Dept. of Justice is investigating Democrat Hillary Clinton’s donations in Chinatown

AP: DOJ is investigating Hillary’s donations in Chinatown

posted at 4:51 pm on November 1, 2007 by Allahpundit
It’s hearsay but there’s no reason to doubt it. Looks like that FEC complaint was superfluous.
On the wall of Hsiao Yen Wang’s apartment, a cramped, 17th-floor public housing unit on the city’s Lower East Side, are photographs of her husband, David Guo, a cook who specializes in Fujian cuisine.
One photo stands out: Guo shaking Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s hand, a memento from a $1,000-a-person fundraiser for the New York senator held in New York’s Chinatown last April.
Last week, Wang got another memento _ a calling card from a Justice Department criminal investigator. The investigator asked Wang if she was coerced into giving money to the campaign and whether she knew of anybody else who may have been forced to contribute.
Wang says she wasn’t coerced but her contribution was refunded anyway because the campaign thought that sum was suspicious coming from a low-wage earner. The DOJ won’t confirm the investigation but let’s assume it’s true. Why would someone from the criminal division, as opposed to the FEC, be snooping around the area? Well, maybe because of stuff like this:
FEC records show that the campaign returned at least $8,000 in checks to at least eight donors, most of them at the end of June. Among those donors were four identified as cooks and one as a cashier. The campaign also returned $4,600 to a donor who appeared to have earlier given the maximum allowed by law.
The campaign appears to have missed some others.
In one small store, a woman said she donated to the Clinton campaign but didn’t have citizenship or a green card. A man living in a Brooklyn boarding house who identified himself as an artist said he also gave $1,000, but said he, too, has no citizenship and no green card.
The AP pulled the addresses of 44 donors at random to see if any were fake. All were real, and the reporters personally spoke to 19 of the donors. But:
One address was a mahjong parlor. At another, a donor identified as a cashier could not be found, and the building superintendent said he had not heard of the person. Associates of some people listed as donors said they were in China and could not be contacted. Others did not return messages left with families.
The LA Times couldn’t find one-third of the donors they checked; the AP did better, but still appears to have fallen below 50%. Stay tuned.

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/11/01/ap-doj-is-investigating-hillarys-donations-in-chinatown/

Russia, China have blocked tough Iran sanctions

Russia, China have blocked tough Iran sanctions: U.S.
By Mark Heinrich2 hours, 23 minutes ago
Russia and China have been blocking tough U.N. sanctions against Iran, the United States said on Thursday, adding there would be a push to impose them if Iran did not halt nuclear activity within two weeks.
But Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said he was “not worried at all” about additional sanctions, dismissing them as ineffective.
Nicholas Burns, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs, said China and Russia had been stalling a new United Nations Security Council resolution since late March.
The five permanent powers on the U.N. Security Council plus Germany will meet in London on Friday to weigh broader sanctions. Increased saber-rattling between Iran and Washington is stirring fears of war if diplomatic pressure fails.
Burns, speaking before talks in Vienna with the U.N. nuclear watchdog chief, said Iran had been given a grace period since the last U.N resolution on March 24.
“Russia and China have been effectively blocking a third resolution since then,” he told reporters. Moscow and Beijing, two of the five veto-holders on the Council and major trade partners of Iran, have insisted on more time for diplomacy.
Western powers agreed in September to put off seeking harsher sanctions after a pledge from Iran to clarify past secrets of its nuclear program to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the U.N. nuclear watchdog.
The IAEA will issue a report in mid-November, but Burns said a clean bill of health from the IAEA alone would not be enough to halt steps to stiffer economic sanctions.
“Our judgment is that if Iran has not suspended in the next couple of weeks, that’s not sufficient, it will remain a refusal to meet Security Council requirements. That will be a highly relevant factor for us,” he said.
“Our hope is the following: first, a third sanctions resolution will be passed as soon as possible. Second, we’d very much support seeing the EU go forward with (its own) sanctions. Third, major trading partners of Iran should reduce trade to show Iran that this is not business as usual.”
AHMADINEJAD “NOT WORRIED”
Iran warned the United States on Wednesday it would find itself in a “quagmire deeper than Iraq” if it attacked the Islamic state.
Tension over Iran’s nuclear activities is one of the factors that have pushed oil prices to record highs of over $90 a barrel in recent days.
President Ahmadinejad, who often rails against the West, said on Thursday his country would respond to any hostile action, but did not say how.
He suggested new U.S. sanctions announced last week would mainly hurt European countries still doing business with Iran, which has major oil and gas reserves.
“The weapon of sanctions does not work,” Ahmadinejad said in a speech inaugurating a petrochemical plant on Iran’s Gulf coast. “We are not worried at all.”
“The main thing they (the United States) are doing is spending from others’ pockets because American companies don’t have any business in Iran,” Ahmadinejad said.
“In fact they don’t have anything in Iran. They are actually putting sanctions on the poor European countries,” he said.
U.S. President George W. Bush has suggested a nuclear-armed Iran could lead to World War Three. Washington says it wants a diplomatic solution but Burns said on Wednesday more “tough-minded diplomacy” was needed to make that work.
He said this should include European sanctions on Iran, which some large EU members are reluctant to pursue.
Russia says dialogue rather than punishment or talk of military action offers the best way to ease tension over Iran.
(Additional reporting by Reza Derakhshi in Assalouyeh, Iran)

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20071101/ts_nm/iran_nuclear_dc_17&printer=1;_ylt=Am1.gnrSsUqJDsvIAPQONwJg.3QA

Michelle Malkin on Hillary Clinton’s dirty campaign donations

Dem. Hillary Clinton campaign refunded $7,000 in donations from Chinatown fundraiser; Update: Cook tells NY Post she was reimbursed for $1k donation

Hillary campaign refunded $7,000 in donations from Chinatown fundraiser; Update: Cook tells NY Post she was reimbursed for $1,000 donation
posted at 1:33 pm on October 20, 2007 by Allahpundit
This would be the same single fundraiser at which she raked in more than 15 times John Kerry’s total take from the entire neighborhood during 2004. The New York Times reports today that the campaign was so curious about how dishwashers could afford to drop thousand-dollar wads in the collection plate, they decided to do a little spontaneous investigating of their own. And by “investigating” I mean that they sent out form letters asking the donors to give them comfort by stating for the record that the money was theirs.
And even that didn’t work in every case.
The Clinton campaign said that after the Chinatown fund-raiser in April, which raised about $380,000, aides conducted a standard review of the donor list: If donors’ stated professions seemed out of line with their donations — for instance, if a dishwasher gave $1,000 — the campaign sent letters asking them to affirm in writing that the money was their own.
In seven cases, with donations totaling $7,000, questions were raised, and those donors did not respond to requests to confirm their contributions. That money was then returned.
What a champ. Kindly revisit the LA Times’s blockbuster at this point and note that among a random sample of Chinese donors, they couldn’t find any kind of ID paper trail for fully one-third of them. There’s no reason to believe the campaign’s investigating that, of course; all they want to know is whether some of the more facially implausible donors are willing to claim that the money came from their own pockets, whether it actually did or not. Sample quote from yesterday’s piece: “Another listed donor, Yi Min Liu, said he did not make the $1,000 contribution in April that was reported in his name. He said he attended a banquet for Clinton but did not give her money.” Another quote, more to the point:
Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give.
You can’t pressure a guy — like, say, a dishwasher — who literally doesn’t have the money, though. What do you do in that case, I wonder? Maybe Howard Wolfson should ask some of those “neighborhood associations” if they have any ideas.
The saddest thing about all this is that no one has a very strong incentive to do the legwork on researching it. The campaigns don’t want to know if their donors are shady, as we saw in the willful blindness towards Norman Hsu. Hillary’s rivals have an incentive, of course, but there must be fundraising skeletons in Obama’s and Edwards’s closets too, just as there must be plenty on the GOP side. That makes it a game of mutually assured destruction among the oppo research teams and no one wants to play that game. The media doesn’t have a grand incentive either, the LA Times’s laudable example notwithstanding, because investigations like these are resource-intensive while basically amounting to fishing expeditions, with little guarantee of finding any wrongdoing. Plus, once you investigate one campaign, you open yourself up to charges of bias by not investigating them all. The best hope is the FEC, but does the FEC have the time and personnel — and political will, given the inevitable feeble claims of anti-Asian racism that are bubbling up here — to do spot checks like this? I’m asking honestly; I don’t know the answer. And if the answer is yes, why aren’t they doing it?
Update: Exactly but exactly what I was talking about up top:
Hsiao Yen Wang, a cook in Chinatown, is listed as giving Clinton $1,000 on April 13. Contacted yesterday, she told The Post she had written a check.
But it was on behalf of a man named David Guo, president of the Fujian American Cuisine Council, and Wang told The Post that Guo had repaid her for the $1,000 contribution.
I’ll bet Hsiao got a letter from the campaign asking her to confirm that she donated $1,000 and I’ll bet she answered that letter, completely honestly, by saying that she had. Which, per the campaign’s very scrupulous “investigation,” makes it a perfectly legitimate donation. When is the Wall Street Journal going to take the baton here and descend on this pool of donors in earnest? They can start by telling us a little more about the Fujian American Cuisine Council. Is that one of those nice “neighborhood associations” that’s been so helpful in drumming up cash for Hillary?
Follow the link and see what else the Post found. Hint: a lot of the same things the LA Times found.

http://hotair.com/archives/2007/10/20/hillary-campaign-refunded-7000-in-donations-from-chinatown-fundraiser/

DEMOCRAT HILLARY CLINTON’S CHOP SUEY CLUB: BIG MONEY FROM BUSBOYS AND DISHWASHERS IN CHINATOWN

An unlikely treasure-trove of donors for Clinton
The candidate’s unparalleled fundraising success relies largely on the least-affluent residents of New York’s Chinatown — some of whom can’t be tracked down.By Peter Nicholas and Tom HamburgerLos Angeles Times Staff WritersOctober 19, 2007NEW YORK — Something remarkable happened at 44 Henry St., a grimy Chinatown tenement with peeling walls. It also happened nearby at a dimly lighted apartment building with trash bins clustered by the front door.And again not too far away, at 88 E. Broadway beneath the Manhattan bridge, where vendors chatter in Mandarin and Fujianese as they hawk rubber sandals and bargain-basement clothes.All three locations, along with scores of others scattered throughout some of the poorest Chinese neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, have been swept by an extraordinary impulse to shower money on one particular presidential candidate — Democratic front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton.Dishwashers, waiters and others whose jobs and dilapidated home addresses seem to make them unpromising targets for political fundraisers are pouring $1,000 and $2,000 contributions into Clinton’s campaign treasury. In April, a single fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.At this point in the presidential campaign cycle, Clinton has raised more money than any candidate in history. Those dishwashers, waiters and street stall hawkers are part of the reason. And Clinton’s success in gathering money from Chinatown’s least-affluent residents stems from a two-pronged strategy: mutually beneficial alliances with powerful groups, and appeals to the hopes and dreams of people now consigned to the margins.Clinton has enlisted the aid of Chinese neighborhood associations, especially those representing recent immigrants from Fujian province. The organizations, at least one of which is a descendant of Chinatown criminal enterprises that engaged in gambling and human trafficking, exert enormous influence over immigrants. The associations help them with everything from protection against crime to obtaining green cards.Many of Clinton’s Chinatown donors said they had contributed because leaders in neighborhood associations told them to. In some cases, donors said they felt pressure to give.The other piece of the strategy involves holding out hope that, if Clinton becomes president, she will move quickly to reunite families and help illegal residents move toward citizenship. As New York’s junior senator, Clinton has expressed support for immigrants and greater family reunification. She is also benefiting from Chinese donors’ naive notions of what she could do in the White House.Campaign concernsAs with other campaigns looking for dollars in unpromising places, the Clinton operation also has accepted what it later conceded were improper donations. At least one reported donor denies making a contribution. Another admitted to lacking the legal-resident status required for giving campaign money.Clinton aides said they were concerned about some of the Chinatown contributions.”We have hundreds of thousands of donors. We are proud to have support from across New York and the country from many different communities,” campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson said. “In this instance, our own compliance process flagged a number of questionable donations and took the appropriate steps to be sure they were legally given. In cases where we couldn’t confirm that, the money was returned.”The Times examined the cases of more than 150 donors who provided checks to Clinton after fundraising events geared to the Chinese community. One-third of those donors could not be found using property, telephone or business records. Most have not registered to vote, according to public records.And several dozen were described in financial reports as holding jobs — including dishwasher, server or chef — that would normally make it difficult to donate amounts ranging from $500 to the legal maximum of $2,300 per election.Of 74 residents of New York’s Chinatown, Flushing, the Bronx or Brooklyn that The Times called or visited, only 24 could be reached for comment.Many said they gave to Clinton because they were instructed to do so by local association leaders. Some said they wanted help on immigration concerns. And several spoke of the pride they felt by being associated with a powerful figure such as Clinton.New take, old gameBeyond what it reveals about present-day campaign fundraising, Chinatown’s newfound role in the 2008 election cycle marks another chapter in the centuries-old American saga of marginalized ethnic groups and newly arrived immigrants turning to politics to improve their lot.In earlier times, New York politicians from William “Boss” Tweed to Fiorello LaGuardia gained power with the support of immigrants. So did politicians in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Chicago and other big cities.Like many who traveled this path, most of the Chinese reported as contributing to Clinton’s campaign have never voted. Many speak little or no English. Some seem to lead such ephemeral lives that neighbors say they’ve never heard of them.”This is a new game,” said Peter Kwong, a professor at Hunter College in New York who studies Chinatown communities across the country. Historically, Kwong said, “voting in Chinatown is so weak” that politicians did not go out of their way to court residents.”Today it is all about money,” he said.The effort is especially pronounced among groups in the Fujianese community. More than a decade ago, Fujianese cultural associations ran gambling operations and, more ominously, at least one was home to a gang that trafficked in illegal Fujian native immigrants.The human-smuggling problem came to a head in 1993, when a cargo ship, the Golden Venture, ran aground off New York City. As shocked police and immigration officials looked on, hundreds of Fujian natives who had spent weeks below deck struggled to make it to shore. Several died in the attempt.A crackdown by the FBI’s organized-crime task force led to the indictment of more than 20 Fujian native traffickers. Today, the problem has substantially dissipated, says Konrad Motyka of the FBI’s New York field office, who participated in the investigation of the Golden Venture.Although Motyka is wary of the havoc wreaked in the past by Fujianese organized crime, he said: “I welcome signs that the community is participating in politics.”High hopesAt his tiny restaurant in the south Bronx, which has one table and a takeout counter, Chang Jian Lin displays a prized memento: a photo of himself and Clinton. The picture was taken at a fundraising banquet in Chinatown this spring.Lin and his wife, who also works in the restaurant, said through an interpreter that they believe Clinton, if elected president, will reunite their family. The Lins’ two teenage children remain in Fujian, a mountainous coastal province in southeastern China opposite Taiwan.”If she gets to be the president, we want our children to come home,” Chang Jian Lin said.Campaign officials point out that Clinton has sponsored legislation aimed at family reunification; the proposals failed. And immigration measures being discussed in Congress would assign a lower priority to family reunification, which tends to bring in poor people, and give preference to immigrants with more-lucrative job skills.Moreover, the Lins appeared to have an exaggerated impression of a president’s ability to change such things as immigration laws single-handedly.Kwong thinks Clinton may be “exploiting the vulnerabilities of recent immigrants.”Nonetheless, Lin is planning to attend another Clinton fundraiser, a birthday bash next week. He said his support rested on more than his hope for reuniting his family. “Besides the immigration issue with my kids, the overall standard of living will improve for the Chinese people” living in the U.S., he said.He has never before supported a U.S. politician and, not yet a citizen, he is barred from voting. But when Fujianese community leaders asked him to donate to Clinton, he said, he eagerly contributed $1,000. Immigrants who have permanent resident status can legally make campaign contributions.Coming up with the money was hard, Lin acknowledged, adding: “The restaurant is really small.”Missing personsThe tenement at 44 Henry St. was listed in Clinton’s campaign reports as the home of Shu Fang Li, who reportedly gave $1,000.In a recent visit, a man, apparently drunk, was asleep near the entrance to the neighboring beauty parlor, the Nice Hair Salon.A tenant living in the apartment listed as Li’s address said through a translator that she had not heard of him, although she had lived there for the last 10 years.A man named Liang Zheng was listed as having contributed $1,000. The address given was a large apartment building on East 194th Street in the Bronx, but no one by that name could be located there.Census figures for 2000 show the median family income for the area was less than $21,000. About 45% of the population was living below the poverty line, more than double the city average.In the busy heart of East Broadway, beneath the Manhattan Bridge, is a building that is listed as the home of Sang Cheung Lee, also reported to have given $1,000. Trash was piled in the dimly lighted entrance hall. Neighbors said they knew of no one with Lee’s name there; they knocked on one another’s doors in a futile effort to find him.Salespeople at a store on Canal Street were similarly baffled when asked about Shih Kan Chang, listed as working there and having given $1,000. The store sells purses, jewelry and novelty Buddha statues. Employees said they had not heard of Chang.Another listed donor, Yi Min Liu, said he did not make the $1,000 contribution in April that was reported in his name. He said he attended a banquet for Clinton but did not give her money.Clinton “has done a lot for the Chinese community,” he said.One New York man who said he enthusiastically donated $2,500 to Clinton doesn’t appear to be eligible to do so under federal election law. He said he came to the United States from China about two years ago and didn’t have a green card.Out of the peripheryA key figure helping to secure Asian support for Clinton is a woman named Chung Seto, who came to this country as a child from Canton province and has supported Bill and Hillary Clinton since the 1990s. She called Fujian natives’ support for Hillary Clinton the beginning of civic engagement for an immigrant group that had long been on the periphery.She said she stationed translators at the entrance of one event to try to screen out improper contributions.Qun Wu, a 37-year-old waiter at a Chinese restaurant in Flushing, saw a reference to a Clinton fundraiser in a Chinese-language newspaper. He took a day off from work to go. Though he only makes $500 a week, he considers his $1,000 donation to be money well-spent. He got his picture taken with Clinton, hung it prominently in his house, then had color reprints made and sent to family in China.”Every day I go home and see it,” he said. “I see my picture with Hillary, and I feel encouraged. It’s a great honor.”Many, on the other hand, said they gave for reasons having more to do with the Chinese community than with Clinton. He Duan Zheng, who gave $1,000, said of the Fujianese community: “They informed us to go, so I went.”Everybody was making a donation, so I did too,” he said. “Otherwise I would lose face.”

http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-donors19oct19,0,4231217.story?coll=la-home-center

Iraqis to Pay CHINA $100 Million for Weapons

Iraqis to Pay China $100 Million for Weapons for Police

Experts Fear More Will Go to Insurgents
By Robin Wright and Ann Scott TysonWashington Post Staff WritersThursday, October 4, 2007; A12
Iraq has ordered $100 million worth of light military equipment from China for its police force, contending that the United States was unable to provide the materiel and is too slow to deliver arms shipments, Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said yesterday.
The China deal, not previously made public, has alarmed military analysts who note that Iraq’s security forces already are unable to account for more than 190,000 weapons supplied by the United States, many of which are believed to be in the hands of Shiite and Sunni militias, insurgents and other forces seeking to destabilize Iraq and target U.S. troops.
“The problem is that the Iraqi government doesn’t have — as yet — a clear plan for making sure that weapons are distributed, that they are properly monitored and repeatedly checked,” said Rachel Stohl of the Center for Defense Information, an independent think tank. “The end-use monitoring will be left in the hands of a government and military in Iraq that is not yet ready for it. And there’s not a way for the U.S. to mandate them to do it if they’re not U.S. weapons.”
News of Iraq’s arms deal came as Army Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the top U.S. commander for day-to-day operations in Iraq, told editors and reporters at The Washington Post yesterday that he expects a U.S. troop presence will be required in the country for a minimum of “at least three to five more years” and will involve 25,000 to 50,000 troops, depending on security conditions.
Detailed planning is underway for the U.S. military to begin scaling back its primary mission from one of fighting a counterinsurgency to an advisory and training role, which will involve pulling U.S. troops out of Iraqi cities and closing some U.S. bases, Odierno said. Odierno and Talabani, who met separately with Post editors and reporters, said they expect their governments to finalize a long-term bilateral security pact in 2008.
The capabilities of Iraqi security forces are pivotal to the U.S. exit strategy in Iraq, with the creation of a viable police force critical to reconciliation. Talabani said only one in five Iraqi police officers is armed and called for faster weapons delivery from the United States to beef up Iraq’s fledgling army.
Iraq’s police force is noted for infiltration by militias and insurgents out to use national resources for their own ends, said William D. Hartung, director of the New America Foundation Arms and Security Initiative. “Besides, aside from possibly wanting newer models, there are piles of arms and weapons floating around in Iraq,” he said.
The Chinese arms deal sheds light on the larger dispute between the United States and Iraq over rebuilding Iraq’s armed forces and police. Iraqi officials have long complained about the supply of weapons and equipment for their personnel, noting that Iraqi security forces often patrol in pickup trucks without body armor along the same routes as U.S. troops wearing flak jackets and riding in armored vehicles.
“There is general frustration in the Iraqi government at the rate in which Iraqi armed forces are being equipped and armed,” Iraqi Ambassador Samir Sumaidaie told reporters this summer. “This is a collaborative effort between the Iraqi government and the government of the United States, and the process is not moving quickly enough to improve the fighting capacity of Iraqi armed forces. A way must be found to improve this process.”
Talabani yesterday expressed frustration with the delays. “The capacity of the factories here are not enough to provide us quickly with all that we need, even for the army. One of our demands is to accelerate the delivery of the arms to the Iraqi army.”
Iraq has become one of the largest buyers of U.S.-made weapons. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, told the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that Baghdad has signed deals to buy $1.6 billion in U.S. arms, with another $1.8 billion in possible weapons purchases.
Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said the United States is “working closely” to help Iraq obtain “appropriate and necessary” military equipment. But U.S. officials concede delivery problems.
“We haven’t converted toaster factories to produce carbines and we’re working hard just to supply our own troops,” said an administration official involved with Iraq policy. “Our factories are working for our own troops. So it’s true we don’t have the ability to provide these rifles and other equipment they’re looking for.”
In 2004 and 2005, the United States bought 185,000 AK-47s from an Eastern European country — after Iraqis rejected U.S.-made M-16 assault rifles — as part of a $2.8 billion program to deliver military equipment to Iraq. But a recent Government Accountability Office report said that 110,000 of them were unaccounted for, with about 30 percent of all arms distributed to Iraqi forces by the United States since 2004 missing.
Nevertheless, Odierno said, recent improvements in Iraq’s security since the U.S. troop buildup have exceeded his expectations, with attacks down in September to the lowest level since January 2006 and U.S. troop casualties declining since June. A major factor has been U.S. operations against al-Qaeda in Iraq, whose sanctuaries have been reduced by 60 to 70 percent since January, he said. He warned, however, that the group can regenerate.
Another factor has been the unexpected willingness of Sunni tribes to cooperate with U.S. and Iraqi forces, he said. But Odierno said he remains concerned over recent statements from Iraq’s Shiite ruling faction demanding that the U.S. military stop recruiting Sunni tribesmen f0r Iraq’s police force.
“That’s uncomfortable to them, and I think that’s part of why it’s so important. This is about reconciliation,” Odierno said. “We have to continue to move forward.”
He said the U.S. military is shifting more of its resources to targeting Shiite militias, including what Odierno called “surrogates” who are trained, armed and funded by Iran, as well as “special groups” affiliated with the Mahdi Army of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr.
“We are starting to see at low levels a split between those [Shiite militias] who have some relationship with Iran . . . and those who do not,” Odierno said. He said the significance of the “fissures” is not yet clear.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/03/AR2007100302464_pf.html

Merger opens U.S. defense to China

Merger opens U.S. defense to China
October 3, 2007 By Bill Gertz – A Chinese company with ties to Beijing’s military and past links to Saddam Hussein’s army in Iraq and the Taliban will gain access to U.S. defense-network technology under a proposed merger, Pentagon officials say. Huawei Technologies will merge with the Massachusetts-based 3Com network-equipment manufacturer in a deal announced last week. Huawei has been linked to the U.N. oil-for-food scandal, which involved millions of dollars in payoffs to Saddam’s regime during a time of U.N. sanctions. The announced merger follows a July computer attack on the Pentagon that U.S. intelligence officials say involved Chinese military hackers. The hackers were detected breaking into Pentagon computers, including an e-mail system close to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates. “Huawei is up to its eyeballs with the Chinese military,” said a defense official concerned about the deal. Huawei was founded in 1988 by a Chinese military officer and got its start building military communications networks. A second official said the deal comes as the Pentagon has mounted an aggressive effort to thwart large numbers of computer intrusions from Chinese hackers and spies. “And now we are proposing to sell the PLA a key to our front door. This is a very dangerous trend,” the official said, referring to the People’s Liberation Army, as the Chinese military is called. 3Com announced Friday the $2.2 billion merger with Bain Capital Partners LLC and noted in a statement that Huawei Technologies will acquire a minority interest and “become a commercial and strategic partner of 3Com.” Rep. Duncan Hunter, California Republican and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, said he is worried the deal will lead to the loss of sensitive technology to China. “Specifically, I have some concerns surrounding the minority position of Huawei Technologies and what control the Chinese company might have over America’s sensitive information,” Mr. Hunter said. “In addition to encouraging the Pentagon to review how this deal may affect any of its classified contracts, I would encourage the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to conduct a thorough review.” A Pentagon spokesman said he is not aware that anyone in the Defense Department has asked Treasury’s Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States to investigate the merger. A Treasury spokesman had no comment. 3Com, through a subsidiary, provides the Pentagon and the Army with intrusion-detection equipment, and the merger potentially will provide Huawei access to strategic computer-network vulnerabilities, said defense officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Spokesmen for 3Com did not return phone calls or e-mails seeking comment. A spokesman for Bain had no immediate comment. A Huawei spokesman could not be reached for comment. Defense officials said Huawei’s past is the main cause for concern. Huawei technicians were involved in violating U.N. sanctions against Iraq in the early 2000s by illegally providing a fiber-optic network in Iraq that linked the Iraqi military’s air-defense network. The CIA-led Iraq Survey Group stated in its final report that Huawei and two other Chinese firms “illicitly provided transmission switches” for fiber-optic communications in Iraq from 1999 to 2002. U.S. and British warplanes bombed the Chinese-made fiber-optic network in August 2001 after it was found to be part of Iraqi air-defense missile sites that were firing at U.S. and allied aircraft enforcing a no-fly zone. Huawei also was involved in building a telephone-switching system in Kabul, Afghanistan, for the ruling Taliban militia prior to its ouster in 2001, according to U.S. intelligence officials. The defense officials said it is unlikely that the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States would block the deal because 3Com is being advised on the merger by Goldman Sachs Group Inc., whose former chairman is Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. White House Chief of Staff Joshua B. Bolten also is a former Goldman Sachs executive. Gary Milhollin, an arms-proliferation specialist with the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, said Huawei was founded by a Chinese military officer and got its start with U.S. technology exports. “In the past, Huawei has shown it’s willing to help America’s enemies after importing U.S. technology,” he said. “And it has done so in defiance of U.N. regulations. So before we make more U.S. high technology available to Huawei, we should make sure it has changed its ways.”

http://www.washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071003/NATION/110030088/1001

U.S. defense contractor in Chinese-purchase deal

U.S. defense contractor in Chinese-purchase deal

3Com makes ‘intrusion prevention’ technology maker for Pentagon, Huawei founder is ex-PLA officer
Posted: September 29, 20078:00 p.m. Eastern
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
The joint acquisition, announced yesterday, of 3Com, the U.S. computer networking group, by Bain Capital, the U.S. private equity firm and China’s Huawei Technologies, a telecoms equipment maker, is being called “really worrisome” by a former Pentagon cybersecurity expert.
The $2.2 billion cash deal gives Bain an over 80-percent stake in 3Com and Huawei – pronounced ‘wah-way’ – just under 20 percent.
While 3Com is small compared to other Silicon Valley technology giants, its focus on sensitive communications networks raises alarms if ownership is transferred to a foreign firm.
3Com’s products include “intrusion prevention” technology that helps its customers, including the Pentagon, protect their computer networks from hackers, reported Financial Times.
As WND reported earlier this month, China has already secretly planned a cyberwar attack – codenamed “Pearl Harbor II” by the Pentagon – that calls for a simultaneous assault on the U.S. aircraft carrier fleet in the Pacific and the disabling of communications at its headquarters at Pearl Harbor and with the Pentagon, leaving America’s key allies in the Pacific – Japan and Taiwan – virtually defenseless.
The plan has been uncovered by intelligence specialists at Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters and at the equally ultra-secret National Security Agency base near Harrogate in the north of the country.
Using a state-of-the-art software program called Moonpenny, the specialists have tracked the activities of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army scientists based at their underground headquarters outside Beijing. The scientists have been briefed to achieve “electronic dominance” not only in the Pacific but over all China’s global military rivals in the U.S., Britain, Russia and South Korea.

According to a recent U.S. Army War College report, the Pentagon believes China’s military views cyber-attacks as “critical to seize the initiative” in the first stage of a war.
The Pentagon identified over more than 79,000 attempted intrusions in 2005, with about 1,300 being successful, reported the London Times. The Pentagon uses more than 5 million computers on 100,000 networks in 65 countries.
Larry M. Wortzel, author of the Army War College report, said: “The thing that should give us pause is that in many Chinese military manuals they identify the U.S. as the country they are most likely to go to war with. They are moving very rapidly to master this new form of warfare.”
According to the Times, the People’s Liberation Army sponsors competitions for hackers to find better ways to break into U.S. computer systems.
The Chinese connection in the 3Com acquisition, particularly given Huawei Technologies roots and history, are troubling to former Pentagon cybersecurity expert Sami Saydjari, now CEO of Cyber Defense Ageny. Huawei having ownership of hardware and network components linked to U.S. security would be “really worrisome,” he told Financial Times.
Ren Zhengfei
The founder of Huawei Technologies, Ren Zhengfei, is a former officer in China People’s Liberation Army, as WND noted in 2001. He owns 1 percent of Huawei and the rest belongs to an unidentified “union,” according to Forbes. Most of Huawei’s customers are state-run businesses in China.
In 2001 testimony before the House Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and the Federal Services Committee on Governmental Affairs, former professor Gary Milhollin, director of the Wisconsin Project on Nuclear Arms Control, singled out Huawei for using technology received from the U.S. to threaten the U.S. military.
In 2000, the CIA discovered Huawei was selling fiber optics equipment to Saddam Hussein, technology that would improve Iraq’s military communications, in violation of the United Nations’ international embargo.
At the time, Motorola had an export-license application pending that would have transferred U.S. know-how for constructing high-speed switching and routing equipment to Huawei. Such equipment allows communications to be moved quickly across multiple transmission lines – ideal for an air defense network.
Milhollin also notes Huawei was allowed by the Clinton Commerce Department to buy high-performance computers from Digital Equipment Corporation, IBM, Hewlett Packard and Sun Microsystems.
While the Bain-Huawei acquisiton raises questions about U.S. security, it is a lucrative offer for 3Com stockholders. The $5.30 per share offering price is 44 percent above 3Com’s closing price of $3.68 on Thursday.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney served as CEO of Bain Capital for 15 years prior to becoming governor of Massachusetts in 2002. His financial disclosure form last month showed that he and his immediate family earned more than $8 million in 2006 from Bain Capital, with stakes in more than 30 Bain Capital funds, the New York Times reported.

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=57902

Democrat and Hillary Clinton Fundraiser, Ron Burkle Buys Stake in Chinese Communist News Company Xinhua

BURKLE TAKES STAKE IN XINHUA
By RODDY BOYD
September 27, 2007 — Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa Companies has signed an agreement to take a stake in a controversial Chinese media company and has put one of its executives on its board.
Terms of Yucaipa’s proposed investment in Xinhua Finance Media, which was announced yesterday, were not disclosed. In a release, the Los Angeles-based private equity powerhouse said that it is slated to “purchase a block of existing shares from certain shareholders that have come out of IPO lockup.” Chicago-based Yucaipa partner David Olson is set to join the board.
Xinhua Finance Media provides business news programming and advertising services across China. The company is best known in the U.S. for its troubled ownership of Glass Lewis, a proxy adviser and corporate governance watchdog. In the spring, several key Glass Lewis executives left the company after raising concerns publicly over Xinhua and the quality of its disclosures.
A series of Post investigations into Xinhua’s numerous related party transactions highlighted some of former company CFO Shelley Singhal’s profitable dealings with several of the company’s subsidiaries. Singhal resigned abruptly in May after Barron’s questioned the company about undisclosed regulatory problems in his past.
Olson and a spokesman for Yucaipa did not return a call or e-mail seeking comment.

http://www.nypost.com/seven/09272007/business/burkle_takes_stake_in_xinhua.htm

Report finds that Democracy in retreat around the world

Democracy in retreat around the world
By Daniel Dombey in Washington
Published: September 24 2007 22:00 Last updated: September 24 2007 22:00
Democracy and good governance are on the retreat in a number of countries around the world, a wide-ranging report says on Tuesday.
The report, compiled by Freedom House, a US government-supported campaigning organisation, concludes that human rights and governance have worsened in Russia and Iran, arguing that corruption in Iran has intensified in spite of the campaign promises of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.
It also indicates that states across the world are attempting to follow the model of China and Russia by seeking to modernise parts of their economy while keeping a central grip on power.
Among the countries that have achieved economic success while maintaining or intensifying what the report identifies as political repression are Libya, Tunisia and Algeria. It adds that Egypt has been both economically unsuccessful and politically repressive and that democratic developments have been stopped in their tracks by coups in Thailand and Bangladesh.
The survey of 30 countries comes as President George W. Bush prepares to address the United Nations on his “freedom agenda” for the world on Tuesday.
On taking office for the second time, Mr Bush pledged that America would seek to end “tyranny in our world”, and he prides himself on being a “dissident president”.
The White House says that “interrelated aspects of human freedom” will be at the heart of the president’s efforts during his time at the UN – whether the issue is Darfur, governance in Africa more generally, or the Middle East peace process.
But in an introductory essay to its survey, Freedom House highlights what it calls “the durability of a 21st century authoritarian capitalist model” pioneered by China.
It argues that Russia has followed a similar path of exploiting economic growth to minimise pressure for political reform and claims that Russia “has come to resemble the autocratic regimes of central Asia more than the consolidated democracies of eastern Europe”.
For the past two years “Russia could no longer be considered a democracy at all according to most metrics”, and is less democratic today than it was in 2005.
It highlights the high threshold for parties to be elected to the Russian parliament, opacity in the award of broadcasting licences, corruption, the rareness of jury trials and uneven enforcement of property rights.
“Civil society has been a clear target of the Russian government over the past two years,” Freedom House says.
On Iran, the report says that corruption has increased – as highlighted by cut-rate privatisations for favoured buyers and a failure to deposit billions of dollars in oil revenues in the national treasury on schedule.
It adds that restrictions on freedom of expression have worsened since Mr Ahmadi-Nejad was elected president in 2005.
“Journalists, particularly younger and less well-known ones, have little protection from arbitrary arrest and detention,” it says, adding that academics and non- governmental organisations with foreign contacts have increasingly been accused of breaking the law by committing “political offences”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/692acca6-6ad8-11dc-9410-0000779fd2ac.html