By Bimal Rajkomar
Daily Bruin Contributor
Allegations that Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at the UC-run Los
Alamos National Laboratory accused of mishandling nuclear secrets,
was targeted because of his ethnicity were the focus of a panel
discussion Wednesday.
The presentation comes in the wake of recent media coverage
about the removal of the lead prosecutor from the case and a
Department of Justice report that concluded that the FBI gravely
mishandled its inquiry.
Lee is now in solitary confinement in New Mexico awaiting trial
and facing the possibility of life imprisonment on 59 felony
counts. The government has not charged Lee with passing secrets on
to anyone or espionage.
The presentation featured Alberta Lee, Wen Ho’s daughter
and 1995 UCLA alumnae, Lan Phan, an attorney representing Wen Ho,
and Kathay Feng of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center.
They depicted Wen Ho as a loving father, and an employee who has
been a scapegoat for the Department of Justice.
Alberta said that from the media, “You hear half-truths,
things presented in a sinister light, but I want to tell you what
kind of man he is.
“He was about food and family, making sure my brother and
I were taken care of,” she continued. “He didn’t
care what happened to him, as long as we were OK.”
The stressful conditions of her father’s situation have
taken their toll on Alberta, who makes efforts to visit her father
as often as she can, but is held back by expensive plane flights
and strict conditions that are placed on visitation.
“I feel like I’ve aged 10 years in just one,”
she said.
One of the more emotional parts of the discussion occurred when
she described the highly controlled conditions in which she must
meet with her father in jail. She explained how infuriating it was
to see her father being treated like an animal.
“We meet in a room separated by glass,” Alberta said
through tears. “We have to talk through an intercom, he has
to lean up in a platform, his wrists and ankles shackled. There are
two FBI agents, listening, taking notes the whole time.”
She urged students to go out to the Federal Building on June 8
for the National Day of Outrage to protest.
“If Asian Americans don’t come together as a
community, this crap will happen again. And this could happen, very
easily, all over again,” Alberta said.
Dennis Tan, a fourth-year Asian American Studies student, who
originally planned to write a paper about the case, organized the
event.
“I had hoped to reach students on this campus and inform
them about racial profiling,” he said.
Because of other claims of discrimination, the U.S. Equal
Employment Opportunity Commission, the federal agency dealing with
such matters, has begun an investigation.
“I just felt that this story is something all minorities
and “˜Americans’ can relate to. I wanted students to
realize that there are discrimination hits closer than we think, it
could happen to any of us anytime and anywhere,” Tan
said.
Phan explained how people of higher ranking are treated
differently in security cases.
He alleged that Wen Ho was simply a scapegoat for the Department
of Justice, which was about to be embarrassed with a scathing
report on security issues and management level problems at the time
of their investigation.
In addition, Feng gave background on the political environment
that existed at the time of the probe. She also recounted how many
Asian American engineers have contacted her with their own stories
of racial bias.
Although he attended the event as an audience member, Charles
Montaño, founding president of Citizens for Los Alamos
Employee Rights, urged the audience to become politically active
during the question-and-answer session.
“You’ve just got to be constantly a thorn in their
side, to where they begin to say this isn’t disappearing,
it’s not going away,” he said after the
presentation.
The audience was mainly composed of students from John
Kao’s Asian American Studies 197 class.
“They did it all,” said Kao, an instructor for the
Asian American Studies Center. “I just suggested it, because
it is very relevant to the course that I’m teaching, so I
made a suggestion and they took the ball and ran with
it.”
A student in Kao’s class, Jennifer So, a third-year
sociology and psychology student, was introduced to the case in
class.
“I heard about it once when I was in the class and I
didn’t really know much about the case, but when I came here
it was just a realization on what can happen,” she said.
“When it happens to another ethnic group, you don’t
really think about it because you just say, “˜it’s not
me,'” she continued. “But then when it does, you
understand how people can unfairly target someone.”