Family Matters

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has canceled the rest of her Asia trip. She is hurrying back to Washington to deal with the crisis. Washington Wags say she has to make sure that Bill, her husband and the UN Special Envoy to Haiti, doesn't get credit for rescuing that devastated land.

Later: "What we can do to help Haiti, now and beyond" op ed in the January 14th Washington Post by Bill Clinton.

Whatever, it is a prudent move. There is big trouble brewing with China. The backstory to the Google announcement that it might pull out of China is that China is conducting massive and aggressive electronic industrial, economic, and political espionage against the U.S. and other Western targets. GhostNet is real. As the Nelson Report notes, Congress is likely to go "ballistic" over this issue and the situation is fast "metastasizing." The topic was a major concern of the recent annual report of the conservative Congressional US-China Economic and Security Review Commission.

It is unclear if US arms sales to Taiwan and Clinton's upcoming speech on Internet freedom are warning flares to China. The concern is so great in the intell community that the FBI leaked recently a classified report on Chinese cyberwar to The Daily Beast. For now, it is fortuitous that Clinton and her Asia team return to Washington to deal with this "crisis."