Deja-vu All Over Again

As Yogi Berra used to say, "It's deja-vu all over again."

Conservatives were highly critical of President Clinton when he put Ron Brown's Commerce Department in charge of U. S. exports, demoting national security as a priority, as he removed the Defense and State Departments from their traditional roles of evaluating the sensitive nature of the products for which American exporters sought export licenses.

Conservatives were critical of the Clinton Administration for placing export controls under the Interior Department instead of the Defense Department. Yet this is exactly what President Bush seems to be doing. Ellen Bork, writing for the Weekly Standard (see her article), worries that there is a bill pending in Congress reauthorizing the Export Administration Act, which would "limit the influence of security-minded officials at the Pentagon and the State Department in controlling dual-use exports."

Ms. Bork is concerned about holes now visible in our national security dyke: "Passage of the export bill would reflect a decision by Congress and the Bush administration, which supports the bill, to make commercial considerations paramount in regulating the export of advanced technologies, including supercomputers, encryption programs, stealth technology, and machine tools."

In view of the fact that China has already bought and stolen from us our most sensitive military secrets, threatened to bomb us with nuclear missiles, sold our stolen military secrets to other unfriendly countries and continues to violate all civilized norms of human rights, this is startling.

It is a fact that destination countries for our products are not always final destinations. China, for instance, has forwarded some of our sensitive exports to North Korea, and we know not what other countries.

It would seem that this is a very delicate part of our foreign policy in which mistakes might well have disastrous consequences.

Ms. Bork doesn't mention that the Interior Department is run by a woman who has a personal relationship with the Chinese government, but one has to wonder whether that fact is beneficial to our interests at this particular time.

It's deja-vu all over again.

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