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The story of Wen Ho Lee is really about how a bureaucracy run amok can steamroll the average citizen. The Justice department, run by Janet Reno, and ultimately presided over by Bill Clinton freely abused individual rights for political purposes. This is merely one case among many (remember Randy Weaver, Waco, Elian, et al). In rather graphic detail, "My Country Versus Me" describes how prosecutors and the FBI put together a case against Wen Ho Lee based largely on spurious information and thin air. Yet Dr. Lee did not help himself by some of the misstatements he made regarding missing tapes he had copied from a secure system to an unsecure system. He makes the case that he made the copies in order to preserve years of work from destruction by a computer upgrade (a sentiment anyone who has lost significant amounts of data on a computer can understand). He later destroyed the tapes.
Wen Ho Lee's story is well-recounted, for the most part, largely with the help of Helen Zia who obviously provided most of the prose. Nevertheless, as much as we are inclined to be sympathetic with Dr. Lee, some passages do not ring true. For example on page 245 when speaking of his pre-trial incarceration Dr. Lee says, "Not knowing my rights as an American to be free from cruel and unusual punishment, I accepted my treatment without question." It is hard to believe that anyone with the Doctor's intelligence (and over thirty years in the United States) could be quite that naive. It is as if portraying himself as an innocent among oppressors will also show him to be an innocent in the matter of espionage.
Another facet of the story is the rabid nature of the press, often assuming Dr. Lee's guilt, fabricating facts and reprinting leaks from a biased Department of Justice. We have also seen this force come to the fore many times in recent history. Dr. Lee stresses that he never paid much attention to the press before his arrest, and now he simply will not believe much of what is printed there.
The unfortunate side of the book is the quite lavish feelings of victim-hood that exude from the conclusion. Dr. Lee maintains that he was attacked because of his Chinese ancestry. He sites some letters and commentaries to support this thesis. Yet such memoranda only prove that there are a few kooks lurking within the mass of society.
There is little doubt Dr. Lee was a victim of an over-zealous FBI and some politically motivated prosecutors. Yet to connect this with his "ethnic group" may be taking things too far. Often the justice system has been used for political reasons, there is plenty of evidence to show that this was the case here. It seems more likely that because of his connections to China (having made several visits there) and his fluency in the Chinese language, and because he had actually been alone with Chinese agents, Dr. Lee was looked on with a great deal of suspicion. Other men and women have been sacrificed to the god of bureaucratic power on less evidence and many were Occidental.
This book would have been far better had the author stuck with the straight story. It is gripping and instructive without the politically correct diatribe.
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