The FBI has a checkered history of investigative integrity

The affidavit filed against Leland Yee described the way the FBI skillfully led Leland Yee on with the promise of easy cash in exchange for Yee's promise to commit a crime or two. The undercover agents were most persuasive and Yee's defense would likely have grounds to plea entrapment.

Whether the court will find that FBI had over reached in Yee's case remains to be seen when his case comes to trial. We do know that the FBI has a history of over zealous and bias prosecution of Chinese Americans.

The first major cause celebre was John Huang, at the time a member of the Clinton administration. President Bill Clinton’s political enemies sought all kinds of ways to embarrass him and bring him down. They accused Huang of raising illegal campaign funds from China and elsewhere from Asia to help Clinton get elected.

Huang was eventually allowed resign his post and fade away to his home in California. He was never charged and did not spend a day in jail but paid dearly in emotional stress, drastic reduction in net worth drained by legal bills and the dismay of seeing the dirty side of American politics.

Unlike John Huang who was an enthusiastic campaign fundraiser because he thought he was participating in the exercise of democracy, American style, Norman Hsu simply ran a con by pretending to be a legitimate bundler of big donors. His ability to get closer to major political candidate, such as Hillary Clinton, gave him credibility that enabled him to operate a Ponzi scheme.  He is now in jail.

Wen Ho Lee also spent 10 months in jail based on evidence fabricated by the FBI, even though he didn’t conduct any of the activity he was accused of doing. He was clearly a victim of racial profiling and the desire of Clinton’s political opponents to use anti-China sentiments to embarrass the administration.

In the end, the presiding judge had to apologize to Lee for government misconduct, but nonetheless to justify Lee’s 10 months of solitary confinement, Lee had to plead guilty to unauthorized downloading of confidential information.

Even when the government makes a mistake, the victim pays. The usual approach is to force the victim to plead guilty to some misdemeanor in exchange for freedom and thus justify judicial abuse.

The most recent example was the Bo Jiang case in Virginia. The FBI took him off the departing plane and put him in detention After seven weeks in jail, the government had to let him go because they did not find any evidence of illegal activity except for xenophobic accusations by Congressman Frank Wolf. Jiang had to plea guilty to downloading pornography into his government computer in exchange for the jail time already served before he was allowed to go home to China.

Like Bo Jiang, Dr. Su Haiping was a subcontractor doing work for NASA in Moffett Field in Mountain View. The FBI asked him to take a lie detector test and then abruptly escorted him off the premises. NASA asked that his employment be terminated, but his employer, a NASA contractor refused, because they could not find any fault in Su’s work. Su is now suing the U.S. government for his treatment and when he wins, it will be a major historic event.

Probably the most shameful in the annals of FBI misconduct and government prosecutorial abuse was the case involving Denise Woo, at the time one of FBI’s own agents. Her superior took offense when she indicated that her undercover work could not substantiate his suspicion of the surveillance target being a spy.

Instead of dropping the investigation, he had her prosecuted for allegedly abetting the enemy agent despite failing to find any evidence that the target was an agent of any kind. Woo had to cop a misdemeanor plea in order to get on with her life, albeit no longer employed by the FBI. As for her supervisor agent, JJ Smith, he was later forced to retire after he was found sleeping with Katrina Leung, otherwise known as the central figure of the Parlor Maid affair. To this day, the FBI could not decide as to which country Leung was spying on and for.

There are other cases where the FBI action against Chinese Americans is based on the presumption of guilt until proven innocent--exactly opposite of the due process according to law. 

If you are a Chinese American and the FBI comes calling, it doesn't matter as to subject matter and whether you are the person of interest or merely a third party query, it would behoove you to have ready an attorney standing by advising you of your rights.

What Can We Learn from the Leland Yee Affair?

The arrest of Leland Yee, California state senator, accused of graft, is the latest of a string of Chinese Americans that were ensnared by the FBI, some caught red handed and others that were unwitting victims cornered by a bureau of investigation that frequently acted beyond the laws they were sworn to protect.

In the case of Yee, based on the FBI criminal complaint, he was almost an accidental by-product of a 5-year undercover investigation on a gangster that proclaimed that he has reformed and gone legit since getting out of jail. According to the FBI, Raymond Chow, the main person of FBI’s interest, offered to help Yee in the gun running business and that’s how Yee came to the FBI attention.

According to the affidavit by the FBI agent, Yee was driven by the need to pay off a debt of $70,000 incurred from his unsuccessful run for mayor of San Francisco. Yee faced term limit on his Senate seat and, since the unsuccessful run for mayor, was planning to run for Secretary of State.

Before he could raise campaign funds for his next campaign, he had to pay off his previously incurred debt. Thus according to the FBI, Yee was tempted by the undercover agent into offering illegal undertakings in exchange for illegal contribution to his political campaign.

Yee is now on bail and his attorney indicated that he plans to plead not guilty. The whole story and where the truth lie remains to be told and pending Yee’s day in court.

At this point, the media’s reports on Yee draw primarily from the FBI affidavit in the 137 page criminal complaint and inevitably presenting only the government’s side of the story. Even so, a careful reading leads one to conclude that the undercover FBI agents masquerading as unsavory underworld characters are gifted actors with enterprising minds, excellent in proposing and initiating unlawful schemes to tempt the unwary and those looking for a fast buck.

Apparently Yee in playing the game of trying to be a successful politician faced the constant pressure of having to raise money and fell from grace. By any measure of the way American politics is played today, the amount of money Yee needed to keep him viable was pathetically minuscule compared to the hundreds of millions the upper 1% of 1% can donate to super PACs, and all legal and according to Hoyle.

The US Supreme Court has just ruled that campaign contribution is another form of free speech and should not have to face restrictions of any kind. This will simply mean that politics will be a game only for the wealthy and folks of limited net worth, such as Yee, might as well not get into the game. It's that or find illegal sources of fund and risk going to jail.

The More Things Changed, the More the World Stays the Same

"We are, perforce, one world, mutually dependent upon complex trade patterns and the distribution of diminishing resources."

Does the above quotation seem particularly relevant to today's world? It was actually an excerpt from a novel, Harlequin, written by Morris West. The copyright for this book of fiction was 1974. That's 40 years ago.

The arch villain in this book was someone who ran computer services for large corporations. They didn't have the Internet then. Today, the analogous villain would be running the cloud services.

As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Egad, what will the world look like forty years from now?

When is Terrorism Not?

The item below has been posted on New America Media.
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Eight assailants dressed in black wielding knives and daggers plowed through the crowd at China’s Kunming train station, slashing and thrusting at random human targets on the night of March 01, 2014. By the time the carnage ended, 29 civilians died and over 140 injured.

By any civilized measure of humanity, the random killing of innocent people, elderly and children included, qualified as an act of terrorism. Indeed, China’s official newswire promptly reported the incident as a terrorist attack and held the Xinjiang separatist movement responsible for the massacre. 

Western mainstream media such as AP, CNN, New York Times et al. re-reported the story as they learned from Xinhua and other Chinese sources. Since no one from the western media was on the scene, their reports attributed the news to Chinese sources and put quotation marks around the word terrorist to indicate that they were quoting from Chinese reports.

China's People's Daily promptly took umbrage about the use of quotation marks and accused the Western media for harboring double standards. China claimed that when acts of violence took place in the West such as 9-11, the perpetrators were ipso facto terrorists. When victims were Chinese in China such as the slaughter at the Kunming train station, there was a wink and nod intimating that the attackers were freedom fighters.

Indeed when the White House spokesperson were first asked about what occurred in Kunming, she grudgingly allowed that it was an act of terrorism, but only after much prompting from the press corp.

China’s thin-skinned reaction can be explained by a history of one story, two interpretations, i.e., China’s official version and a western version tinged with a dose of anti-China bias. 

In the case of Xinjiang, one clear example of the bias was what happened to the Uighurs rounded up in Afghanistan as suspected members of Al Qaeda. After years of internment in Guantanamo, they were not handed over to China at China’s request but released to some willing eastern European host nation. Apparently the mere possibility of their fighting for the non-existing East Turkestan state was enough to render them less than full-blown terrorists and should not fall into the clutches of Beijing.

Seven days after the massacre, the American consulate general from Chengdu went to the Kunming train station to lay a wreath expressing condolences to the victims of terrorism. Subsequent official statements from the US government also acknowledged that it was an act of terrorism-- without equivocating quotation marks.

China side seemed mollified by the subsequent US response. They seemed ready to turn their attention to the unofficial, informal visit of the First Lady, Michelle Obama, and her daughters to China taking place later this month.

Nonetheless, the world has come to expect the rule of double standards in American diplomacy.

For example, the US is persistent in criticizing China for their record on human rights and for one party rule rather than rule by free election. Democracy is the only acceptable form of government so far as Washington is concerned, notwithstanding the many democracies that have failed or are failing.

Further, the US has not been true to its own pro-democracy stance but has made exceptions when the exceptions were more conveniently aligned to its national interest. Past examples that come to mind: The CIA orchestrated collapse of the freely elected government in Iran and later in Chile because the elected leaders were not to Washington’s liking.

Egypt is a more recent example of American exceptionalism. Mohamed Morsi was the rightfully elected leader until deposed by street protesters which led to Egypt’s military strongman, General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, to take over. Since Morsi’s support base is the Moslem Brotherhood, not exactly on the White House favorite guest list, Washington is not complaining or interfering.

Ukraine is an even more blatant example. By most accounts, Yanukovych is a corrupt leader and he does not like the West but is pro-Russia and in Putin’s pocket. But he has not been vacated as the elected leader of Ukraine by any legitimate due process. Even so the U.S. couldn’t act fast enough to support the ad hoc opposition in Kiev.

Washington needs to get off the holier than thou, ideology based high horse and work to develop pragmatic relationships based on shared interests. China has to deal with terrorist organizations and so does the US. In a globalized world, terrorists can move to anywhere. Being the two major powers most susceptible to attack, the US and China need to cooperate to more effectively deter terrorism.

Gary Locke's China Legacy is for all Americans

There were strong murmurs of dissatisfaction within the Chinese American community over Gary Locke's performance as ambassador to China. Their disappointment seemed similar to Beijing's official criticism upon his departure--namely too much harping on human rights according to official party line from Washington and not enough effort on being a friend of China.

Expecting Locke to be more empathetic to China's position was unfortunately based on the wrong assumption. He was appointed by the U.S. to represent the official position of the Obama Administration. That was his mandate which he carried out as best as he could. It's certainly debatable whether he is even qualified to represent Chinese Americans point of view steeped in Chinese culture and history. As an American born Chinese, he did not have the necessary background and exposure to Chinese values and he probably did not have the personal inclination to become a bridge to both sides.

Even so, he played a vital albeit unwitting role in the Wang Lijun affair which led to the downfall of Bo Xilai. The drama is not yet over but we may yet find out that in ensuring the safe delivery of Wang to the central authorities, Locke thwarted an attempt to overthrow the current regime and be replaced by a rogue and corrupt cabal. When (and if) all the sordid details of the attempted coup are ever revealed, Beijing may yet acknowledge the positive contribution by Locke and the U.S. government.

As I had anticipated in my blog, written when he was first nominated, Locke's task as the ambassador was more challenging than just any plain old white guy because of expectations associated with his ethnicity that he cannot fulfill. Sadly for him, based on the official lambasting farewell sendoff that he received, he may not even be welcome in the future as a "friend of China." Unlike his predecessor ambassadors, he may have difficulty developing a lucrative advisory practice based on his rolodex built during his Beijing stay.

Ironically, there was even some speculation in Washington circles that Locke could never be counted as a member of the U.S. establishment because there were always some doubt as to "which side he is on." (It happened to the late Matt Fong during his Senate confirmation hearings when he was asked hypothetically as to which side of the Pacific his loyalty lay.)

This won't be a problem for Max Baucus. He is white with many years of service in Congress. Few can claim his kind of inner circle credentials. He will be able to talk to any members of Congress and perhaps alter some deeply ingrained China bashing attitude. He should find receptive listeners in Secretary of State Kerry and President Obama, both former colleagues in the Senate. He has the real potential to construct and strengthen the communications link between Beijing and Washington. 

Chinese Americans should take pride in Gary Locke becoming the first Chinese American governor of a state and first cabinet secretary. He made history by being the ambassador to China, though not quite on par with Anson Burlingame becoming the ambassador from China. Instead, Locke is a role model for all Americans, not just Chinese Americans.

Export Control Reform Remains on the To-Do List

Accelerate sensible US export control reforms. Export controls are an important part of ensuring the security of the United States. The Obama administration should continue its reform efforts that will ensure US security is not undermined while eliminating unnecessary licensing controls on products no longer a threat to US security. Such reforms will boost US exports and help support and create jobs. The United States should move forward more quickly with modifications of non-controversial items even as more difficult reform vetting continues. Those modifications should include items that can be delisted for countries such as China because they are available on the open market from non-US sources. 

The US-China Business Council recently published a list of priorities for the bilateral commercial relations. This is just the third such publication of priorities in its forty+ years of existence as the most influential business organization related to doing business in and with China. One of those priorities that caught my attention is about the need for US export control reforms as I have excerpted in the preceding paragraph.

The suggestion to "accelerate sensible US export control reforms" has been couched in highly diplomatic language, but if one were to read the passage carefully, one would come to disheartening conclusion that when it comes to Federal bureaucracy and export regulatory red tape on exporting to China nothing much has changed.

In Obama's first term of office (around September 2010), the White House announced the intention to reform the existing export control policy towards China. The announcement admitted that the export control procedure has been too complicated and goods for export to China were over regulated. At the time, the announcement was warmly welcomed by American businesses active in China. It was titillating to imagine that reform was finally on its way.

Since then other than Gary Locke leaving the post of Secretary of Commerce to become the ambassador to China, nothing has come to public's attention to indicate that any serious reform has taken place. The February 11, 2014 posting of the priorities from the Business Council continues to suggest that nothing much gets done in Washington.

Cruising the Eastern Caribbean Islands

Earlier this month, my wife and I got on the Celebrity Summit in San Juan, Puerto Rico and headed south along the strand of islands that form a crescent between Puerto Rico and Venezuela on the South American continent.

We weren't much into sun, sand or shopping, the three major themes for most of our fellow passengers (in addition to unrestricted alcohol consumption) but we were interested in learning more about these islands and took in a bit of sightseeing at each port of call.

We were told that the Arawak Indians were the first to inhabit these islands as they migrated by boat from the South American continent. These hunter gatherers were peaceful. They were followed by the warlike Carib Indians, who believed in eating their fallen male adversaries and assimilating the women and children. By the time Columbus "discovered" these islands, only the Carib Indians remained to greet him.

The Spaniards that followed Columbus to the new world were only interested in finding gold to plunder. These islands didn't have any and therefore the Spaniards did not stick around. It took another 100 to 150 years or so before other western powers led by the Brits concluded that the conditions on the islands were excellent for growing sugar cane.

This was before the age of mechanization, and growing and harvesting sugar canes and squeezing the canes for the juice and refining the juice into sugar were labor intensive. The few surviving Indians weren't enough to go around and thus the cheapest form of labor was to bring in slaves from Africa.

The booming sugar industry from the Caribbean islands grew on the backs of massive import of African slaves. More slaves were brought to the Caribbean than were imported to work on the cotton farms of the United States.

The economic importance of sugar has faded and in any case there are other places in the world that can produce sugar more cheaply than on the these islands. Sugar from sugar beets in the U.S. thanks to heavy government subsidy is one of these.

Most of the islands are now economically dependent on tourism. Unemployment is as high as 20%. One indicator of how well an island is doing is the female to male ratio. High ratio, say 5 or more to 1, means that the island has plenty of service jobs and women come from other islands to find work. We were told this by our guide but would require further verification.

While there are certainly a lot of poor folks living on these islands, the climate attracts the wealthy from around the world to buy a vacation home or even retirement home there. One of the more interesting and somewhat unique investment we visited was Stony Hill on St. Lucia.

This villa on a ridge overlooking one of the scenic harbors of St. Lucia is owned by the Soni's. Dr. Soni is no longer a practicing neurosurgeon, having retired from a successful practice on the Caribbean islands. He invested in the property which he developed into Stony Hill. To go with the spectacular view, he cleared the native vegetation and put in a lovely three acre garden around the villa. He and his wife live on the property and they also host weddings and catered to special events to offset some of the cost of living in their private paradise.

View from the terrace of Stony Hill in St. Lucia.