This time is no exception. The Congressional Human Rights Caucus is holding a briefing on Wednesday to look at how U.S. Internet companies are complying with Chinese government orders, and a House International Relations subcommittee has a virtually identical session planned for Feb. 15.
"It is astounding that Google, whose corporate philosophy is 'don't be evil,' would enable evil by cooperating with China's censorship policies just to make a buck," says Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican who heads the subcommittee. "Many Chinese have suffered imprisonment and torture in the service of truth--and now Google is collaborating with their persecutors."
If Smith and compatriot Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, were sincere in this paean to free speech, perhaps we could applaud them for a steadfast commitment to principle.
But they're not. Smith and Lantos voted for a flag-burning amendment that flies in the face of the right to protest, a law to criminalize computer-generated images of nude minors, and the restrictions on election-related speech in the McCain-Feingold law that are now causing trouble for bloggers. Both voted for the Patriot Act, even though a federal judge ruled a key portion violates the First Amendment's free speech rights. Smith also embraced a proposal to restrict the sale of violent material such as video games to anyone under the age of 18.
If we try to reconcile these votes with recent statements, we're left with the unsettling conclusion that this pair of solons may care a great deal about free speech--but only for the Chinese, not Americans.
Or we can consider a second explanation: that they'd simply like to whip up some anti-China sentiment, and Internet censorship is a convenient excuse to do it.
"It's really just hatred of China," says Lew Rockwell, president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala. "People like Christopher Smith, the neo-conservatives, the Christian right that Christopher Smith is affiliated with, were planning a cold war against China before 9/11. They've just postponed it."
Rockwell, whose group supports free markets and peace, adds that Congress seems intent on "making trouble, expanding the empire, and actually hurting the cause of freedom."
There already is an undercurrent of anti-China rhetoric flowing through Congress, as I wrote about in a column two years ago.
And Lantos has a history of pulling these kinds of stunts. As recounted by the Village Voice and Wikipedia, Lantos' Congressional Human Rights Caucus called as a witness a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl, identified only as "Nayirah," who said she saw Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait seize incubators and leave "babies on the cold floor to die." "Nayirah" was lying--she was the daughter of Kuwait's ambassador to the United States and her appearance was orchestrated by a public relations firm--but her testimony was cited by President George H. W. Bush and used to propel the nation to war against Iraq in 1991.
Nobody is saying that the leaders of China's ruling Communist Party should be immune from rebukes, of course. Their thuggish attempts to censor what their own citizens can read deserve not just criticism but contempt.
But it would be a welcome change if the politicians who have chosen to anoint themselves as defenders of civil liberties in China were half as interested in protecting those of Americans at home.
Biography
Declan McCullagh is CNET News.com's chief political correspondent. He spent more than a decade in Washington, D.C., chronicling the busy intersection between technology and politics. Previously, he was the Washington bureau chief for Wired News, and a reporter for Time.com, Time magazine and HotWired. McCullagh has taught journalism at American University and been an adjunct professor at Case Western University.
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Excellent reporting! Keep up the great work!
Good stenography work, though.
May I humbly suggest that Mr. McCullagh take a tour of the DPRK, Cuba or China in the near future so the pinko goggles may be removed from his eyes. Travel has a funny way of messing with one's dearly held prejudices.
While he is there, he may want to do a search on the internet for, say, "Falun Gong". Or "Tiennamen Square", perhaps.
Just don't try it on Google China, unless you enjoy reading Communist agitprop. I don't particularly like it, but he might.
Takes all kinds, I guess.
I don't know about the other guy you mentioned, but Tom Lantos has a long history of defending human rights, arising from his life experience. Lantos has actually lived under both Fascism and Communism -- so he knows what it means to really value freedom. How many of us can say that?
Many reasonable people part company with Lantos on the flag-burning issue, but it's easy to see why the guy would value this symbol of our country enough to want to extend it special protection. Especially when he knows the vote will not lead to an actual change to the Constitution, where the bar is set much higher than one man's vote in Congress and has to be determined individually by the states. In Congress this is a symbolic vote, in every sense of the word. But your article doesn't leave any room for such nuance.
At the same time, you choose to overlook another vote that is much more than symbolic: Lantos agreed with an overwhelming majority of his colleagues to support the Patriot Act just after September 11, that's true. But he has since voted against extending the Patriot Act, saying some of its provisions had been abused by the Bush Administration. Yet your article fails to mention that fact; is it because it's inconvenient to your argument?
And it was a cheap trick to tacitly urge readers to look at Lantos' Wikipedia entry by citing it and providing a link. Wikipedia is notoriously unreliable because all kinds of people with axes to grind are constantly vandalizing it -- particularly the entries on politicians. There's a lot of junk supplied by frothing-at-the-mouth oppononents who have no real power, so they take out their frustrations on-line. Volunteer administrators try to patrol Wikipedia's pages periodically, but their diligence can't keep up with determined vandals.
Shame on someone with a distinguished history in journalism such as you for citing such an unreliable source.
Really, the whole column smacks of distaste for Tom Lantos. CNet can do better than this.
I mean, seriously. Complete with attacks on neo-cons and the Christian right, as if they have anything to do with a democrat and republican being upset about Google's actions with China. And info gleaned from the Village Voice, Wikipedia, and some leftist who clearly has a warped worldview and sounds like a real tinfoil hat wearer? Ridiculous.
Shedding crocodiles tears about the citizens of an "enemy" nation, whether that be China, Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Cuba, Russia, or the old Soviet Union is a standard American propaganda ploy.
And Congress--whether that be Republicrats like Chris Smith or Republicrats like Tom Lantos--should take a closer look in the mirror at the USA and its "democratic" allies (like Lantos' beloved Apartheid Israel for example) if they want to champion freedom and democracy (which they don't).
This is the same USA, after all, that has used its phony "War on Terrorism" to rollback and abrogate civil liberties such as with the Patriot Act, Fatherland Security Department, NSA spying on its own people, and of course the use of torture from Abu Ghraib to the Gitmo Gulag to the CIA "dentention centers" throughout the world.
The more authoritarian America becomes in reality, the more shrill and more desperate the USA attempts to attack its opponents with the bludgeon of freedom.
This debate also raises the question of American Corporate Media colonization of the world. USA corporations like Google, CNN, et al. all seek to penetrate and colonize markets around the world (like in China)--in the process, they will effectivly destroy the development of any kind of local or native *private* media.
This US corporate media colonization of the world has nothing to do with free speech or freedom but is effectively about imposing an American worldview and values on nations around the world. Globalization is Americanization in everything but name.
But this is what people like Chris Smith and Tom Lantos really are motivated by: American colonization of the world disguised behind the mask of freedom itself. The aggression against Iraq is the most obvious example.
Sadly, for America, much of the rest of the world sees this for the pathetic lie which it is--even if CNN/Fox News-watching Proud Amurikans still cling to the delusion that the self-styled Land of Free has any moral credibilty to posture as a Champion of Freedom or Human Rights.
"Notoriously unreliable"? That's why Nature did a peer review and found it to have on average one error more per entry than, say, Britannica. Granted, it had been scientific articles, but because often times these political types are either watched by many or flagged as being part of some current event, there are many, many people watching these profiles and catching vandals with said axes.
http://pekingduck.org/archives/000162.php
America, the Communist Party hates you.