Exporting killer technology for campaign cash

We called the Clintons on it. Now, we have to make the call again. It’s as if 9/11 never happened.

Some in the administration are undermining President Bush’s efforts to prevent proliferation of high technology that would help America’s enemies build weapons of mass destruction.

Paid lobbyists in Washington have been working hard to eliminate export controls on supercomputers – and in recent days, legislators who should know better have tried to get Congress to go along. Surprisingly, they received strong support from Commerce Secretary Don Evans and even National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.

Export control laws have eroded so sharply in recent years that the US now allows the unregulated export of supercomputers capable of performing 98 percent of the Defense Department’s military applications, according to a Senate report.

Still, nearly half the House of Representatives, led by Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier (R-Cal.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Cal.), recently voted to lift most of the remaining restrictions anyway. The narrowly defeated Dreier-Lofgren amendment would have repealed an existing law adopted in the wake of revelations that US supercomputers useful for developing thermonuclear and other weapons of mass destruction and modeling their effects had been sold to dubious foreign entities, including Communist China’s nuclear weapons complex.

Will President Bush allow pandering for campaign contributions from such exporters to trump his counter-proliferation agenda — and, by so doing, give every other industrial nation political cover to continue their lucrative transfers of potentially deadly technologies?