Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes (33 page)

Pennsylvania representative Curt Weldon, who is chair of the National Security subcommittee on military research and development, and is fluent in Russian, has characterized the six years of Clinton's administration as "the worst period in our history in terms of undermining our national security." In May, Weldon traveled to Russia, in company with ten other congressmen. On that trip, in his presence, a Russian general threatened the assembled congressmen, warning that if the United States put ground troops in Kosovo, Russia "could" detonate a nuclear device in the lower atmosphere off the eastern United States. The resulting electromagnetic pulses, he claimed, would "fry" every computer chip in the country, shutting down phones, airplanes, electrical grids, and so on until the country was thrown into absolute chaos. This threat was not made during the Cold War by a ruler of the former Soviet Union. It was made by a Russian general, in May 1999.

These revelations are disturbing enough, but in the initial reactions to the
Cox Report
there was enough complaceny and denial to add an ominous element to the mix. Before the report was even issued, the Clinton cover-up squad had begun its famous spin cycle. Spokesmen for the White House and congressional Democrats explained that the damage resulting from all the spying was not that great because China only has eighteen missiles, while the United States has six thousand. Well, that may be fine, temporarily. But the theft has given China a twenty-year jump in its nuclear weapons development — an eternity in terms of modern technologies. What happens five or ten years in the future 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, 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 that their president has denied them a missile defense? In the event of such an attack, would Washington be willing to trade seventeen American cities 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 two million of their own citizens (a figure comparable to seventy-two million deaths in the United States) against the prospect of victory, while fifty-eight thousand proved too great a sacrifice for Americans. The Chinese Communists have already killed an estimated fifty million of their own population in their pursuit of a revolutionary future. Why would they not risk another fifty million to achieve a goal their leadership deems worthy?

In addition to making the false and irresponsible claim that the thefts reported by the Cox committee were not so serious, Clinton and his spinners argued that they themselves were not really guilty because "everyone does it." Shame on Democrats who have gone along with this argument, as they did with similar mendacities during the impeachment process over the President's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. This is not about a squalid presidential affair but about reckless and perhaps criminal behavior affecting the very lives of the American people. Yes, nuclear spying took place in previous administrations, and in every administration no doubt since the invention of the atom bomb. The difference is that previous administrations cared about such leaks and prosecuted the offenders — and had not accepted millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions from the military and intelligence services of the foreign power that pulled off the theft. Previous administrations did not lift security controls that supplied the thieves with additional vital military technologies, after the thefts had been discovered. Or systematically disarm their own military forces while this was happening. Or vigorously oppose the development of necessary defenses in the face of the threat. But the Clinton Administration did.

One of the key technological breaks China received without having to spy to get it was the delivery of supercomputers once banned from export for security reasons. Supercomputers underpin the technology of modern warfare, and not only for firing and controlling missiles. A supercomputer can simulate a nuclear test and is crucial to the development of nuclear warheads. But, according to a
Washington Post
editorial on May 26, 1999, "In the first three quarters of 1998 nine times as many [supercomputers] were exported [to China] as during the previous seven years." This transfer was authorized three years after the spy thefts were detected. What rationale (besides stupidity, greed, or some treasonous motive) could justify this decision? What responsible president or official in any government would allow the massive transfer of national security assets like these to a dictatorship they knew had stolen their country's most highly guarded military secrets? And if they did do it, why did they?

Was this the reason for the Chinese cash flow to the Clinton-Gore campaign? If not, what was the payoff the Chinese expected? What was the payoff they received? And who in the administration is responsible for the cover-ups, the laxity, and the leaks that made the Chinese conspiracy work as effectively as it did? Is there, for example, any connection between this security disaster and the fact that Sandy Berger, the president's National Security Advisor was a lobbyist for Chinese companies before being appointed to his post? Or that he and other top Clinton officials responsible for this mess have been left-leaning skeptics about Communist threats in the past, and radical critics of American power?

In the immediate handling of the national security disaster, a profound disservice was done to the American people, in fact, by both political parties. Shell-shocked by Democratic attacks during the impeachment process, Republicans on the Cox Committee became complicit in an essential part of the cover-up in the name of bipartisanship. This was the decision to de-couple the spy scandal and the technology transfers from the Clinton money trail to Beijing. This removed a large potential area of conspiracy from the perspective of the Cox report. In all, 105 witnesses to the illegal funding of the Clinton-Gore campaign by people connected to the Chinese military and Chinese intelligence either took the Fifth Amendment or fled the country to avoid cooperating with investigators. They did this with the tacit acquiescence, if not active help, of the Clinton Administration. What were they hiding, and why the did Clinton Administration, at the very minimum, not care?

The entire debate has taken place in a surreal atmosphere of politics-as-usual: the partisan defense of the White House, the denial of the real magnitude of the nuclear danger, the political decoupling of the Chinese plot to infiltrate and influence the Clinton-Gore Administration, and the failure even to acknowledge that what is at stake is a probable massive betrayal of the American people's trust by its national security leadership.

Someday, the American people may want to revisit questions they disposed of during the president's perjury over an illicit affair in light of the unfolding national security drama. Is bad character an impeachable offense? Does reckless behavior and lying under oath make a leader unfit to be commander-in-chief? Whatever their answers, and whatever the results of the investigations in progress, one thing is certain: the already revealed facts will redraw the legacy of this presidency as the most reckless and dangerous in our lifetimes.

E
VEN AS OFFICIALS WERE PREPARING to release the Cox report on how the communist dictatorship in Beijing had stolen the design information for America's nuclear weapons systems, the Democratic National Committee was announcing the appointment of its new "political issues director," Carlottia Scott, a former mistress of the marxist dictator of Grenada and an ardent supporter of America's adversaries during the Cold War. What could the DNc have been thinking to make such an appointment at such a political juncture? And what might this tell us about the roots of the nation's security crisis, the dramatic erosion of its defenses and military credibility, and the theft of its nuclear arsenal by an opponent the administration thinks of as a "strategic partner," while its communist leaders regard America as their "international archenemy"?

Carlottia Scott was for many years the chief aide to Congressman Ron Dellums, a Berkeley radical who, with the approval of the congressional Democratic leadership, was first appointed to the Armed Services Committee and then to the chair of its subcommittee on Military Installations, which oversees United States bases 267 worldwide. The Democratic leadership apparently detected no problem in the fact that every year during the Cold War with the Soviet empire, Congressman Dellums introduced a "peace" budget requiring a 75 percent reduction in government spending on America's defenses. Nor did they have any problem with Dellums's performance during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which occurred on Jimmy Carter's watch. As Soviet troops poured across the Afghanistan border and President Carter called for the resumption of the military draft, Dellums told a "Stop the Draft" rally in Berkeley that "Washington, D.C. is a very evil place," and the only "arc" of a crisis that he could see was "the one that runs between the basement of the west wing of the White House and the war room of the Pentagon."

Among the government documents retrieved when the marxist government in Grenada was overthrown were Scott's love letters to Grenada's anti-American dictator Maurice Bishop. Scott wrote that "Ron has become truly committed to Grenada. . . . He's really hooked on you and Grenada and doesn't want anything to happen to building the Revolution and making it strong. . . . The only other person that I know of that he expresses such admiration for is Fidel." Bishop and Fidel were not the only communists in the Americas favored by Dellums. About the time these letters were retrieved, Dellums was opening his congressional offices to a Cuban intelligence agent organizing support committees in the United States for the communist guerrilla movement in El Salvador. Yet when Dellums retired, the Clinton Administration's Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen, bestowed on him the highest civilian honor the Pentagon can award "for service to his country." After Dellums's retirement, Scott became chief of staff to Dellums's successor, Berkeley leftist Barbara Lee. I met Barbara Lee in the 1970s, when she was a confidential aide to Huey Newton, the "Minister of Defense" of the Black Panther Party, whose calling card was the "Red Book" of Chinese dictator Mao Zedong.

Also among the documents liberated from Grenada, were the minutes from a politburo meeting of the marxist government attended by Barbara Lee. The minutes state that "Barbara Lee is here presently and has brought with her a report on the international airport done by Ron Dellums. They have requested that we look at the document and suggest any changes we deem necessary. They will be willing to make the changes."

The airport in question was being built by the Cuban military and, according to United States intelligence sources, was designed to accommodate Soviet warplanes. The Reagan Administration regarded the airport project as part of a larger Soviet plan to establish a military base in this hemisphere, and administration officials invoked its construction as a national security justification for the invasion that followed. In an effort to forestall such an invasion, as head of the House subcommittee on Military Installations, Dellums made a "fact-finding" trip to Grenada and issued his own report on the airport, concluding that it was being built "for the purpose of economic development and is not for military use." Dellums's report also made the political claim that the Reagan Administration's concerns about national security were "absurd, patronizing and totally unwarranted." In other words, the captured minutes of the politburo meeting show that Ron Dellums and his aide Barbara Lee colluded with the dictator of a communist state to cover up that the Soviet Union was building a military airport that posed a threat to the security of the United States.

Despite this betrayal, and with the approval of her Democratic colleagues in the House, Barbara Lee is now a member of the House International Relations Committee, which deals with issues affecting the security of the United States. With equal disregard for national security the Democratic Party has appointed Scott to her new position. When I asked a leading Democratic political strategist, who is not a leftist, how it was possible that the leaders of the Democratic Party could appoint someone like Scott to such a post at such a time, he replied: "You have to understand that in the 1960s these people were chanting "Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF IS Gonna Win!"

The left-wing culture that pervades both the Democratic Party and the Clinton Administration is at the heart of the current national security crisis. People who never conceded that the Soviet Union was an evil empire, who never grasped the dimensions of the Soviet military threat to the United States, who regarded America's democracy as an imperialist empire and as morally convergent with the Soviet state, who insisted (and still insist) that the ferreting out of Soviet loyalists and domestic spies during the early Cold War years was merely an ideological "witch-hunt," who opposed the Reagan military buildup and the development of an anti-ballistic missile system in the 198os, and who consistently called for unilateral steps to reduce America's nuclear deterrent, could hardly be expected to take the post-Cold War threat from the Chinese Communist dictatorship seriously. And they have not.

In fact, the current national security crisis may be said to have begun when President Clinton appointed an anti-military, environmental leftist, Hazel O'Leary, to be Secretary of Energy in charge of the nation's nuclear weapons labs. O'Leary promptly surrounded herself with other political leftists and anti-nuclear activists, appointing them assistant secretaries with responsibility for the nuclear labs. In one of her first acts, O'Leary declassified eleven million pages of nuclear documents, including reports on nuclear tests, describing the move as an action to safeguard the environment and a protest against a "bomb-building culture." Having made America's nuclear weapons secrets available to adversary powers, O'Leary then took steps to relax security precautions at the nuclear laboratories under her control. She appointed Rose Gottemoeller, a former Clinton National Security Council staffer with extreme anti-nuclear views to be her director in charge of national security issues. Gottemoeller had been previously nominated to fill the post-long-vacant in the Clinton Administration-of Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy. The appointment was successfully blocked, however, by congressional Republicans alarmed by her radical disarmament views. The Clinton response to this rejection was to appoint her to be in charge of security for the nation's nuclear weapons labs.