Debate Over Cox Report

By taking the Communist Party line that treating espionage against U.S. national laboratories seriously is racist, Tom Plate does a disservice to every Chinese American and more so to the people of China (“Cox Report Was ‘an Exercise in Amateur-Hour Paranoia,’ ” Commentary, July 21). It is Orwellian to suggest that supporting the Chinese people requires supporting the Communist government or turning a blind eye to the theft of sensitive military secrets.

As the father of China’s democracy movement, Wei Jingsheng, and I have written together (Commentary, June 4), the growing military power of the People’s Republic of China is used to control China’s population. The men and women in slave labor camps, women undergoing forced abortions, jailed founders of China’s Democratic Party and the citizens of Taiwan whose democracy is threatened by Beijing are not Americans--they are all Chinese.

The Plate column’s bizarre thesis amounts to the most diabolical conspiracy yet imagined: Every Republican and Democrat on the committee is a dangerous racist who deliberately ignored the classified evidence.

REP. CHRISTOPHER COX

Chairman, Select Committee

on U.S. National Security

R-Newport Beach

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Plate criticizes the Cox report’s handling of the Chinese espionage issue and laments the potential “fall-out effect on public opinion about people in the U.S. of Chinese ancestry.” As a member of the Cox panel, I share some of Plate’s concerns.

The Cox report does raise legitimate issues about the security of our national labs. However, using the report as a platform to adopt overly suspicious policies that treat visitors from China and Chinese Americans as potential spies is unfair and un-American.

The contributions of Asian Americans to this country are immeasurable. To question their loyalty to the U.S. because of this report or any other politically motivated congressional investigation is completely unfounded and simply unconscionable.

REP. LUCILLE

ROYBAL-ALLARD

D-Los Angeles

*

Plate erroneously and recklessly ascribes to me the view that the bipartisan congressional report on U.S. national security concerns regarding China was “an exercise in amateur-hour paranoia.” Nothing could be further from the truth.

Plate uses two declaratory sentences extracted from the recent report on Department of Energy security by a special panel of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB), which I chaired. These declarations reflect the panel’s displeasure over insinuations of governmental conspiracy and other like-minded innuendoes regarding the executive branch, security vulnerabilities at the DOE weapons labs and espionage by foreign governments. They do not refer to the work of the members of the Cox committee, but to the unfortunate swirl of wild speculation and controversy that erupted publicly following the release of the Cox report.

Plate neglected to quote from those passages of the PFIAB report in which the panel does specifically cite the Cox committee’s efforts. In our foreword we note that “Although we do not concur with all of their conclusions, we believe that both intelligence officials at the Department of Energy and the members of the Cox committee made substantial and constructive contributions to understanding and resolving security problems at DOE.” Later in the report, the panel asserts that “the evidence indicating widespread security vulnerabilities at the weapons laboratories has been ignored for far too long, and the work of the Cox committee and intelligence officials at the Department [of Energy] has been invaluable in gaining the attention of the American public and in helping focus the political will necessary to resolve these problems.”

WARREN B. RUDMAN

Washington

*

Plate’s commentary provides us with an excellent view of the way propaganda works. Goebbels and Joseph McCarthy knew too well how to spread the big lie. Get it out front before anyone knows what is coming and repeat it as often as possible. The real problem with reports such as this is that they receive so much initial publicity that they gain credibility merely because the press and others pay them heed. How much press would one expect that [Rand senior East Asia expert] Jonathan Pollack’s evaluation of the report will get?

ALBERT J. GRAFSKY JR.

Palm Desert