The Disgrace of The New York Times

by Alexander Cockburn

Yet, not a whisper of contrition, not a murmur of remorse, has, as yet, agitated the editorial pages of the New York Times, which now righteously urges the appointment of a "politically independent person of national standing to review the entire case."

No such review is required to determine the decisive role of the New York Times in sparking the persecution of Wen Ho Lee, his solitary confinement under threat of execution, his denial of bail, his shackling, the loss of his job, and the anguish and terror endured by this scientist and his family.

On March 6, 1999, the Times carried a report by James Risen and Jeff Gerth entitled "Breach at Los Alamos" charging an unnamed scientist with stealing nuclear secrets from the government lab and giving them to the Chinese Peoples' Republic. The espionage, according to one security official cited by Risen and Gerth, was "going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs."

Two days later, Wen Ho Lee, an American of Taiwanese descent, was fired from his job. Ahead of him lay months of further pillorying in a racist witchhunt led by the Times, whose news columns were replete with further inaccurate bulletins from Risen and Gerth, and whose op-ed page featured William Safire using their stories to launch his own calumnies against Wen Ho Lee and the Clinton administration.

Guided by Safire, the Republicans in Congress pounced upon the Wen Ho Lee case with an ardor approaching ecstasy. By spring of 1999, their effort to evict Bill Clinton from office for the Lewinsky affair had collapsed. They needed a new stick with which to beat the administration, and the New York Times handed it to them.

Yet, Risen and Gerth's stories had been profuse with terrible errors from the outset. Their prime source had been Notra Trulock, an embittered security official in the Department of Energy intent upon his own vendettas within the DoE. Risen and Gerth swallowed his assertions with disgraceful zeal. From him, and other self-interested officials, they relayed one falsehood after another: that Wen Ho Lee had failed a lie detector test; that the Los Alamos lab was the undoubted source of the security breach; that it was from Los Alamos that the Chinese had acquired the blueprint of the miniaturized W-88 nuclear warhead.

Even near the end, when it was plain that the government's case was falling apart, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno's prosecutors successfully contested efforts to have Wen Ho Lee released on bail. And when Judge Parker finally threw out almost the entire case after harshly criticizing the 59-count government indictment and the "demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions" in which Wen Ho Lee had been held, the prosecutors continued to insist, as has Reno, that their conduct had been appropriate throughout.

The New York Times, without whose agency Wen Ho Lee would never have spent a day in a prison cell, perhaps not even have lost his job, is now, with consummate effrontery, urging an investigation of the bungled prosecution. On Sept. 16, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis excoriated Reno's Justice Department and proclaimed piously that "this country's security rests in good part in having judges with the character and courage, like Judge Parker, to do their duty despite prosecutorial alarms and excursions." No word from Lewis about the role of his own newspaper.

But if ever there was an occasion for self criticism by a newspaper, it is surely this one. In an extraordinary breach of conventional decorum, the president of the United States has criticized his own attorney general for the way Wen Ho Lee has been maltreated. Yet, the editors of the New York Times can admit no wrong. Risen and Gerth are not required to offer their reflections of the outcome of the affair or any apology to the man whose life they almost destroyed.

When the forgeries of Richard Pigott, described in the 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica as "a needy and disreputable Irish journalist", against Parnell were exposed, he fled to Madrid, and there, blew out his brains. The London Times required years to efface the shame of its gullibility. Would that the New York Times was required to admit equivalent error. But it won't. Next year, it will no doubt preen amid whatever Pulitzer awards are put its way by the jury of its friends. This is no-fault journalism, and it's a disgrace to the Fourth Estate.