Word: wen
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...hard to find anyone left standing - much less standing tall - after the government's strange case against nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee came crashing to the ground last week. No one was bleeding so heavily as the FBI and its director, Louis Freeh, whose top agent recanted some of his testimony against the 60-year-old Los Alamos engineer. But there was rubble everywhere you looked. Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, whose department had ignored security lapses at Los Alamos for years, was walking around in a daze. Rescue workers were still searching for Attorney General Janet Reno and her deputy...
...Kafka-esque tale (replete with a law enforcement officer who lied shamelessly to the court) of a man held in solitary confinement for nine months to force him to confess a crime. Even President Clinton has slammed his attorney general's handling of the case, saying denying Wen Ho Lee bail and keeping him in solitary confinement as a threat to national security was rendered unjustified by the plea agreement the government accepted...
...Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz noted on Sunday, the resolution of the Wen Ho Lee case leaves leaves little cause for satisfaction. "This case stinks," said Dershowitz. "And the resolution doesn't make it smell any better. It only makes the contestants happy, but it shouldn't make the public happy." After all, he argues, if Lee was guilty of the original charges, then he shouldn't have been released, but if he's guilty only of the felony cited in the plea agreement, then he should never have been denied bail in the first place - in other words, Dershowitz...
...Wen Ho Lee's most fervent pursuers had proclaimed his case the biggest thing since the Rosenbergs, but the historical parallel may in fact be closer to the Dreyfus case. Like the turn-of-the-century Jewish Frenchman falsely accused of treason in a blaze of anti-Semitism and finally vindicated after a spell in prison, the Taiwanese-American nuclear scientist is set to go free Monday after reaching a plea agreement with federal prosecutors. Unlike Dreyfus, of course, Wen Ho Lee isn't entirely innocent, but the government has been forced to concede that what he's guilty...
...helping a foreign power steal the "crown jewels" of the nation's nuclear secrets, only to recant nine months later and concede that the accused was guilty only of something even a former CIA director has admitted doing - mishandling classified misinformation. So while the feds may have finished with Wen Ho Lee, it's unlikely that Lee is finished with the feds...