavery.
Asians are racist against blacks but White American racism against them runs far deeper:
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The purges of the Mongols compared to those killed by White genocide is like comparing apples to oranges. The Mongols were able to massacre 30 million with medieval technology, primitive methods and brute force, which is quite a feat seeing as how not even Whites at the time period could even come close to killing that many by force and horseback alone. The recent killings by Whites comes with the aid of technology and guns so the comparison is invalid.
The Japanese were far more hideous and actually killed more people numerically then the German Nazi’s during WWII, just read about Unit 741 and the Rape of Nanking. Just because it doesn’t involve blacks doesn’t mean that Asians are not worse. infact even several Japanese politicians have publicly stated that blacks are holding America back and if they were in America’s position, they would genocide and sterilize them in masse.
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Why is this devolving into a debate whether Asians or Whites are more racist than they other, or which is more guilty of cultural genocide or racist democide?
Shall we compare the Roman / Byzantine empires and the Crusades with the Mongols? The Japanese with the Nazis? Which was more cruel? How do you quantify that? Number killed? bloodshed? Where do we compare what Americans did? It looks like that is shifting to another topic (and a pointless one at that – at least for this blog post).
How about this: They are all guilty and cruel. Even if one is found to be more cruel than the other, it does not excuse the other parties for their atrocities.
It is suggested that Wen Ho Lee was suspected by the US govt as being a spy for China due to ethnic similarities. However, I am sure that if he were in China, he could have equally been suspected of being a spy due to his birth in Taiwan and educational and national ties to the USA. That is another type of profiling. To tell the truth, I don’t trust either country NOT to use profiling to further their mission to punish a scapegoat.
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@ Kiwi
It is almost a trope: If I write about white racism against X, a non-black people of colour, some white-minded fool will feel the need to point out the racism of X against blacks, however hypothetical.
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Thanks. I agree with you that no party’s crimes are excusable. It is troubling that Xera’s mindset comes across as being “I don’t care if Asians suffer racism. They are racist against blacks.” Whites have used the same excuse when justifying their racism against blacks. “I don’t care if blacks suffer racism. They are racist against whites.” You see how it works?
Except that they are racist and are rather more primitive and concrete in their racism as say compared to the subtle racist ways of Whites. Even if Asians suffer racism, they will use whatever opportunity to get out of the receiving end rather then actually interpret the immorality of it, at least that is the case with the majority of them with their thinking.
They used primitive methods and brute force compared to the methods later put down by Europeans. They simply went in and killed as much as they could by combat alone instead of devising more sophisticated methods of killing. A lot of their techniques were stolen or assimilated from specific engineers and craftsmen from whomever they were going against. I’m surprised that you were stating that the “Rape of Nanking” was sensationalist coming from an Asian.
Speaking about Japanese, have you heard about Prime Minister Fujimoro and he how sterilized natives in a Latin American country? I wonder what a Japanese is doing, going around sterilizing natives in the former colonies of a Spanish empire.
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The evils of the Japanese are WAY off topic here. Or the Mongols. Or Asians generally unless you can tie it into racial profiling or the Wen Ho Lee case. I am deleting any further comments about it.
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@Kiwi
Thanks for the info on Christopher Columbus…I’ve further checked on the net. And I used to think that guy was a saint! Love your posts and love this blog!
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Reblogged this on The Racist and Unoriginal Anglo-American Entertainment Industry and commented:
a case of the yellow peril stereotype
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Abagond– This is particularly timely in the face of the dual loyalties slurs lobbed at Elaine Chao and Mitch McConnell by an allegedly liberal progressive org in my state, Progress Kentucky. You might want to check out the coverage. The org has “apologized,” but only said that its statements were inappropriate, won’t admit to the racism, and is still putting out yellow peril-type propaganda.
Mind you I have no love for Mitch McConnell, but the racism is ridiculous and is far from “progressive.”
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