No Redemption for Bill Richardson
January 1, 2009
Don’t forget him: Wen Ho Lee is 2008’s person of the year
I know, Lee made news back in 1999. But people forget, and they need to remember. That’s especially true now that Lee’s main tormentor, Bill Richardson — the former energy secretary under Clinton and now governor of New Mexico — has been named President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of commerce.
Richardson is relevant again. And so is Lee. Yet to my surprise, nearly ten years after Lee’s sordid treatment at the hands of Richardson, the media and the U.S. government, Lee’s name barely seems to register with anyone. Not with mainstream society or media. Not with Barack Obama. Not even with the Asian American community as a whole.
For Asian Americans (the majority of whom backed Obama), the Richardson nomination can be seen as the most serious transgression against Asian Americans in some time.
Richardson may be considered in political circles as the “Latinos’ Latino,” but to Asian Americans he remains the perpetrator of one of the worst racial profiling cases in America before 9-11.
Some of you recognize that. A few have gone to wenholee.org to sign an online petition against Richardson’s nomination. But it seems more people are sympathetic to the indignity suffered by American Idol’s William Hung rather than the injustice endured by Wen Ho Lee.
Who He Lee?
Just repeating the facts makes one cringe. Lee was the naturalized citizen from Taiwan who became a prominent American nuclear scientist. He was falsely suspected by the United States of being a spy for China, then subjected to nine months in solitary confinement.
If the consequences were only limited to Lee, I wouldn’t be surprised at how quickly it’s been forgotten. But as Lee’s fate worsened, so did Asian Americans’. In the pre-Sept. 11 world, nothing was considered more dangerous to the American way of life than an Asian American student/professor/high-tech worker with ties to China. The suspicion was entirely based on race, and it was official. It was a de facto APA witch-hunt set off by Richardson’s green light: the xenophobic targeting of Lee as a spy.
To be responsible for all that is no small deed. As the 20th Century came to a close with America becoming more and more diverse, Richardson found a way to use fear of Asians to whip up hysteria against Asian Americans not seen since World War II. For his role, Richardson deserves at least a yellow, if not scarlet, letter.
Instead, Richardson has neither been shunned nor dishonored. After a brief stint as chief executive of New Mexico, he is poised to become a major player in the “cabinet of change.”
Where is Richardson’s accountability? Where is his place in America’s racial hall of shame? It is the same place where you’ll find the respect for Asian Americans by the American political class. Nowhere.
Don’t misunderstand Lee’s silence
While Richardson maintains his prominence, Lee’s fall was hard and permanent. His scientific career lost, Lee now lives in quiet obscurity in Northern California. His daughter Alberta communicated that the family prefers to stay “above the fray.”
But don’t take that as your cue to be silent. It may be your sign to continue a broader fight for justice for Lee and the entire Asian American community.
Consider that in 2000, after all he went through, Lee was released without ever being charged with espionage. His lone crime? A lowly charge of mishandling computer files. For all he went through, Lee got an apology from the presiding federal judge, and even from Bill Clinton. But nothing came from Richardson.
Prior to his release, Lee filed a lawsuit in 1999 alleging that Clinton officials disclosed to the media that he was under investigation. Lee’s claim was neither about race nor discrimination, but simply about privacy. It would have crystallized Richardson’s culpability.
But in 2006, the government and five media organizations paid for Lee’s silence. Lee got an unprecedented $1.6 million settlement from the United States, The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ABC News and the Associated Press. The government gave Lee $895,000 of your tax dollars to drop the suit on the condition that the money would cover legal fees and not personal damages.
The media organizations came up with $750,000, the only money he gained personally. That’s chump change for what Lee went through. But the media willingly paid it to protect its leakers. Hmm, could that have been Richardson?
Chu’s no salve
Obama knew he would catch some heat from Asian Americans on Richardson. So to balance Richardson, there’s Shinseki to Veterans’ Affairs and Steve Chu to Richardson’s old post at the Department of Energy.
Both are qualified non-affirmative action appointees. The choice of Nobel laureate Chu may also be a sign to all APAs in the scientific community that these are different times from when Richardson ran the department. Unfortunately, the appointments do nothing to hold Richardson accountable for his past.
If Richardson’s appointment flies through the Senate unchallenged, it will be a big blow to all justice-loving Americans. But for Asian Americans in particular, it will be the stripping of any moral authority we might have gained from Lee’s martyrdom.
There’s still time to let the president-elect know that this case still matters, and that we haven’t forgotten the time when APAs were singled out and looked upon with suspicion. If Richardson isn’t held accountable and soon, here is my New Year’s prediction for the future: There will be another Wen Ho Lee.
For your New Year greeting and other thoughts, see the blog at amok.asianweek.com. E-mail: emil@amok.com
Comments
10 Responses to “No Redemption for Bill Richardson”
Got something to say?
Emil:
IIt’s not that Bill Richardson is “Latino.”
It’s that he was just one more supplicant before the throne of Mammon and power.
Race has nothing to do with it.
Even as a “Chinese” “American” promulgates racist jargon in re the issues of “immigration and exhortation.
Richardson is just one more mendicant prostrate before Mammon, even as Obama may prove to be the same, only “higher,” as in “office.:
These guys are a dime a dozen, maybe a mill a baker’s dozen.
Let them eat cake, as in Gollywood makeup “pancake” salons.
The while we peons beg, barter, or steal. So long as we don’t kill anyone else in the process.
Unlike the neo-Zionists in Israel and our very own neocons in the Beltway, where rhyme begets umreasoning. idiocies.
P.S.: And wherethell’s Crhis Cox these days??
. . .
Amd. fpr
. . .
And, for that matter, wherethell’s John Doolittle? Corrupting the entire “democratic” process as he feathers his own foul nest?
This is why we Asian Americans need a Supreme Court Justice sitting on the Supreme Court…some one like Frank Wu or Harold Koh,,,these are only two highly qualified men…Mr Wu was the Dean of Wayne State School of Law and Koh is the Dean of Yale Law School. Two men who have written and know how we Asians need representation on the Highest Court of the Land.
We need to get together to make this happen so no more dastardly unamerican deed happen to any more Asian Americans..ie Japanese Americans going to Cooncentration camps…and being accussed of being spys, because we look differently from mainstream America…..Let’s join together to make this happen.
Richardson has withdrawn, by himself or by outside pressure ?, from the Obama
nomination for Secretary of Commerce.
Not surprising.
Richardson has local controversy which he yet has to face, in New Mexico.
Asian-American protests probably was not a cause.
He is rather unfit as Secretary of Commerce anyway.
He probably would further alienate US trade partners, should he get appointed,
by his swashbuckling manner and prejudicial mindset. He might even cause
trade wars or isolationist movement.
Hopefully Obama will have better sense in his choice of his cabinet. He should remember what he promised. “Changes we can believe in “, remember ?
Too much expectation have been put on Obama, I can only wait and see this first year of his government.
Dear Tanaka:
True enough and more than obvious, including Obama’s own acknowledgment of expectations.
But if today’s Inaugural glimmerings are any measurement, the man may well live up to his “message.”
So far, Day One, he appears to be batting 1.000.
Now, let’s see how well deeds can match words.
The icing here, of course, is that NO WAY can he do worse than our down home again, thank God, Texas ranger, or should that be drugstore cowboy?
I say, give the man a chance. Two terms, maybe?
Hedging this bet here;
Postings like today;s on CountePunch, not to mention those of recent days on related subjects, makes me want to uppoint another obvious:
How can Obama reconcile his lofty ideals of “peace” and “justice” in re the er, ah, “ceasefire” in Gaza?
How can he begin to equate the recent House votes regarding that disaster of inhumanity to an evenhanded and morally accountable American response?
And, the crux of this matter, how can he begin to exculpate AIPAC here, forget Rahm?
Eisenhower warned us. Nobody listened. To date, that is.
Are, indeed, Palestinians “human”? Like the slaves who were deemed six-tenths?
Day 1:
Obama bats .667?
Two out of three ain’t bad.
The lobbyist manifesto sounds great, and may even work, up to a point.
And the open phones to the rest of the world sounds gutsy.
But, alas, the continuing AIPAC/Likud axis line remains intact, at least on the surface. Can there be measurable “change” here as well in the subtext?
Today’s CounterPunch online piece is by one Gabriel Kolko, who cites Uri Avnery as calling the still simmering Gaza strike “madness,” and who, himself proclaims the obvious, that this Israeli act, sanctioned and backed by “us:? , will prove a bonanza for al Qaeda and muslim extremism.
The underlying obvious that “America” refuses to acknowledge as well, to wit: the neoZionist descendants of the original Holocaust victims are, today and here, the Nazis in this case, and they are sowing the dragon’s teeth of reaction.
Obama would appear to be more than decent and compassionate, certainly on domestic issues, and his open call to regional leaders to “talk” is, at the very least, a light towards the end of this tunnel.
But can he manage to shift the military/industrial butt out of its own self-defeating seat of macho authority?
Especially when most of that crowd are, at heart, bullying frat boys, and the rest nest-feathering chief high poobahs of varying stripes and stars.
The Brit Guardian has provided the best “coverage,” at least in this view, of the Obama Nation, and both CounterPunch and Info Clearing House continue to tell it like it IS, as well.
Bottom line: fresh breeze blowing in the Beltway. Cough cough.
Is AsianWeek still flatlining? Any attempts for resuscitation? Anyone? Hello?
Linda:
Maybe you know some people in the East, i.e. N’Yawk, who have bucks AND guts, not to mention smarts, to think about some kind of shock treatment to jumpstart this venue. Geography is irrelevant in this inner space and outer limit.
Where else can “we” find a common, as in one for all and all for one, forum to chew the fat and maybe a few fatasses in the bargain? Chew them out, that is.
And, by the bye, only Day 2, and, I, for one, among millions no doubt, am once again proud as Hell to be an American, even a hyphenated one.
Now, if only Uri Avnery and his crowd can find their own Obama.
Cheers.
what’s william hung got to do with this article? us asians are just whole bunch of back stabbers and ass kissers ourselves; we didn’t go anywhere because of this.
I didn’t make this stuffs up out the blue!?#* dostoevsky was way before me, go check him out……