The Shame of Injustice
Judge James Parker had some harsh words for our government yesterday. In releasing former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee from nine months of solitary confinement, often in shackles, he slammed the top officials at both the Department of Justice and the Energy Department, saying they "have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it." Those are not minced words. Parker said he was misled by the government when he ordered Lee incarcerated, and sincerely apologized to the 60-year-old former Los Alamos scientist.
Lee was jailed on December 10th on charges that around suggestions that he supplied classified nuclear weapons information to the Chinese. The government shoveled great hooplah about Lee being a major spy for Beijing, saying that he had access to the "crown jewels" of U.S. nuclear secrets. Morons spouting oxymorons.
Surprise, surprise -- nothing ever materialized, and for a while now have come a spate of stories about the government’s case unraveling. On Sunday, it was reported that the government had agreed to release Lee the next day if he would plead guilty to a single count of downloading secret files in an unsecured area of Los Alamos. An unsecured area in Los Alamos? Are they kidding? The place leaks like an upside down sieve.
But what was thought to have been a deal came apart in the details Monday. One suspects the government was demanding some admission from Lee that would help the government save face. How ironic, the government asking an Asian for face, when the government’s own agents admitted targeting Lee because he’s Asian. Another nice mess the feds got themselves into was that Mrs. Lee was revealed to be more than just an administrator at Los Alamos, but also an employee of the CIA. That’s our CIA, in case you were flailing about looking for explanation.
Lee was finally released Wednesday. If there was justice, the people who put him there would take his place. For it is just the latest case of people with too much authority exceeding it in a heinous manner. We are familiar with it at the plebeian level of cops pulling over blacks in LA, and the FBI spying on civil rights and anti-war protesters. In this case, though there was the smell of racism, this was less about Lee being Asian and more about the Justice Department being out of control. You can be sure that the only reason Lee agreed to the single guilty plea is that the government — our government — threatened to delay his release. Holding him the two more days was just their way of flexing.
Surely that is a crime. Prosecutors who persecute. I’m sure they would be a lot slower on the trigger if they faced incarceration for abuse of power, false imprisonment, and misleading judges. Judge Parker was right to shame the shameless, and to put the names of every American on his indictment. If people can be locked away in solitary in shackles on the basis of a prosecutor’s private agenda, then we soon won’t have to worry about violence just in the movies.
And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.