IBD: It Could Be Loral All Over Again

The Obama administration is apparently intent on partying with the Chinese communist government like it’s the pre-1999 Clinton administration.

Here’s Investors Business Daily, as usual reporting news that the establishment press must not have deemed important:

Selling China The Rope To Hang Us

National Security: On the eve of a visit by China’s No. 2 ranking military officer, the Obama administration loosens export controls on technology that will benefit Chinese missile development. It’s deja vu all over again.

The Pentagon has announced that Chinese Gen. Xu Caihou will visit the United States and meet with Defense Secretary Robert Gates on Oct. 26. Xu is vice chairman of the People’s Liberation Army Central Military Commission. While here, Xu will visit American military installations around the U.S., including the U.S. Pacific Command.

Perhaps Xu will bring with him a note of thanks for the administration’s decision to shift authority for approving sales of missile and space technology from the White House to the Commerce Department. As Bill Gertz points out in the Washington Times, the little-noticed “presidential determination” made Sept. 29 alters a key provision of the 1999 Defense Authorization Act.

That provision required that the president notify Congress whether a proposed transfer of missile and space technology to China would harm the U.S. space-launch industry or help China’s missile programs. It was enacted after a Clinton-administration scandal in which U.S. companies were allowed to transfer technology that jump-started a troubled Chinese missile program.

After the failed launch of a satellite built by Loral Space and Communications Ltd. and attached to a Chinese rocket in February 1996, Loral provided 200 pages of data to China’s Great Wall Industry Corp. to correct the guidance system problems of their “Long March” rockets, which blew up 75% of the time. Hughes Electronics was also involved in the technology transfers.

On March 14, 1996, the Clinton administration transferred licensing responsibility for technology exports to the Commerce Department from State and Defense and, as a result, our formerly strict export controls were effectively eviscerated. This transferring of licensing responsibility was made after a request from a man who would be the Democratic Party’s largest donor in 1996 — Loral Chairman Bernard L. Schwartz.

A May 1997 classified Pentagon report concluded that Loral had “turned over expertise that significantly improved China’s nuclear missiles” and that “United States national security has been harmed.”

So the mechanism is in place for the same thing to happen again. In the late 1990s, it helped make China a player. This time, it could easily make it an equal, or given the size of its population and our debtor status, a conqueror.

There IS something treasonous about giving technology capable of ultimately destroying us to an ideological enemy, isn’t there? Or maybe it’s that with Barack Obama, Anita Dunn, and others running, the show, this administration and congress don’t consider communists ideological enemies any more. Maybe we’re all comrades now.

Wanna bet?