Talk:Timeline of the Cox Report controversy

Caveat Lector
Just in case this ever gets nominated again, while I'm not around to vilify it, let me put in my two cents now. This list represents the worst of wikipedia. It's a hodge-podge of leadingly worded and often disparate incidents strung together in such a way as to imply a grand treasonous conspiracy of all involved. My review of just the top 5 or so items in the timeline found that often the sources did not support the claim in the text. Several of these had no apparent or stated connection to any espionage. Moreover, the entire list is riddled with leading phrasing.

If I actually cared about this topic, and did not have a full time job, I would spend the day or two necessary to clean this up and the extra week needed to debate the author about it. However, I don't care that much. So I'll leave it at this: No way in hell should this ever by featured. It's better deleted. And, as is sadly so often necessary on Wikipedia, "Reader Beware".

I'm well aware the main author will probably insta-revert the handful of cleanups I already made. Well, that would just prove the point, wouldn't it? At any rate, revert away as I'll not waste further time talking about or editing this unsalvageable heap.

For reference, here is the primary author's [www.freerepublic.com/forum/a38b222247a92.htm original version] of this article, posted to the far-right Free Republic website under the keywords "TREASON OF BIBLICAL DIMENSIONS".Derex 10:03, 6 September 2006 (UTC)


 * Pretty humorous comment from someone who promotes the far-leftist blog Daily Kos on his user page --Jayzel 18:00, 14 November 2006 (UTC)


 * Oh, that's cute, Jayzel. If you think libertarians are far left, you're thinking more clearly than usual, or didn't you read the link? I'll spare you posting the other couple freep links you authored, because I think you might just spontaneously combust and I'd hate to see Wikipedia lose you that way. Derex 11:08, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Issues with list
I have to agree with the comment above (Caveat Lector). I think this entry makes assertions that are inaccurate, or it leaves out crucial information. For a rebuttal of the Cox report, you might want to look at this Stanford report (http://carnegieendowment.org/pdf/npp/coxfinal3.pdf), which noted, "The language of the report, particularly its Overview, was inflammatory and some allegations did not seem to be well supported....Some important and relevant facts are wrong and a number of conclusions are, in our view, unwarranted."

A final note. The staff of the Cox committee was led by Scooter Libby and others who later worked for Vice President Cheney. These are among the peopel who were accused of 'cooking' the WMD intelligence on Iraq to support the case for invasion. I wonder if they cooked the intelligence on China to support the case for impeachment. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 38.100.16.194 (talk) 21:30, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Missile secrets?
The article states "Loral and Hughes Electronics' engineers gave away missile secrets to China in the ensuing investigation."

This is quite a strech. According to C-SPAN's detailed article, after the launch failure in 1996 both Loral and Hughes launched investigations to find the cause of the crash. The root cause of the failure was determined to be "a deterioration in the gold-aluminum wiring connections within a power amplifier for the follow-up frame torque motor in the inertial measurement unit". These reports were submitted to the China Great Wall Industry Corp and included in both Loral and Hughes's 1996 disclosure to the US State Department, US Defense Department, the CIA, and an US inter-agency review team.

The problem here is that both Loral and Hughes failed to submit the report to US State Dept FIRST and get their approval BEFORE handing them over to China Great Wall Industry Corp. This was determined to be a violation of export rules since it helps the PRC in debugging rocket failures. The information that was given away was a description of what Loral and Hughes thought was defective on the Chinese rocket. Does that constitute "missile secrets"? I think that falls under the "weasel word" category.

-- Adeptitus 19:57, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Record of accusations?
This article represents a list of items. Of these many are not confirmed, but only accusations of alleged incidents. This article could be improved by taking more care to differentiate the two. As it stands this article is seriously flawed and strictly speaking flat out wrong. -- M0llusk 14:13, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
 * As a non-American with little previous knowledge of this topic I think that it also lacks context and seems pretty one-sided - are all the claims in this article accepted as being true? Also, the title of the article is missleading as the article covers allegations of espionage as well as proven incidents and only covers nuclear espionage between 1995 and 1997 and government reporting on this espionage in 1998 and 1999. --Nick Dowling 04:08, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Everything is cited. Read the sourced material. One-sided how? Please be a bit more specific. I agree about the title. That has proved problematic as the article has already gone through a number of titles. All the information comes from the bipartisan U.S. government report called the Cox Report, therefore perhaps the article should be titled Timeline of Cox Report controversy or some such, I don't know. Help yourself. I'm not much interested in this article anymore. I created it, but dropped it a while ago. The nuke tests are included because they are what caused the Energy Department scientists to conclude espionage had taken place. I will be readding that info. Cheers! --Jayzel 04:18, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * I'm pretty sceptical about whether any reports produced by politicans should be taken as gospel truth. The article on the Cox report states that serious doubts have been raised about much of its contents and only one criminal prosecution against an individual for spying (as opposed to companies selling secrets) has been sucessful so this article seems to need to be revised. The references to the nuclear tests still seem highly marginal as the only justification for their inclusion is burried in the middle of a paragraph and this only refers to the first of the tests mentioned in the article. What does including them in the timeline add beyond a means of falsely dramatising events? - it's not like the tests were being conducted over downtown Los Angeles. --Nick Dowling 09:01, 3 March 2007 (UTC)


 * Questioning your government is always a healthy thing, but it's just as healthy to know what your government is saying. Ta! --Jayzel 15:51, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

After more thought, I think changing the title is a good idea. If anyone disagrees, feel free to revert back. --Jayzel 15:57, 3 March 2007 (UTC)

Controversial Issues that Require Solid Referencing
It is alleged that First Lady Hilary Clinton discovered that Deutch removed ground intelligence from Iraq and had him fired by President William Clinton, with a cover story of a secure computer being taken home.

The cover would have been if it was one, a unsecure system with classified data on it. (he's personal laptop was not cleared for classified data handeling)It was never alleged that he took home a secure and/or classified system. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Deutch —Preceding unsigned comment added by 131.174.62.189 (talk) 02:50, 3 January 2011 (UTC)

It is also alleged that Deutch was conducting dual-use biological and chemical warfare research in the Department of Applied Biological Sciences at MIT. Something better than MIT's student Thistle newspaper should be found as a reference, if true.

It would also be interesting to determine whether, as Robert McNamara's protege, Deutch saw the failure of conventional explosives to penetrate Viet Cong tunnels, and therefore turned his research at MIT to "burning droplets" as over-pressure weapons for bunker-busting techologies. Doug Youvan (talk) 03:44, 21 April 2008 (UTC)