(Newser) – The next time the Justice Department decides to arrest a "spy" for sending classified scientific information to China, it might try consulting a scientist first.
In what the New York Times describes as an "embarrassing acknowledgement" for prosecutors and the FBI, espionage charges have been dropped against Xi Xiaoxing, a 57-year-old American citizen who has been in the US since 1989 and was the chairman of Temple University's physics department when he was arrested in May.
He was accused of illegally sending blueprints of a pocket heater to China, but the charges were dismissed after experts—including the device's co-inventor—explained that the blueprints were of something else and Xi was engaged in normal academic cooperation.
The prosecution involved "fundamental mistakes and misunderstandings about the science and technology," Xi's lawyer notes that the blunder came amid a major push to counter Chinese economic espionage.
Xi, who was arrested by armed agents who stormed his home, says the incident has badly damaged his academic career and his research into superconductors.
"I don’t expect them to understand everything I do," he told The New York Times. "But the fact that they don't consult with experts and then charge me? Put my family through all this? Damage my reputation? They shouldn't do this. This is not a joke. This is not a game”.
Readers's comments
He probably can't
sleep at night, his family is traumatized, and his career that he worked his
entire life for is badly damaged and they can't even apologize?
I hope he sues
and gets at least $10 million in damages.
I agree. We should expect a better quality of
government than this.
False prosecution is one side of the coin. The
flip side is failure to catch the people who really should be caught. How do
they catch espionage when that cannot recognize it?
Oh I agree completely! It does seem incredibly
odd that they would say "OMG, he's e-mailing technical stuff that we can't
understand to China! Let's ram his door in, scare him half to death, and put
him in jail" without even doing the absolute most minimal effort job to
determine what they were looking at.
You might expect this from a small town police
department, but the FBI?
And... what if he or his wife had a heart
attack and died when they kicked the door in? Or what if he shot and killed one
of them and they shot him back?
No knock warrants are incredibly dangerous and
stupid. This guy was a professor who went to the same office in the same school
each day. Why do you have to ram his door down in the middle of the night?
You would be
amazed on how many chineses spies are in the next door.
Welcome to
America.
The root problem is that we allow emigrants to
settle in our first world countries but unless we make them truly welcome and
treat them as equal citizens from day one, the natural tendency is for them to
retreat to their own communities for support, and the more that happens, the
less the chance that they will integrate into our societies and the more
isolated from us they become.
The "Welcome to America" most
emigrants receive is: "Ok, you're here but you're not the same as us, or
as good as us and we're watching you closely."
They call this the self-fulfilling prophesy in
sociology. I think the problem is less top-down than it is bottom-up in terms
of the bias (conscious or not) carried by the public at large.
If I could give your post 10 thumbs up I
would.
Then you end up with a cycle of poverty and
crime.
In the mid 1800's in Boston people sued the
city to not have Irish kids next to them in school. Today the Irish aren't
discriminated against in Boston and they run the city and hold positions of
power and prestige.
Mr. Joshua is 100% right. If we take in
Syrians we absolutely have to welcome them, and invite them to be Americans,
not just people in America.
What happen is that
the man is playing smart , and is getting away with that .
How dumb was
that? The JD should have experts at their disposal to look over evidence like
this before taking action.
Like I keep
saying - 'everything the government touches turns to shite'.
something similar
and she has yet to work again.....
I have read that
the JD has not exactly been contrite, other than oops. What is it with
government types that they are beyond apologizing profusely for ruining people's
lives?
Well, Trump declared on the Tonight Show that
he'll apologize if he's ever wrong. Maybe the "government types"
share the same attitude. Trump will be a good fit with them.
Armed agent stormed his home. The agents storm
homes not out of necessity but for their own sick fun.
