Word: parkerisms
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That would turn out to be the high-water mark of the government's three-year pursuit of Wen Ho Lee. Before Christmas, prosecutors asked Federal Judge James Parker to deny Lee bail and hold him in solitary confinement before trial, lest he somehow communicate to allies or foreign governments how to find the missing tapes or destroy evidence. The government based its plea on testimony from the FBI's chief investigator in the case, Robert Messemer, who said Lee had engaged in a pattern of deceit, misled the government about his contacts with Chinese officials and written letters seeking...
...July, Judge Parker dealt the prosecution two blows. He ruled that the defense could use highly sensitive material in court, forcing the government to accept a compromise of secret information. And he allowed Lee's lawyers to subpoena internal government documents that might shed light on whether racial profiling had been used to target Lee in the first place. Both rulings threatened to make a trial unpleasant for the government. Lee's lawyers planned to portray him as an unlikely spook, more bumbling and naive than clever and secretive, who had asked for a colleague's help in moving...
Then, in August, the government's case collapsed. FBI agent Messemer recanted statements he had made at the December bail hearing about Lee's alleged lies, letters and contacts with Chinese officials--claims that had helped send Lee into solitary confinement. That reversal angered Judge Parker, who already had doubts about whether the sensitive material Lee downloaded was truly vital to national security...
...weeks ago, prosecutors began to try to cut a deal and eventually dismissed all but one of the 59 counts. Before releasing Lee on Wednesday, Judge Parker scolded the government for its handling of the case, apologized to Lee and told him he had served enough time already--278 days in prison. Afterward, Richardson argued improbably that the government had triumphed. "The issue here," he says, "is are we getting the tapes back, and do we find out what happened to those tapes. The plea bargain enables us to get that information." Maybe so, but there had to have been...
...talk about American music without talking about Black people and Black musical forms. And you cannot discuss Black music without taking it account its edginess (think of bluesman Robert Johnson, bebop innovator Charlie Parker, rocker Little Richard, soulman Otis Redding, et al.), its rebelliousness (anyone from Big Mama Thornton to Jimi Hendrix) and the fact that edginess and rebelliousness ultimately appeals to white young people as much as it does to Black young people. That and "white music" suffering slumps from time to time made the white embrace of hip-hop inevitable - has there really been anything interesting happening...