All the news about subpoenas, stains, and the Secret Service has overshadowed the ongoing investigation of how the Clinton administration's relaxation of export regulations on high-tech products may have undermined American national security. But that could change soon. Last week, the Chicago Tribune reported that a forthcoming General Accounting Office analysis will fault the administration for relying on a flawed study to justify exports of supercomputers to countries like China, India, and Pakistan. The study was conducted by Seymour Goodman, whose longtime bias in favor of relaxed controls was chronicled in these pages by Matthew Rees ("Sell Them Anything," September 8, 1997).
Not surprisingly, the GAO has called into question Goodman's work, charging that there was a failure to review how "countries of concern" could use American supercomputers for "military and other national security applications" (supercomputers can be used in the development of nuclear weapons). Moreover, the GAO says the Goodman study rested on an unproved assertion that exports of supercomputers were "uncontrollable."
According to the Tribune, the GAO study finds numerous other shortcomings in the Clinton export policy, including its failure to determine how supercomputers are used once they arrive in other countries. The senior Commerce Department official for exports, William Reinsch, has described the GAO study as "seriously deficient." Sounds like a case of what psychiatrists call projection -- ascribing one's own flaws to others.