THE PRESENCE OF FOREIGN SPIES IN THE US SEEMS TO BE GROWING EXPONENTIALLY

by Michael Patrick

Senior News Analyst for CBN News.

According to some we are approaching Cold War II. This may well be the case since the presence of foreign spies in the US seems to growing exponentially. This view is spreading from the far right into the more populated central body politic. Here is a view of some interest.

By Michael Patrick
May 15, 2000

Truth really is often stranger than fiction. Recent accounts of how some federal officials are choosing to defend America's national interests read like a Tom Clancy novel, without a happy ending.

This past week, reporters' beepers were going off all over town when the FBI charged that it has uncovered spies among Washington, DC's liberal news media. FBI officials told the House International Relations Committee that some of the journalists trolling for stories in the State Department are really foreign intelligence agents.

"Something is screwy here," Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., declared. The Capitol Hill hearing targeted the latest series of security failures, including the disappearance of a lap top computer from a State Department conference room. The laptop reportedly contained highly classified information related to America's missile defense and nuclear arms negotiations.

It would not take Tom Cruise and the Mission Impossible team to steal our national secrets. Highly classified documents have been spilling out of the federal government at an alarming rate. Congressional investigators discovered that nuclearweapons secrets have been a relatively open book for years. That's because the US government allows legions of foreign government officials to traipse through federal facilities with little oversight. Foreign scientists have enjoyed unfettered access to work and study in some of our most sensitive sites. It's no small wonder that our technological secrets are now allegedly helping guide ballistic missile programs in places such as China, Pakistan and North Korea.

In the movie Casablanca, Claude Rains played Major Renault, who officially declares in Rick's casino that he is "shocked--shocked to find that there's gambling going on in here," even as he is handed his own winnings behind his back. Some American officials feign shock that there's spying going on, even as they overlook the foreign policies and practices that tolerate it.

A decade ago, America won the Cold War by trumping our enemies with a strong defense of individual freedom and liberty. Ironically, we are now trading in those values that gave us victory, in favor of a worldview that embraces repressive regimes like old friends. Fairly distracted by the bread and circuses of prosperity, much of the American public is largely unaware of the creeping political changes that are reshaping America's global priorities.

American secrets have been put at risk by an internationalist worldview that is worming its way throughout the foreign policy establishment. Those who think that it takes a global village to raise a nation believe that America's national interests must be gradually submerged in a sea of internationalist values. It is quietly argued that a few leaked secrets are actually good for us because it "levels the playing field" internationally. Nationalism remains a dirty word used by internationalists to describe backward nations who disagree with the interests set by global elites.

If you wonder which comes first these days--historic liberties or internationalism--just ask Elian Gonzales. Don't ask the boy now. Ask him a handful of years from now, once he's been "re-educated" to work as a model global citizen amid Cuba's sugar cane fields.

On Thursday, a federal Appeals Court judge asked Elian's father, Juan Miguel, why it took him months to come to his son's rescue. By one account, the reason may have been because the father's name was not on Elian's original birth certificate. Elian was born two years after Juan Miguel had abandoned his family for another woman. The Cuban government reissued Elian's birth certificate to show Juan Miguel as the father, after Elian arrived in the United States.

We shouldn't fault Juan Miguel's delay in accepting his fatherhood. The US government was equally reluctant to accept any responsibility for seeing this young refugee raised in freedom. A generation ago, when families risked their lives to escape from behind the Iron Curtain, our political leaders never contemplated tossing people back into the clutches of a communist state. Providing a safe haven for those escaping a totalitarian state was considered "in the national interest." Not long ago, as columnist Peggy Noonan has aptly argued, our president would have spoken up on behalf of liberty, and required Cuba to set the father free also. Once upon a time, our president wouldn't have blamed Americans first.

My, how times have changed. That famous Associated Press photo suggests that Janet Reno didn't send in armed storm troopers because she wanted to protect a child in Miami. The Administration's desire to preserve internationalist relations with Fidel Castro simply drowned out the final plea of a mother who died to get her son to freedom.

Old-fashioned notions of liberty are fading from view. Sure, there were those rare, expedient moments when America helped trade away the freedoms of people living in parts of Europe, such as a short-sighted effort to avoid troubles with the Russians at the end of World War II. We even turned a deaf ear to the cries of a boatload of Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. We lived to regret those mistakes.

Nowadays, the dominant U.S. foreign policy view is far less concerned about upholding the principles of liberty. The chief purpose of foreign policy is more effectively about exploiting new markets for global elites, fueled with cheaper labor. We are no longer shocked by revelations that campaign contributions help keep even White House doors wide open to the world, except for those unable to pay the price of admission.

The benevolent argument is that prying opening repressive regimes with the iron bar of raw capitalism will eventually forge greater individual freedoms. History and human nature tell a starkly different story. Capitalism unguided by steely principles of individual liberty simply breeds richer tyrants.

The new internationalist foreign policies are starting to raise concerns among those young and idealistic enough to care, and among those who are old enough to remember.

From our view, America's freedoms are based on God-given principles that give every human being the right to liberty. When we fail to vigorously defend what is right, we open ourselves up to lose more than a few national secrets. We erode our own liberties as well. Let's hope that not all of us forget.

END

Michael Patrick

CBN News
May 15, 2000

Original title: Elian and the Spies

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