China :: Exposé

A grand jury has been empaneled in the Eastern District of Virginia to investigate a possible violation of the Espionage Act involving the computer-based acquisition of protected government information concerning national defense or foreign relations. In other words, the Grand Jury seems to be investigating WikiLeaks. Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com reported that a summons to appear before the Grand Jury on May 11 was served on an unidentified recipient in Cambridge, MA. He also posted a copy of the document. See FBI serves Grand Jury subpoena likely relating to WikiLeaks, April 27. The initial hurdle to any possible prosecution of WikiLeaks is to identify a specific crime that it may have committed. The subpoena suggests that the path chosen by prosecutors (as predicted ) is to allege a conspiracy to violate the Espionage Act under 18 USC 793 (g). But like much of the Espionage Act, the practical meaning of this statute is quite unclear. So is its application here, beyond the bare impli...

Human rights attorney Jin Guanghong who had been missing for ten days and couldn't fully remember what had happened to him. (Courtesy of Jin Guanghong) A Beijing human rights attorney who had been missing for ten days, was released by authorities from a mental hospital in an extremely weak physical and mental state. He couldnt walk, had pain all over, and couldnt fully remember what had happened to him. What Jin Guanghong, a Beijing rights lawyer, could recall after his ten-day ordeal, was that on April 8 or 9, while walking on the street, he was abducted and taken to a detention center, and later a mental hospital. He said he was beaten and vaguely remembers being tied to a bed and given injections and medicine. He then held a hunger strike but was fed through a tube in his nose, according to an April 22 report by China Rights Defense Alliance. On April 19 a Beijing mental hospital released Mr Jin to his brother and three teachers from Xiamen University who took him to...

REUNITED: Zhang Lianying and her family arrived to New York in late January and spent two days making phone calls to friends, relatives, and acquaintances in China to tell them of their experiences and escape. (Courtesy of Zhang Lianying) NEW YORKIt was a dark, rainy day on June 14, 2005, and the family had just returned home from grocery shopping. Suddenly, someone jammed an arm under Zhang Lianyings neck and a black bag was thrust over her head. The eggs she was carrying smashed on the concrete as she was dragged away. Her husband Niu Jinping was taken too by the Chinese security forces, leaving their 2-year-old daughter crying and screaming in the stairwell until a neighbor came to help.Niu was later released, but little Niu Qingqing didnt see her mother again for 2.5 years. From that day in 2005, Qingqing lived with her grandparents while Zhang was in and out of labor camps and torture chambers. Qingqing barely spent two yeas with her mother before the age of 7...

Artists protest during a march to demand the release of detained prominent Chinese artist Ai Weiwei in Hong Kong on April 23. Armed with banners, posters, masks and various musical instruments, over 1,000 protesters walked across the city's downtown district of Tsim Sha Tsui. Ai Weiwei remains missing after being intercepted by government officials in Beijing on April 3. (Laurent Fievet/Getty Images) Three weeks after the disappearance of Ai Weiwei, people around the world are speaking out on his behalf. In Hong Kong thousands staged a protest march demanding the immediate release of the world-acclaimed Chinese artist and rights activist. Many people showed up in creative costumes and masks and brought along expressive artwork, posters and banners, as well as gongs and drums. Banners displayed slogans asking for freedom of artistic expression and human rights. Hong Kong event organizers, a coalition of artists, said about 2,500 participated in the April 23 march. Cheng Zhan...

A police van with officers waiting inside are parked near the location where Chinese Christians from the Shouwang Church were planning to hold an Easter Sunday Mass in Beijing on April 24, 2011. At least 30 members of a Chinese evangelical church were arrested on April 24 for trying to hold an Easter service in defiance of the officially atheist government. (Frederic J. Brown/Getty Images) On Easter Sunday, Beijing police placed 500 Chinese Christians under house arrest to prevent one of the largest underground so-called "house churches" from publicly celebrating the holiday, according to China Aid Association. At least 34 church members were detained at the police station. The rest of the congregation of Shouwang Church showed up at the designated meeting place in the city, said the rights group that seeks to draw attention to Chinas human rights violations against Christians. During the past two Sundays, police waited at the usual meeting place of the non-state san...

Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei poses in front of his sculpture 'Template'. Weiwei disappeared by the authorities 20 days ago, and is reported to have confessed to charges of tax evasion after being tortured in custody. (Simon/Getty Images) Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, disappeared by the authorities on April 3, is reported to have confessed to charges of tax evasion after being tortured in custody, according to an article published in a Chinese human rights journal. The details of the case, said to have been leaked by an official with conscience in the Ministry of Public Security, were published on April 21 EST in a text titled The Alarming Conspiracy Behind Ai Weiweis Torture and Confession, dated April 19, in the biweekly journal of the NGO Human Rights in China (HRIC). The article claims to be written by an anonymous Xinhua journalist and was in the Letters from China section. The text says that Fu Zhenghua, Director of the Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau, instructe...

Most executive branch agencies failed to meet a December 2010 deadline set by President Obama to issue implementing regulations for his December 2009 executive order on national security classification policy, dealing a setback to the Administrations classification reform agenda. Despite last years presidential deadline, As of March 15, 2011, only 19 of 41 agencies have issued their implementing regulations in final form, according to the latest Annual Report to the President (pdf) from the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), made public today. Given that less than half of agencies have issued implementing regulations in the 15 months since the President issued the order and the 9 months since ISOO revised the government-wide implementing regulations for the order, it is clear that the means by which agencies modify and issue implementing regulations are not sufficient to accommodate changes in national security policy, the ISOO Report said. ISOO sees this as the biggest i...

The Central Intelligence Agency announced yesterday that it had declassified six World War I-era documents describing the use of invisible ink to convey secret messages. The CIA presented the new disclosure as an indication that the declassification process was functioning properly, not that it was dysfunctional. These documents remained classified for nearly a century until recent advancements in technology made it possible to release them, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta said in a news release . When historical information is no longer sensitive, we take seriously our responsibility to share it with the American people. The CIA recognizes the importance of opening these historical documents to the public, added Joseph Lambert, the Agencys Director of Information Management Services. In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Agency declassified and released over 1.1 million pages of documents. But there are a few things the CIA news release did not say. These World War I documents remained class...

A group of about 100 people from the Toronto art community gathered outside the Chinese consulate on April 17 in Toronto, in support of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who has been detained by Chinese authorities. (Zhou Xing/The Epoch Times) Chinese media smear campaign against acclaimed dissident artist Ai Weiwei reflects the regimes fear and need for stability maintenance according to a political Chinese commentator. Artist Ai Weiwei was taken away by police at the Beijing Airport on April 3. Since then, several of his colleagues have also gone missing and their whereabouts remain unknown. Lately, the Chinese regimes army of undercover Fifty Cent Party Internet commentators and regime-controlled mass media have been spreading propaganda to smear Ai, saying he is suspected of economic crimes and tax evasion, among other things. Challenging the Regime Renowned U.S.-based political commentator He Qinglian believes Ai poses a genuine challenge to the regime. In a recent article sh...

The American public does not have an accurate sense of the threat posed by attacks in cyberspace because most of the relevant threat information is classified, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), who introduced legislation last week to raise public awareness of cyber security hazards. The damage caused by malicious activity in cyberspace is enormous and unrelenting, Sen. Whitehouse said on April 14. Every year, cyber attacks inflict vast damage on our Nations consumers, businesses, and government agencies. This constant cyber assault has resulted in the theft of millions of Americans identities; exfiltration of billions of dollars of intellectual property; loss of countless American jobs; vulnerability of critical infrastructure to sabotage; and intrusions into sensitive government networks. These massive attacks have not received the attention they deserve. Instead, we as a nation remain woefully unaware of the risks that cyber attacks pose to our economy, our national secur...

Chinese Artist Ai Weiwei (Johannes Simon/Getty Images) Supporters of Ai Weiwei , the artist who was arrested and detained by the Chinese regime, will gather in front of Chinese consulates and embassies throughout the world on Sunday, April 17. Supporters are invited to participate in 1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei, by bringing a chair and gathering outside Chinese embassies and consulates to sit peacefully in support of the artists immediate release, according to the 1001 Chairs for Ai Weiwei Facebook page. The event is being organized by the Creative Time arts group. The inspiration behind the demonstration is in direct reference to an art installation that Ai did in 2007 called Fairytale: 1001 Qing Dynasty Wooden Chairs. Ai has been known for his open demonstrations and defiance of the Chinese regime, often highlighting human rights abuses. He was detained at the Beijing International Airport on April 3 and authorities stormed his studio, arresting his assistants, according to an The Epoc...

Tian Lu with her husband Cong Rixu before he was detained in China. (Courtesy of Tian Lu) Related Articles Two Vietnamese to Stand Trial for Broadcasts Into China Researchers Unravel Horrors in China The city of Dalian is in Liaoning Province, which, according to the Falun Dafa Information Center, is one of the deadliest places in China to be a Falun Gong practitioner. Lulu recalls the last glimpse she had of Rixu, in the Dalian Detention Center. Police were circling around him and beating him. In his court testimony, Rixu described how on March 2 the police took his picture and finger printshe had refused to cooperate. An officer kicked me in the lower back and slapped my face over and over again. He then banged my head against the wall several times, kicked me to the ground, and trampled my body, head, chest, and lower back. My nose and mouth bled, the entire right side of my head was swollen, and my lower lip was open and swollen as well. Then four officers lifted me to ...

An Obama Administration initiative to curb overclassification of national security information that was announced in December 2009 has produced no known results to date. The Fundamental Classification Guidance Review, which was mandated by President Obamas executive order 13526 (section 1.9), requires each classifying agency to review all of its existing classification instructions prior to June 2012 and to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified. While more than a year remains to complete the process, it is already behind schedule. The Department of Defense, the most prolific classifying agency, failed to produce implementing regulations for the executive order in advance of the December 31, 2010 deadline for doing so set by the President. As a result, most DoD components have not even started to review their classification guides, of which there are thousands. Most recently, U.S. Central Command said that it had no records concerni...

Editor's note: The Epoch Times here publishes direct translations of statements made by Chinese people in renouncing the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its subordinate organizations. Statements such as these are submitted to a website affiliate of the Chinese version of The Epoch Times, Dajiyuan. The movement to renounce, withdraw from, or quit the CCP , called tuidang in Chinese, began in late 2004, soon after The Epoch Times published the Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party, an editorial series that explores the nature and history of the CCP. The statements offer a rare and candid glimpse of history in the making: the Chinese people turning their backs on the Communist Party, choosing conscience over pragmatism, and peacefully ushering in a future China free of Party rule. Taking Back My Clean Self I am a county-level cadre. Joining the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has become necessary for survival and career development in China. I joined the Commu...

The Obama Administration today released the text of Presidential Policy Directive (PPD) 8 (pdf) on National Preparedness. The Directive, signed by President Obama on March 30, generally calls for development of systematic response plans for natural and manmade disasters, and seeks to enlist broad engagement in the process. This directive is aimed at strengthening the security and resilience of the United States through systematic preparation for the threats that pose the greatest risk to the security of the Nation, including acts of terrorism, cyber attacks, pandemics, and catastrophic natural disasters. Our national preparedness is the shared responsibility of all levels of government, the private and nonprofit sectors, and individual citizens. Everyone can contribute to safeguarding the Nation from harm . As such, while this directive is intended to galvanize action by the Federal Government, it is also aimed at facilitating an integrated, all-of-Nation, capabilities-based approach ...

WEIGHTY FINDINGS: David Matas addresses the New York University School of Law's Lipton Hall about the findings of his report, as professor Jerome Cohen looks on. (Gary Du/The Epoch Times) Usually the litany of human rights abuses in China might be thought of as a tangled and barbed skein. But David Matas, a distinguished human rights lawyer based in Winnipeg, Canada, sees them more as a quilt: ready to be unraveled by the pull of a single thread. The thread on which he would pull would be the persecution of Falun Gongor, specifically, the killing of Falun Gong practitioners for their organshe told a forum at the New York University School of Law on April 6. The killing has been inflicted since 2001, and the organs are sold to patients who need transplants, he said. Titled Bloody Harvest , his report on the topic, co-written with fellow Canadian and former parliamentarian David Kilgour, came out in 2006. It was updated in 2007 and published in book form in 2009. Th...

A federal court heard pre-trial arguments last week in the case of former National Security Agency official Thomas A. Drake, who is charged with unlawful retention of NSA documents. He allegedly relayed some of those documents to a Baltimore Sun reporter, who subsequently wrote stories about NSA waste and mismanagement. At last weeks hearing (pdf), prosecutors and defense attorneys battled over the facts of the case, the scope of the charges, the constitutionality of the Espionage Act statutes, the nature of the evidence that may be presented at trial, and other matters. In the end, each side got a favorable ruling on the must win issues it needed in order to have a chance of success at the actual trial, which is scheduled for June. Judge Richard D. Bennett of the Maryland District Court sided with prosecutors in affirming the constitutionality of both the Espionage Act and the Classified Information Procedures Act, and he declined to dismiss any of the multiple charges against Mr. Dr...

Members of the public enjoy unrestricted access to all reports of the Congressional Research Service, according to the Librarian of Congress, Dr. James H. Billington. Though CRS has no direct public mission, at present the public has unfettered access to the full inventory of CRS Reports for the Congress at no cost through the office of any Member or committee, he wrote in an April 4 letter (pdf) to Amy Bennett of Openthegovernment.org . Unfortunately, that assertion is quite wrong. The public does not have access to the full inventory of CRS Reports. There is not even a public index of CRS reports that would enable people to request specific reports by title. No Member of Congress or committee permits unfettered public access to all CRS Reports, which are produced and updated at a rate of perhaps a dozen a day, although individual reports will often be released upon specific request. (Some CRS Reports are prepared confidentially for individual Members and those are not available to o...

The Senate Intelligence Committee is proposing to punish leaks of classified information by authorizing intelligence agencies to seize the pension benefits of current or former employees who are believed to have committed an unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The pending proposal would provide an additional administrative option for the Intelligence Community to deter leakers who violate the prepublication review requirements of their non-disclosure agreements, the Committee said in its new report (pdf) on the FY2011 Intelligence Authorization Act. This option may require individuals to surrender their current and future federal government pension benefits if they knowingly violate the prepublication review requirements in their non-disclosure agreements in a manner that discloses classified information to an unauthorized person or entity, the report said . But the premises of the new proposal are questionable and it has generated some controversy even within the Sena...

Violent instability in Central America poses a growing threat to the countries of the region, with direct and indirect consequences for the United States, according to a new report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service. The seven nations of Central America face significant security challenges. Well-financed and heavily armed criminal threats, fragile political and judicial systems, and persistent social hardships such as poverty and unemployment contribute to widespread insecurity in the region. The United States has allocated $260 million in security assistance to support Central America since FY2008 under what is now known as the Central America Regional Security Initiative; however, security conditions have continued to deteriorate, the CRS report said. A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News. See Central America Regional Security Initiative: Background and Policy Issues for Congress, March 30, 2011. Other noteworthy new CRS reports include the following (all pdf...