Cox, Dicks, No Balls

If Cox and the rest of his committee's politicians had been trying to divert attention from their corporate sponsors by blaming faceless, nameless government bureaucrats and sinister Chinese spies lurking in dark halls, it worked. All four major television networks and the nation's newspapers focused almost exclusively on the sensationalistic laboratory allegations. Most of those few papers that reported on the activities of Hughes Electronics and Loral did so as an unimportant afterthought. Register reporters didn't even bother to mention the companies in an article released immediately after the report was issued.

"The important thing about releasing the report" is to have "a full and public discussion of the most serious policy issues involved," Cox told NBC's Brokaw on May 21. "More than anything, [the important thing] . . . is to make sure that we all focus on the gravity of the problem."

Yet ironically, it is perhaps Cox who has done the most to bury the question that no Democrat or Republican politician wants debated: What to do in a capitalist system in which multinational corporations have access to a nation's most sensitive military secrets yet recognize no geographic boundary or political allegiance in their search for profit?