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In further proof the depraved Chinese government knew poison was being exported as gluten, the Los Angeles Times reports on a farm/company that was ignored/facilitated by the government and then razed in the middle of the night as American inspectors entered the country. Also telling is the continued efforts by the American EM to shill for the Chinese. (HT Pat S.)

Gluten factory had a toxic history

XUZHOU, CHINA — Before Mao Lijun’s business exported tainted wheat products that may have killed American pets [may have??–ed.], his factory sickened people and plants around here for years.

Farmers in this poor rural area about 400 miles northwest of Shanghai had complained to local government officials since 2004 that Mao’s factory was spewing noxious fumes that made their eyes tear up and the poplar trees nearby shed their leaves prematurely. Yet no one stopped Mao’s company [Minus the spin=co-conspirators ignored complaints–ed.] from churning out bags of food powders and belching smoke — until one day last month when, in the middle of the night, bulldozers arrived and tore down the facility.

It wasn’t authorities that finally acted: Mao himself razed the brick factory — days before the investigators from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration arrived in China on a mission to track down the source of the tainted pet food ingredients.

In the end, Chinese authorities caught up with Mao [ha!–ed.] and arrested him. And Tuesday, after weeks of denials, China acknowledged that Mao’s company and another [as though there were only two–ed.] Chinese business had illegally exported wheat and rice products spiked with melamine, a chemical used in making plastics and fertilizers. That chemical is banned in foods in the U.S…

And when you do the bidding of your communist government and something goes wrong, exactly what do you think is going to happen? The only way for the Chinese to remove “Mao” from the scene, making him unavailable to American inspectors, is to arrest him.

The other question is, Why is the American EM giving China a free ride on this story? To report what the Chinese are saying as though it is fact is absurd. If they would even apply a fraction of the suspicion they apply to their coverage of President Bush and his admin, we might actually get some insightful coverage.

All of you who are liberal and animal lovers should make note of that hypocrisy and join us in demanding the EM cover this story with a little more gravitas, and stop simply printing PR releases from the Chinese.

Here are some other examples in this Los Angeles Times story where China bizarrely gets the benefit of the doubt:

Besides turning up [like it walked into the pet food by itself!–ed.] in pet food, melamine has been found [ooh, look, how did that get there?–ed.]in feed for thousands of hogs and millions of chickens in the U.S. The FDA said Tuesday that melamine-contaminated foods also were fed to fish raised for human consumption. But in each case, U.S. officials said there was little risk to human health…

An Environment Protection Bureau official in Pei county, which is a part of Xuzhou, said one of his colleagues had visited Mao’s facility in recent years when it was processing yeast and wheat. The inspection did not turn up any serious violations, and neighbors were told to complain to a court or another agency…

Cai Kesen, president of No. 1 Flour Factory of Pei county, said unadulterated wheat gluten from China certainly would not have caused a scandal. The quality of the region’s wheat last year was the best in a decade, he said.

China’s General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said Tuesday that Xuzhou Anying and Binzhou Futian had evaded quality checks by labeling their products as exports not subject to inspection. [Yeah, those evil small farmer companies who do bad things and fool the great and compassionate Chinese government who only want to help the world with their benevolence–ed.]

None, none of the absurd claims by the Chinese are challenged in this story. Every time they ‘report’ the Chinese line there is no qualifier as there always is when they cover the president or politics associated with the war. ‘Alleged,’ ‘Argued,’ ‘Supposed,’ ‘Misleading…’ Nothing here, just a presentation of the Chinese line as though it were fact. No questions, no suggestion that the Chinese government had been using that ‘company’ and others to knowingly distribute poisoned food the the Western world.

Asking that is too scary–it might actually put a leftist heaven in a bad light, to say nothing of distracting g everyone from the fact that we all know George W. Bush and the United States are the most evil things in the world. And we certainly can;t have the truth, no matter how deadly, interfere with that line, now can we?