Chinese Softcore Torture; Earth Day's Clapp Clinic; Fly Trouble

A friend of mine has been trying to convince me to do an article on the propaganda put out by the Chinese government during the spy-plane hostage crisis. He suggests as Exhibit A the Xinhua news wire from a couple of Thursdays back, entitled "Prayers Go Out for Missing Wang"?a headline I haven't seen since Lorena Bobbitt was on the rampage. The story reported that the

wife and child of missing pilot Wang Wei "have been praying."

Praying to whom, by the way? And praying for what? For a successful conclusion to the aerial search for Wang, of course, because, to quote the only thing any of his neighbors had to say about him, "Wang Wei is always ready to help others."

It was surprising to learn from Chinese sources the extent and duration of the search, which covered 300,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles), with 900 flights and 60,000 personnel; 3800 villagers were enlisted to search 190 kilometers of beach on Hainan. According to Xinhua, "Every village along the shoreline in Hainan has set up lookout posts, keeping vigilance round the clock."

To anyone who still believes the Chinese tale that the collision occurred in Chinese airspace, this bit of information ought to be mystifying. Because if the Chinese knew where Wang's plane went down, their search would have to cover about one square mile. That alone is cause to wonder whether the whole search wasn't a charade. It's hard to imagine the Chinese government was keen to have Wang go to the Hague to explain to the World Court exactly what his orders were. And in that sense, it's probably safe to say Washington was considerably more "sorry" about his loss than Peking was.

What's more, since the aerial search went on for 11 days, which is about a week after there would have been the scantest hope of recovering the pilot, it's worth asking what the Chinese were actually looking for. The answer, of course, is: top-secret materials that were dumped out of the U.S. spy plane as it made its way to Hainan island. The search more likely than not covered the plane's flight path, and continues as you read this.

A couple of corners of the story were insufficiently reported even in the Western press. For one, there has never been a satisfactory explanation of why the American E3-PE landed at Hainan without a nose cone. The semi-official American explanation is that the Chinese fighter, flying up from behind, hit both engines on the American plane's left wing, then broke in half and cartwheeled forward, shearing off the nose cone. But the nose cone as seen on the runway in Hainan didn't look like it had been "sheared": it looked like it had been popped off clean. That part of the plane certainly contains sensitive radar technology. No one should bet against the possibility that it was detached as part of the information-ditching procedure as the plane descended.

The second underreported corner concerns the interrogation to which the crew was subjected. Shane Osborn, the pilot, told interviewers that "the only unpleasant part was the interrogation and the lack of sleep." Specifically, the Chinese woke the crews up in the middle of the night for long grilling sessions on how the plane worked, and tried to browbeat confessions out of them. So to call this crew hostages may not even go far enough. Back in Cold War times, sleep deprivation as an aid to interrogation used to get classified among the softcore variants of torture.

Clapp Clinic

Another Earth Day has passed. Hoo, hah! Who needs Christmas when you've got a holiday like that? I mean, there's always magic in the air when it's Earth Day season. This year environmentalists showed that Earth Day is no longer just an occasion for silly folk songs; it's now an occasion for devious politics as well.

The pounding George W. Bush has been taking on the environment is grossly unfair, as Gregg Easterbrook points out in an excellent piece in this week's New Republic. Easterbrook knows his environmental issues; I don't. But you don't have to know much about carbon dioxide levels to recognize gross political posturing.

Take Philip Clapp of the National Environmental Trust, who has been hammering the President over the last few months on everything from arsenic to zoology. Last Wednesday, when Christie Whitman announced that the administration would try to drop the permissible level of arsenic in drinking water to between 3 and 20 parts per billion?below Clinton-administration levels?Clapp dismissed it as "blatant Earth Day window dressing." The next day, when Bush announced he would sign an international treaty to eliminate a "dirty dozen" of environmental toxins, Clapp dismissed it as "a political no-brainer. There is no political cost to signing it."

Now, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer is correct when he points out, "Many of the regulations that this President is reviewing...only went into effect in the last?in some cases?24, 48, 72 hours of the previous administration." Among those is the arsenic level, which stood at 50 parts per billion until the two-minute-warning stage of the Clinton administration. I don't recall Philip "Mr. Arsenic" Clapp holding Bill Clinton's feet to the fire during the eight years the President defended the same standard.

Green groups like the National Environmental Trust probably wind up doing more harm than good to the environmental cause, because they're not issue groups at all?they're pseudonymous arms of the Democratic Party. Hence Ralph Nader's honorable run for president last year. It's not just that political activists don't stand for anything. It's that they've even forgotten what it means to stand for anything.

Fly Trouble

There were a couple days of big political scandals in New Jersey last week. Sen. Robert Torricelli took on water over gift allegations. The acting governor, the Republican Donald DiFrancesco, was nearly knocked out of next fall's race by allegations he took a $575,000 "loan" from a friend who later got a big state contract. Then Donny D's top staffer, Jeff Michaels, was revealed to have been paid $100,000 by a Trenton lobbying firm, in what was presented as a kind of "buyout" of Michaels' own lobbying firm, which at the time of the purchase had existed for all of two months.

But the most old-timey Garden State moment came when Elizabeth City Councilman Armenio Monteiro filed suit against Council President Patricia Perkins-Auguste. Two weeks ago, the two of them were locked in a hot debate over taxes in the city budget when Perkins-Auguste got so ticked off she ordered two policemen to take Monteiro to jail. An added benefit for Perkins-Auguste is that Monteiro missed the vote.

No politician has been more often on the wrong end of overzealous law enforcement than former Washington, DC, Mayor Marion Barry. Last week, he fell afoul of the courts once again, when he was sentenced to a year of probation in Baltimore for misdemeanor indecent exposure. Here's what happened. Last summer, Barry walked up to a urinal in a public men's room at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and was told by the woman swabbing the floor that he'd have to hold it until she'd finished cleaning. Barry, who had recently had prostate surgery, couldn't hold it, did his business, and after some harsh words between him and the janitress, left. The janitress decided to press charges and (perhaps not incidentally) sue Barry for $300,000.

I've done the same thing Barry did on more than one occasion. This is one of those situations where the norms of civilized behavior dictate that the janitor cede. The janitor can clean the bathroom anytime, but someone who has to piss has to piss. And here's a revolutionary thought: Why not use female janitors to clean the ladies' rooms and male ones to clean the men's rooms?

If Barry gets caught in one more incident like this, I'm going to have to campaign for him in the next mayoral election.