 |
|
Wen Ho Lee. File photo.
|
Wen Ho Lee Can’t Find Work
New APALC report says Lee and other APA scientists are victims of racial profiling
By Sam Chu Lin
Special to AsianWeek
Former Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee says he has been unable to find work since he was fired and prosecuted for making unauthorized copies of nuclear weapons information, according to an interview recently published in a scientific journal.
“I have tried to get a job in both the university and industry setting, but so far I have not been able to locate a job,” Lee said in an article appearing in the July issue of the American Physical Society News. “I am currently doing my own research on semiconductor design. I hope that someday I can make a contribution to the electronics industry.”
Lee, who was held in solitary confinement for nine months on suspicion but never charged with allegedly passing on nuclear weapons secrets to China, predicts foreign-born scientists, especially those from Asia, will find it more difficult to get jobs requiring security clearances.
“I feel that racial profiling may be a very complicated and a long-standing problem,” he stated. “It will take a long time even to make tiny progress.”
The former Los Alamos scientist is suing the federal government for invasion of privacy and for releasing his name to the media before he was indicted.
“Racial profiling will be a key argument in our case when we go to trial probably in the spring of 2003,” Lee’s attorney Brian Sun of Santa Monica, Calif., stated. “We’re wrapping up the discovery phase now.”
The Asian Pacific American Legal Center in Los Angeles is concluding a year’s research on the Wen Ho Lee case. Racial profiling is a big part of the study entitled “Hostilities Exposed.” Attorney Bonnie Tang, project director for the anti-discrimination unit at the legal center, says the 50-page report points out there was discrimination before the Wen Ho Lee case, and it worsened afterwards.
“There was basically a distrust of Asian Pacific American employees,” she stated. “A lot of them had to undergo a lot more polygraph tests. Their contacts with foreign nationals were screened more carefully. Some of the employees had their security clearances revoked.”
That contrasts with a report released earlier this year, in which the General Accounting Office [GAO] found no evidence of racial profiling at the national weapon’s laboratories. Tang says that’s simply not the case.
“Our advantage was we were able to speak to community folks who actually had experienced discrimination,” she added. “They also felt the government’s investigation of the Wen Ho Lee case didn’t examine the same kind of evidence that showed there was blatant discrimination and racial profiling of Dr. Wen Ho Lee himself.”
The APALC researchers used the Freedom of Information Act, government reports, studies produced by other groups, and interviews. They are hoping both the weapons laboratories and community groups will benefit from their findings.
“We learned that the community needs to be ready for this kind of discrimination and racial profiling,” she said. “We need to organize more collaboratively. A lot of times there is tension between different community and ethnic groups. We need to be unified in our voice against racism and any kind of discrimination.”
The researchers feel management at the weapons laboratories needs to take a more pro-active role and less talk in eliminating racism and discrimination from the work place. They are also calling on the mainstream media to be more balanced in its reporting of cases like Wen Ho Lee.
Stewart Kwoh, executive director for the APALC, emphasizes Asian Pacific American scientists also have their work cut out for them.
“We have recommendations to make sure that Asian Americans do work within the labs in ways that can insure their promotion or make their promotions easier,” he remarked. “We have found that Asian Americans do need to integrate with other workers and get to know them.
“What we advise,” he continued, “while we need to advocate for the removal of discriminatory barriers, the way people can succeed is also by integrating with the staff, making sure that they can develop communication skills and other skills that will enable them to move into management positions.”
For more information about the legal center’s study of the weapons laboratories, e-mail Bonnie Tang at btang@apalc.org.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
|
