China :: Exposé

MISSING: A group of protestors, including a lawyers concern group, call for the release of human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng (seen on poster) as they protest in Hong Kong on June 17, 2009. Gao has suffered repeated abductions by security forces and his his whereabouts are unknown. (Mike Clarke/AFP/Getty Images) For years the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been abducting troublesome lawyers, dissidents, and activists, and detaining them in secret locations without notifying a soul. It is an extralegal process, decried by international observers and carried out secretly inside China. A new change to the criminal law might make the process legal. The proposed amendments to residential surveillance laws would permit police to hold suspects in undisclosed locations for up to six months in cases involving terrorism, major corruption, or national security. The latter term is often interpreted in unconventional ways by Chinese security forces, and can include holding and expressing ...

A recently released Guangzhou lawyer, who was detained by Chinese authorities for posting a message about the Jasmine Revolution, has broken his silence about the mistreatment during his 108 days in detention. Liu Shihui, a civil rights lawyer from Guangzhou, hasnt been heard from for over 3 months since his arrest on Feb. 25. Five days previously, on Feb. 20, Liu wrote on Twitter: I am having a date with Miss Jasmine at People's Park in Guangzhou at 2 p.m., Feb. 20. There is nothing private about it, onlookers are welcome. On his way to the park Liu was apprehended and beaten by men believed to be plainclothes police. During the beating Luis feet were fractured, and he was sent to a hospital. From then on, the outside world lost all contact with him. After 108 days in detention, Liu was released on bail on June 12 and banished to his ancestral hometown in Inner Mongolia. But on the afternoon of Aug. 21, Liu started posting messages on Twitter, talking of some of the ordeals he suf...

Prosecutors in the case of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling, who is accused of leaking classified information to author James Risen, have asked a federal court to reconsider (pdf) the July 29 ruling that narrowly limited Risens obligation to testify at the trial of Mr. Sterling. ( Reporter Risen Will Not Have to Identify Source in Leak Trial, Secrecy News, August 1.) There is no equivalent for Risens eyewitness testimony, prosecutors wrote in an August 24 motion for reconsideration , arguing that Risens participation was indispensable to the prosecution of Mr. Sterling. There is no non-testimonial direct evidence in this case that can establish what Risen can. There are no recorded telephone calls in which Sterling discloses classified information to Risen, nor are there emails in which Sterling discloses the same. Had there been such recordings or emails, that evidence would have been disclosed and the government certainly would have provided such discovery after indictment. Ther...

A federal court yesterday rejected (pdf) multiple defense motions to dismiss Espionage Act charges against former State Department contractor Stephen Kim , who is accused of leaking classified information to a Fox News reporter. Mr. Kims defense team had marshalled a series of seemingly ingenious arguments for dismissal. The use of the Espionage Act to punish political crimes such as leaking is prohibited by the Constitutions Treason Clause, one defense motion said. Further, the language of the statute appears to prohibit unauthorized disclosure of tangible items, such as documents, not information which cannot be surrendered on demand. Also, the defense argued, the Espionage Act is impermissibly vague and ambiguous with respect to oral disclosures. Finally, prohibitions against leaks are enforced and prosecuted rarely and unpredictably, rendering those rare cases intrinsically unfair. None of these arguments gained any traction with the court, though the defense discussion of the...

If the Obama Administration wants to advance the cause of open government, one particularly fruitful way to do so would be to share unclassified open source intelligence publications with the public. The Federation of American Scientists offered that suggestion in response to a White House call for public input into the development of the pending Open Government Plan. The U.S. Government should adopt a policy of publishing all non-sensitive products generated by the Director of National Intelligence Open Source Center, we wrote . Doing so would serve to enrich the online domain with uniquely high-value content on a broad range of national security and foreign policy topics. It would foster increased public awareness and understanding of national security and foreign policy affairs. And it would provide the public with a tangible return on investment in this vital area of national policy. The U.S. Open Government Plan is being developed as part of the multi-national Open Government Par...

Sobbing 10-year-old child holds the funerary photo of her father, Huang Guohui. (Weibo.com) A young girls plea for justice following her father's suspicious death in police custody reverberated through the Chinese Internet earlier this month, drawing tens of thousands of sympathetic responses and reposts on a Chinese blog portal in a matter of hours. The 10-year-old child, calling herself "Helpless Yuan-Yuan," posted an online message on the afternoon of Sunday, Aug. 14, asking readers to forward her message chronicling her father's journey from a wildlife reserve to the morgue and to pressure the police into revealing the details surrounding his death. "On the morning of Aug. 12, my father, Huang Guohui, accidentally trespassed onto the Datian Nature Reserve in Hainan Province," she wrote. "After a quarrel, he was taken to a police station. Two hours later he died in the interrogation room, covered with wounds." Her post immediately sti...

As tens of thousands of Libyans celebrate rebel fighters' "final push" to bring an end to Moammar Gadhafi's dictatorship on Aug. 21, photos of their celebration have inspired Chinese netizens to ponder over their own totalitarian regime. (Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images) As hundreds of Libyan rebel fighters entered the capital of Tripoli in their final push to bring an end to Moammar Gadhafi's 42-year rule, media reports showed the Libyan people gathered in celebrationand Chinese celebrated along with themthough not the Chinese regime. Despite the Chinese communist regime's official mouthpiece Xinhua deeming the celebration a riot and its foreign ministry calling on Libya to return to stability for its people to be able to lead normal lives, the Chinese public has decided to think outside the official propaganda box and celebrate with the Libyan people, with some even hoping to overthrow their own totalitarian government. In response to another neti...

A newly released intelligence guide to document classification markings explains the meaning and proper use of control markings to designate classified information. See Authorized Classification and Control Markings Register (pdf), CAPCO, Volume 4, Edition 2, May 31, 2011. (See also the associated Implementation Manual of the same date.) This material is very detailed, comprehensive and quite informative, with only a few redacted passages pertaining to some code word usages. But though it is only three months old, it is already out of date due to the constant churning within the classification system that regularly generates new marking requirements and cancels old, familiar ones. This has been particularly true lately with respect to changes in markings for Restricted Data, or classified nuclear weapons information. Thus, the intelligence guide to classification marking refers to the so-called Sigma system for marking Restricted Data. Each Sigma level refers to a particular aspect ...

HUMAN RIGHTS: U.S. Vice President Joe Biden speaks to an audience of 400 at Sichuan University in the southwestern Chinese city of Chengdu on Aug. 21. As Biden calls on the communist regime to expand human rights in China, Chinese police arrested rights activists and petitioners who wished to attend his speech. (Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images) When U.S. Vice President Joe Biden stood at the podium and spoke about human rights at one of China's best universities on Sunday, he probably had no idea how relevant and timely his remarks were. The American Embassy in China had told the Chinese public that everyone was welcome to get up close with Bidenbut Chinese police arrested and disappeared residents in Chengdu with different political views who were trying to attend, and erected a phalanx of restrictions to stop everybody else. Li Zhaoxiu, for example, came under the authorities' watch when she complained about a government-forced eviction. She wanted to make a short trip wi...

Information about police violence during the recent mass protest in Dalian over toxic chemical pollution is coming to light. Despite the positive press the incident has received, riot police from out-of-town savagely beat students, leaving pools of blood on the ground, witnesses said. The protest is said to have been the largest in northern China since the 1989 Tiananmen Square student protests. Responding to online calls to take a walk in the public square, tens of thousands in Dalian City, Liaoning Province, came out on Sunday, Aug. 14, to demand that authorities shut down Fujia Dahua Petrochemical Company because of toxic chemical leaks. It started out almost like a mass family outing: people took their young children and elderly parents along to participate in the protest walk. Many carried high-quality banners and displayed messages on T-shirts. Riot-police surrounded the square soon after the crowd grew, but they showed restraint. Hong Kongs Apple Daily published a p...

Geng He, wife of missing Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhisheng, participates in a press conference held by U.S. Rep. Chris Smith (R-N.J.) to discuss Chinese human rights records on the eve of Chinese President Hu's White House arrival on Jan. 18, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AFP/Getty Images) Prominent Chinese human rights lawyer Gao Zhishengs five-year probation period ended on Aug. 14, and his family wants him to come home alive. Gao has been missing for 16 months since a brief public appearance in April 2010, after which he was again taken into extralegal custody by Chinese authorities; they told Gaos family little more than that he has gone missing. He had been in detention, with no legal procedures, for a year before that short-lived reappearance. My family needs him. I hope that our family can be reunited, Gaos wife Geng He told The Epoch Times. She said that according to Chinese law, Gao should be freed after the five years of probation. We should always have the...

There can be such a thing as too much security, the Navy said in a new Instruction on Operations Security (pdf) or OPSEC. OPSEC refers to the control of unclassified indicators that an adversary could use to derive critical information (CI) concerning military or intelligence programs. Properly applied, OPSEC contributes directly to operational effectiveness by withholding CI from an adversary, thereby forcing an adversarys decisions to be based on information friendly forces choose to release, the new Navy Instruction said. Inadequate OPSEC planning or poor execution degrades operational effectiveness by hindering the achievement of surprise. But even if adequately planned and executed, not all OPSEC is necessary or useful; sometimes it is actually counterproductive. Excessive OPSEC countermeasures can degrade operational effectiveness by interfering with the required activities such as coordination, training and logistical support, the Instruction said. See Operations Security, OP...

Even the most highly classified offensive cyberwar capabilities that are acquired by the Air Force for use against enemy computer systems will be subject to a thorough and accurate legal review, the U.S. Air Force said in a new policy directive (pdf). The directive assigns the Judge Advocate General to ensure all cyber capabilities being developed, bought, built, modified or otherwise acquired by the Air Force that are not within a Special Access Program are reviewed for legality under LOAC [Law of Armed Conflict], domestic law and international law prior to their acquisition for use in a conflict or other military operation. In the case of cyber weapons developed in tightly secured Special Access Programs, the review is to be performed by the Air Force General Counsel, the directive said. See Legal Reviews of Weapons and Cyber Capabilities, Air Force Instruction 51-402, 27 July 2011. The Air Force directive is somewhat more candid than most other official publications on the subject...

Faced with restrictions on permissible reports, Chinese journalists have turned to Sina.com and other blogs to make important stories known. A prime example of this occurred recently when an important story about relocation abuse was banned by Hunan Provinces Propaganda Department. The story concerns a resident of Yuanjiang City who moved away when the local government told him that his residence was in a flood plain. But years later, the resident learned that the area had become a valuable development zone strewn with factories and was no longer listed as at risk from a nearby dams discharge. A television station in Hunan investigated but was told to squelch the story by Mr. Gong, deputy minister with Yuanjiangs Propaganda Department. The station continued its investigation so Gong contacted Hunans deputy director of propaganda, Mr. Wen. Wen, apparently endowed with more clout because the station was in his jurisdiction, issued a ban on the story at midnight before it would air and an...

Riot police arrive during a protest against the construction of a toxic waste incinerator near their town's water supply in Beishan, China Aug. 4. (Posted by a Chinese blogger to Internet forum) About ten thousand people in Chinas Hunan province took to the streets on Aug. 4 to protest the construction of a toxic waste incinerator near their towns water supply. Several protesters were beaten bloody by police, while irate villagers beat up the vice mayor. Peace in the picturesque, yet densely populated Beishan township in Changsha County was shattered after local authorities announced plans in July to construct a 180 million yuan (US$28 million) hazardous and medical waste disposal plant in the hills above the Beishan reservoir, the drinking and irrigation water source for many villages. Beishan resident Ge told The Epoch Times that all the people in the surrounding villages are opposed to it as it is certain that the garbage incinerator will pollute the water. Ge said in m...

A bill that would curb the ability of courts to impose secrecy orders on public health and safety information was favorably reported by the Senate Judiciary Committee last week. See the report (pdf) on the Sunshine in Litigation Act of 2011, August 2, 2011. Court secrecy prevents the public from learning about public health and safety dangers, the Committee report said. Over the past 20 years, we have learned about numerous cases where court-approved secrecy, in the form of protective orders and sealed settlements, has kept the public in the dark about serious public health and safety dangers. Such cases, many of which are cataloged in the report , have included complications from silicone breast implants, adverse reactions to a prescription pain killer, park to reverse problems in pick-up trucks, and defective heart valves. This problem most often arises in product liability cases, the report said. In exchange for monetary damages, the victim is often forced to agree to a provision ...

More than 100 million Chinese people have withdrawn from the Chinese Communist Party and its affiliated organizations as of Sunday. The picture shows a parade in New York commemorating the "Tuidang" movement on March 27. (Dai Bing/The Epoch Times) A peaceful movement that encourages renunciations from the Chinese Communist Party now counts 100 million Chinesethat is one in every 13 Chinese peopleas its participants. The show of mass defiance is unsettling to the largest political party in the world. Having 100 million Chinese people withdraw from the Chinese Communist Party is an occasion to celebrate and a historic milestone in Chinese history, Yi Rong, chairwoman of the New York-based Global Service Center for Quitting the Chinese Communist Party, said at a press conference. It means a lot for Chinas present and future, as well as for Chinas transition toward a future free from the terror imposed by the Communist Party, she said. Known as Tuidang in Chinese, the mo...

(Epoch Times) 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 . I want to withdraw from the Youth League I live in Urumqi city. I joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in 2003. In my childhood and youth, I used to obey whatever the communist part...

Could the unauthorized receipt of classified information be a felony? Judge Leonie M. Brinkema made that startling claim in passing in a July 29 memorandum opinion (pdf) in the case of suspected leaker Jeffrey Sterling that was unsealed yesterday. But her statement is almost certainly a misunderstanding and a misrepresentation of the law. Judge Brinkemas memorandum opinion , first reported and released by the New York Times , was written to substantiate an order issued last week that limited the scope of testimony of Times reporter James Risen in the upcoming trial of Mr. Sterling, and excused Mr. Risen from identifying his source, who the prosecution says was Mr. Sterling. The newly released opinion affirmed the existence of a qualified reporters privilege which protects a journalists confidential relations with a source under some circumstances. But astonishingly, in her explanation of why certain remarks previously made by Mr. Risen to a third party would not be considered hearsa...

The Senate Intelligence Committee rejected an amendment that would have required the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence to confront the problem of secret law, by which government agencies rely on legal authorities that are unknown or misunderstood by the public. The amendment, proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden and Sen. Mark Udall, was rejected on a voice vote, according to the new Committee report on the FY2012 Intelligence Authorization Act. We remain very concerned that the U.S. governments official interpretation of the Patriot Act is inconsistent with the publics understanding of the law, Senators Wyden and Udall wrote . We believe that most members of the American public would be very surprised to learn how federal surveillance law is being interpreted in secret. The Senators included dissenting remarks, along with the text of their rejected amendment, in the Committee report . Sen. Wyden and Sen. Udall also offered another amendment that would have required the ...

A judge ruled on Friday that New York Times reporter James Risen will not have to testify about the identity of a source in the upcoming trial of former CIA officer Jeffrey Sterling , who is accused of leaking classified information to Risen. The July 29 court order (pdf) said that Risen must testify only about certain non-privileged information. Specifically, Mr. Risen was directed to appear at trial in order to confirm: (1) that Risen wrote a particular newspaper article or chapter of a book; (2) that a particular newspaper article or book chapter that Risen wrote is accurate; (3) that statements referred to in Risens newspaper article or book chapter as being made by an unnamed source were in fact made to Risen by an unnamed source; and (4) that statements referred to in Risens newspaper article or book chapter as being made by an identified source were in fact made by that identified source. The court order by Judge Leonie M. Brinkema was framed as a partial grant of the governm...