another interesting case is operation Dragon Fire:
"ASSAULT WEAPONS" FOR U.S.
But of all the decisions, waivers and export liberalizations
executed on behalf of the Chinese by the Clinton White House,
none rivals what the administration did for Wang Jun, the
princeling chairman of China's state owned arms conglomerate,
Poly Technologies. For years, China had been doing a land office
business exporting to the U.S. semi-automatic rifles and ammo
made by Poly and another arms manufacturer, Norinco. Reportedly,
the gun trade was worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually
to the PRC. But suddenly in 1994, there was a problem: the
Clinton Assault Weapons Ban. Overnight, China's weapons cash cow
evaporated.
Not to worry. According to a Scripps Howard report by Michael
Hedges, which ran on the front page of the March 14, 1997 edition
of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the Clinton administration
granted Wang Jun's Poly Technologies importation permits to flood
America with over 100,000 semi-automatic weapons and millions of
rounds of ammunition -- despite the president's own cherished gun
ban. That was on Feb. 2, 1996 -- just days before Clinton issued
the first satellite waivers for Loral Corp.
It gets worse. On Feb. 6, just four days after the assault
weapon waivers were issued, Wang Jun was ushered into the White
House for a personal meeting with Bill Clinton. Wang's escort
was Yah Lin "Charlie" Trie, who had laundered over $600,000 from
Chinese sources for the Clinton Defense Fund. Combined with his
campaign donations to the DNC, Trie's total contributions to
Clinton coffers topped the million dollar mark in 1996. For that
kind of money, it's a good bet Charlie Trie could bring anybody
he wanted to the White House.
And Charlie Trie wasn't Wang's only solid White House reference.
Charlie had worked with longtime F.O.B. Ernest Green to get Wang
a U.S. visa, though Wang conveniently forgot to mention that he
was a Communist arms dealer on the visa application. Had he
disclosed that fact, Wang Jun would never have been let in the
country, let alone the White House. The day after Wang's visit
with Clinton, Ernie Green's wife donated $50,000 to the DNC.
Except for these import waivers, issued two years after Poly's
rifles had been banned at the president's own direction, there
would have been no legal U.S. market for Wang Jun's guns.
Michael Hedges interviewed lawyers involved in negotiating the
deal, nearly all of whom were stunned when Poly Technologies got
the exclusive approval. "All of a sudden there was a
breakthrough. I can't account for it.", said one attorney.
Another admitted that the Clinton administration had been tying
other arms importers in knots to keep guns out of the country
because the president was opposed. He described the abrupt
turnaround in U.S. import policy as "highly suspicious". And
this was from a guy who was working to make this deal happen.
Last year, Hedges told me that his evidence included signed
copies of the importation permits for Wang Jun's guns. Between
the on-the-record interviews and the documentation, his expose
was rock solid. Yet, despite the fact that the implications of
his report were absolutely staggering, only one New York or
Washington paper thought its readers were entitled to this news.
Eleven days later, The New York Daily News followed up on the
Wang Jun 100,000 gun story.
News Columnist Michael Daly managed to uncover the destination
for Wang's 100,000 guns: a Detroit firm which investigators have
linked to the Chinese Armed Police. The Chinese Armed Police
used similar assault rifles to mow down demonstrators in
Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The massive gun shipment would have gone through, flooding
America's cities with weapons ruled inappropriate by the Clinton
administration, but the deal was suspended in the wake of the
aforementioned COSCO connected smuggling operation - which was
short-circuited by federal agents just weeks after Wang Jun's
importation waivers were granted. On the night of March 18,
1996, undercover Customs and BATF agents accepted delivery of
guns smuggled aboard the COSCO ship Empress Phoenix, as part of
an ongoing sting operation dubbed "Dragon Fire." The undercover
agents had lured the Chinese into making a trial shipment of
Chinese machine guns: a dry run set up to establish a working
relationship before the Chinese granted access to their full
inventory. Besides the smuggled guns, which they recommended for
the California street gang market, the Chinese operatives
explained that they were ready to sell everything from grenade
launchers to shoulder fired Red Parakeet surface to air missiles,
which they boasted could "take out a 747". (Coincidentally, a
Boeing 747 was taken out over the skies of Long Island just
months later.) That March night, federal agents secretly
unpacked COSCO crates containing 2,000 Poly Technologies AK-47's
delivered from the hold of the Empress Phoenix. It was the
largest seizure of fully operational automatic weapons in the
history of U. S. law enforcement.
http://www.cnn.com/US/9605/23/china.arms/
http://www.ak47world.com/clinton.html
http://www.stanley2002.org/stories/090403/09040332.htm
