Truth - Al Franken [72]
That’s exactly where I bumped into Brian Ross. He was looking good, still trim and fit despite years of legendary overeating.7 As he wolfed down a massive dollop of bread pudding, I told him that I’d been telling my audience about his Saipan investigation.
“Pretty ugly, eh?” I said.
“Yeah, especially the forced abortions.”
I thought I’d misheard him because his mouth was full. “You mean the forced prostitution, yeah,” I said. “It’s amazing that a guy like Tom DeLay—”
“No, no. Forced abortion. The forced prostitution was in my second report. The thing that still gets me is the forced abortion.”
Every journalist makes mistakes. And I’m no exception. Turns out I’d only done half my homework. Instead of watching both of Ross’s reports, I had merely read the transcript of one of them. Fortunately, my years of training had prepared me for this very moment. I knew just what to do.
“Brian, could I get the tapes of those two reports?”
Those were the magic words. A day later, I received a package containing a videocassette. On that cassette was the smoking gun. Two episodes of 20/20, detailing everything my listeners, and now my readers, needed to know.
In this book, I’ve described some pretty revolting stuff. But in terms of sheer hypocrisy, it is hard to match Tom DeLay’s defense of a system that involved forcing young women to get abortions in order to keep their jobs.
In his 20/20 report, Ross interviewed Allan Stayman, who ran the office in the Interior Department that oversaw the Northern Mariana Islands.
STAYMAN: We have now documented the fact that management coerces female workers who become pregnant into having abortions.
Ross didn’t take Allan Stayman’s word for it. He talked to Tu Tao May, a Chinese woman who had made Ralph Lauren Polo brand T-shirts in a Saipan sweatshop.
MAY (through translator): When I told them I was pregnant, they tell me to have an abortion.
When she refused, she was fired.
ROSS: Will you get your job back, then?
MAY: Cannot.
Ross also interviewed Eric Gregoire, the Catholic human rights worker who had talked about the barbed wire surrounding the labor barracks.
GREGOIRE: With eleven thousand Chinese workers here, I have never seen a Chinese garment factory worker have a baby in my entire four years on Saipan.
Pretty sick. Even for Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff. It made me wonder how a guy like DeLay, who reportedly spends hours a week in church praying to his pro-life God, can sleep at night.
Is it possible that he just lies to himself? Hard to say. But the Galveston Daily News did offer a clue, which is that he has no problem lying to everybody else.
When their reporter interviewed DeLay for a May 15, 2005, story, the majority leader called the allegations against the sweatshop owners “totally false,” “incredible lies” told by “the left” which was “trying to destroy what was going on in the Marianas Islands.” And he knew all this, he told Marty Schladen of the Daily News, because he had investigated it himself.
We met with people who were making these kinds of allegations, including the Catholic Church, and asked them to show us even one story that was brought up by the George Millers of the world,8 and they could not produce one story, or one individual to prove their allegation. I saw it for what it was: the left wanting to impose federal bureaucracy on the economy of the Marianas Islands, and shut down what was going on there. They will say and do anything.
Of course, there were plenty of stories and plenty of individuals who backed up the allegations. Besides “Katrina” and Tu Tao May, there were the 150 victims in the ten involuntary servitude cases brought by the Clinton Justice Department at the end of the nineties.
In one case, for example, Soon Oh Kwon, president of Kwon Enterprises, pled guilty in U.S. District Court to bringing Chinese women to Saipan on contracts to become waitresses, and then forcing them to have sex with patrons at his karaoke club, K’s Hideaway.
As for DeLay’s contention that only the “left” was attacking the conditions