Cover-up at the Bush Commerce Department
Bush Reverts to Satellites for China
JUDICIAL WATCH: "The Bush administration has been "as bad, if not worse" than the Clinton administration when it comes to the transfer of sensitive technologies to the People's Republic of China."
Accuracy in Media: "President Bush seems to have no clearer vision of what constitutes a strategically sensitive export than did Clinton. For example, Republicans harshly condemned Clinton for exporting high-performance computers to China, but President Bush has more than doubled the control threshold on these computers despite existing intelligence estimates that demonstrate how China's national security benefits from such acquisitions."
INSIGHT MAGAZINE: "Indeed, in his last days as a lame-duck president Clinton made exports of U.S. supercomputers easier by raising the export threshold from 28,000 millions of theoretical operations per second (MTOPS) to 85,000 MTOPS. Bush raised that limit to 190,000 MTOPS. A General Accounting Office (GAO) official tells Insight that the government hadn't done the necessary pre-export analysis and that an "interagency process" led by the Department of Defense should be in place for export controls.
An April 2002 report by the GAO on computer-chip technology transfers to China claims that the government did not do an adequate analysis of the cumulative national-security effects of chip exports to China either, and that most export applications are simply approved. The policy is to approve applications unless it is shown that the items in question "would make a direct and significant contribution to electronic and antisubmarine warfare, intelligence gathering, power projection and air superiority."