The Things Left Out
Sometimes they're the most important things of all
by Tamara Baker

May 14, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- If, in America, you get all your news from a typical national wire service such as the AP, chances are you're not getting the whole story. It's even worse if you rely on TV and radio, especially cable TV and AM radio.

The best course of action, I have found over and over again, is that when a big story breaks, it's best to check out what the local media are saying about the story. All too often, important, often pivotal bits of information are left out when the story is passed on up the corporate media food chain.

One recent example: The story of California spies James Smith and Katrina Leung, two people who, while working for the FBI, were simultaneously passing secrets to the Communist Chinese. This story has been floating around the national media's back burners for over a month, but has never been brought to the fore.

If you were to read most of the national print stories, and see/hear most of the national TV and radio programs about this case -- including not one but two stories with Kenneth Starr dictation-taker Michael Isikoff's byline over them -- you would never know some very interesting information, mentioned in the April 11, 2003 edition of the Sacramento Bee:

Spy case arrest shocks GOP friends
The Chinese American woman has been accused of acting as a double agent.
By Margaret Talev -- Bee Capitol Bureau

Published 2:15 a.m. PDT Friday, April 11, 2003

Katrina Leung seemed just the sort of woman the California
Republican Party wanted in its ranks.

A Chinese American business consultant from Southern
California, Leung spoke Cantonese, Mandarin and English with
ease, was well connected and was eager to donate her energy
and money to the GOP.

She gave thousands of dollars last year to gubernatorial
candidates Richard Riordan and Bill Simon, and they thanked
her by name in speeches and on Web sites. U.S. Rep. David
Dreier liked his San Marino constituent so much that he
recently appointed her as a voting member on the state
party's central committee.

Leung's beneficiaries were stunned Thursday to learn federal
officials had arrested her the day before, alleging the 49-
year-old woman, code named "Parlor Maid," was a double agent
who used a romance she'd carried on with an FBI agent since
the 1980s to obtain secrets for the Chinese government.

Yupper, folks: Katrina Leung, the Parlor Maid, part of the biggest and worst US espionage since Aldrich Ames, is also a major part of the California GOP's power structure, donating over twenty thousand dollars of her own money to Republican candidates, in addition to helping organize several GOP fundraisers targeted at the wealthy and politically-powerful California Asian community.

True, she did make a total of $1500 in donations to three Democrats, but they were ethnic Chinese, like her, and the donations were done in the context of her other big community role, that of a leader in California's Chinese-American community. Her GOP donations, however, went to persons like GOP gubernatorial hopeful Richard Riordan, and were much, much bigger: $10,000 alone went to Riordan before he was defeated in the primary.

Now, you may say, this is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with anything?

Simply this: as Atrios notes in his 04/21/03 New York Press column, Leung's boyfriend, FBI agent James Smith, was the FBI's go-to guy allegedly investigating the bogus Clinton-Gore "Chinagate" scandal, a scandal that turned out to be mostly hot air and hyperventilating on the part of Smith's boss, FBI director (and Republican judge) Louis Freeh, who spent most of his time as FBI chief trying to bring down the man who appointed him to his post.

Now, put it all together:

• two FBI double agents, looking to hide their spying for Red China, and one of them is a GOP activist
• their boss (Freeh) is a rabid GOP activist, who's looking for any reason to take out his bosses (Clinton/Gore)
• a corporate press that dislikes Democrats and is beholden to Freeh, as well as to other GOP activists like Ken Starr, for scoops and other stories that don't require much legwork (as Al Giordano points out in a recent Narco News, Timesmen and other elite papers put their reporters through the wringer, demanding three stories per week, all of them requiring legwork and hard research; it's not surprising that journos are constantly looking for ways to save them this grunt work)

The story is easy to figure out, once you have all the information in place. But that's difficult if you don't have all the information -- and you're not likely to get it from the national media.

Case in point number two: The Flight of the Texas Democrats.

As you may know by now, the Democratic members of the Texas Legislature, rather than put up with GOP gerrymandering and government-trashing from Tom DeLay, decided to deny the GOP a quorum rather than allow votes that would destroy what good things are left in the Lone Star State.

Now, if you watched TV and read the national papers, you'd never know that Tom Craddick, the GOP legislator man who wailed and whined about Those Low-Down Dirty Double-Dealing Demon Rats to a concerned and sympathetic Candy Crowley, and was quoted as saying that "Republicans never once resorted to such an irresponsible stunt", had in fact done the exact same irresponsible stunt himself back in 1971. And if you just were exposed to the national corporate press, you'd have never known that The Texas Republican Party went and purchased radio advertisements calling on the public to badger the Texas Department of Public Safety with reported sightings of Texas House members.

This not only wastes the time of DPS personnel, it also endangers the health and safety of the Texas people: How many legitimate 911 calls won't get through because of these GOP-approved prank phone calls? How many people will die in Texas just because the two Toms, DeLay and Craddick, want to score political points?

The things left out, you know.