This week, newspapers reported that Orange County Congressman Dana Rohrabacher was outraged because President Barack Obama's administration is allegedly jeopardizing national security by sharing sensitive satellite technology with China.
Of course, those mainstream media reports dutifully quoted Rohrabacher as an untainted crusader: “China has aggressively sought our technologies through legal and illegal methods for decades.”
The Costa Mesa Republican went on to fret that this loss of technology would close the U.S. superiority gap in outer space with the communists.
But none of the articles reported Rohrabacher's glaring, self-serving hypocrisy.
]
On Oct. 17, 1993, he and other Republican congressmen signed a letter (eventually obtained by me) to then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher in support of the transfer of sensitive space technologies to Beijing.
He was unambiguous in his lobbying objective.
“We
ask you to direct that these satellites be excluded from any list of
sanctionable items [blocked from transfer to the communists in China],”
Rohrabacher wrote.
Christopher complied.
Who benefited from the action besides Beijing?
Answer: Private U.S. defense corporations that stuff Rohrabacher's campaign coffers with contributions.
When eligible to fight for his country during the Vietnam War, the congressman remained a civilian. After he passed the draft age, he became a chicken hawk and began lecturing battle-scarred military generals on their combat strategies. Nowadays, he proudly calls himself “a patriot” at conservative political events and incredibly receives applause.
–R. Scott Moxley / OC Weekly
CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.