Vietnam apparently inaugurated a general consulate in Houston yesterday, and hundreds of Viets came out to protest.

Or rather, hundreds minus one, because the email from the organizers noted that they saw “one person who’s been on (internet) forums attacking the community thus giving the communists an advantage.”

The protests started around 9:30am and ended at 1pm.

A Philadelphia company and its executives being prosecuted for bribing officials of the government of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam have pleaded guilty, according to a press release by the U.S. Attorney’s Office here.

The pleas were entered on March 16 in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania federal court.

Pleading guilty to conspiracy and violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) and other acts are the following:

* The company, Nexus Technologies, Inc., pleaded guilty to everything.

* Nam Nguyen, 54, the CEO, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, FCPA violations, the Travel Act violation, and money laundering.

* Kim Nguyen, 41, Nam’s sister, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, substantive FCPA violations, and money laundering.

* An Nguyen, 34, Nam and Kim’s brother, pleaded guilty to conspiracy, FCPA violations, the Travel Act violation, and money laundering.

Another company executive who’s not related with the rest of them, Joseph T. Lukas, had pleaded guilty last year to conspiracy and to violation of the FCPA (see here).

The list of bribe recipients, as alleged in court documents (read more here), are:  VietSov Petro, PetroVietnam Gas Company (in Vietnamese: Tập đoàn Dầu khí Quốc gia Việt Nam), Vung Tau Airport, Southern Flight Management Center, (in Vietnamese: Trung tâm Quản lý Bay Miền Nam) and a tourism and trading company that allegedly belongs the Ministry of Public Safety.

“In connection with the guilty pleas, Nexus and the Nguyens admitted that from 1999 to 2008 they agreed to pay, and knowingly paid, bribes in excess of $250,000 to Vietnamese government officials in exchange for contracts with the agencies and companies for which the bribe recipients worked. The defendants admitted that the bribes were falsely described as ‘commissions’ in the company’s records,” says the press release.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s office, Nam Nguyen negotiated the contracts and bribes with the Vietnamese government agencies and employees. Kim Nguyen, vice president of Nexus, oversaw the U.S. operations and handled company finances. An Nguyen identified U.S. vendors to supply the goods needed to fulfill the contracts.

Nam and An Nguyen face a maximum sentence of 35 years in prison, and Kim Nguyen faces as long as 30 years in prison, according to the statement.

(Photo by Chitose Suzuki, AP)

When the USS Lassen made its official port call to Da Nang, Vietnam, earlier today, it marked the first time that a Vietnamese-American U.S. warship commander came back on Vietnamese shore.

Cmdr. Hung Le (in Vietnamese: Lê Bá Hùng) was just 5 years old when communist forces overran South Vietnam. The commander’s father, himself an officer in the South Vietnamese navy, took his family on a boat and headed out to sea. They were picked up by the USS Barbour County, a tank landing ship of approximately the same size as the destroyer Cmdr. Le now helms.

Cmdr. Le is a native of Huế in central Vietnam. A friend of the family told the Bolsavik that the commander’s grandfather was Lê Bá Hà, ward chief of Phú Cát in the city. The family friend confirmed that the commander comes from the city’s illustrious ”Lê Bá” family.

A few hours before entering Vietnam, Cmdr. Le corresponded by email with a reporter of Nguoi Viet Daily News. (No, not the Bolsavik.) The interview is published here, in Vietnamese.

Some excerpts:

* “I was born in Huế and left Vietnam with my family in 1975. I grew up in northern Viriginia and attended the U.S. Naval Academy, graduating in 1992.”

* “I am very proud to be an American and also proud of my Vietnamese heritage. As a U.S. Navy Commander, I have the privilege and honor of serving my country as my father đi when he was a commander in the South Vietnamese Navy.”

* “(My father) never pushed me into a naval career.”

* “The U.S. and Vietnam have a growing friendship, and this visit is a tangible symbol of that. I am very pleased to be a part of that growing friendship, as is every member of my crew.”

The lawyer who wrote the bar association’s proclamation, asserting Vietnamese sovereignty over disputed islands off the country’s central coast, has been arrested by Vietnam’s government.

OK so this is not strictly a Vietnamese-American issue, but I felt compelled to speak out. This is, after all, my blog. (Note also that I’m not speaking in the third person.)

On Saturday, the Vietnamese Ministry of Public Security, acting under what it called an “urgency,” arrested attorney Le Cong Dinh (Lê Công Định in Vietnamese spelling). The purported reason was for “acts against the State” and “libel of the Prime Minister and other comrades in the leadership of the Party and State.”

A closer reading of the news of his arrest, however, shows that the Vietnamese government could not even adequately allege, let alone prove, any of the charges. The same, almost identical “news story” appeared throughout the country’s media, all of which are owned directly or indirectly by the state. Here‘s one sample.

Successful professional

Educated in Ha Noi, Saigon, and at Tulane University – Columbia, the 39-year-old Dinh is highly successful and wealthy. He owns a house in the exclusive Saigon South new development, and has his solo practice in the high-rent District 1 area. (It’s the Vietnamese equivalent of living in Westchester and working in Manhattan.)

Dinh is married to one of the prettiest and smartest women of Vietnam, beauty queen Ngọc Khánh. (That’s Dinh and his wife in the photo above.) In a country where most positions of prominence go to older men and women over 50, Dinh was elected the Vice-President of the Bar Association of Ho Chi Minh City, the umbrella organization for all lawyers in the 9-million-people metropolis.

And yet, he’s taking risks that a wealth-maximizing rational being would not take. In the restrictive and risky environment that is communist Vietnam, Dinh has dared gone against the grain, representing clients that other lawyers would not touch, and speaking out on issues that many others, lawyers or not, would not speak.

These taboo issues include the assertion of Vietnamese sovereignty over the Spratlys and Paracels, and also issues of human rights and religious freedom.

Represented activists

Among clients represented by Dinh are his colleagues Nguyen Van Dai and (Ms.) Le Thi Cong Nhan. Both are attorneys based in Hanoi, and they were most prominent as lawyers specializing in human rights, representing Christians, mostly Protestants, seeking the right to practice their faith. In the picture is Dai in suit in front and Cong Nhan in red behind him.

The two were arrested and charged with acts against the State, and Dinh represented them. Dai was sentenced to 5 years and Cong Nhan to 4 years for their work on behalf of Christians. Yes, we know the actual charge was something like “acts against the State” – but what other “acts” were there, other than representing Christians?

That was in May 2007. Later that year, on news that China has formally annexed the Spratlys and Paracels, thousands of young Vietnamese took to the streets of Hanoi and Saigon in protest. (See, for example, AFP report here.) Police came out in force. No arrest or confrontation was made on the day of the protest, but they were taking names, and in the ensuing days, hundreds were called in for questioning.

Among those being harassed the most, by the Vietnamese government, for asserting Vietnamese sovereignty (if you understand how this works, please do elucidate) was my friend Điếu Cày. Read more about him in previous entries here, here, here, here.

Dieu Cay was eventually arrested and charged with tax evasion. (In restrospect, it may have been a short-lived experiment in charging dissident with something other than acts against the State.) In September of last year, he was sentenced to 2 1/2 years in prison. Representing Dieu Cay was none other than Le Cong Dinh.

The Bar Association’s proclamation

Long before Dieu Cay was arrested, though, there was an unwritten order, enforced by brute force at every level of government, to prohibit discussion of the Spratly and Paracel islands.

And yet, at a plenary meeting of the bar association, attended by the city’s top communist officials, the association’s president Nguyễn Đăng Trừng moved, and the assembled attorneys voted to approve, a proclamation asserting Vietnamese sovereignty over the islands.

The author of the proclamation was Dinh. That’s Dinh at the meeting in the photo to the right. Ironically, one of the few sources for the text of the proclamation and for this picture is Dieu Cay’s blog, here.

Arrested for criticizing the Prime Minister

In announcing Dinh’s arrest, the Ministry of Security specifically cited the Spratlys and Paracels issue, stating that Dinh has “taken advantage of the Spratlys and Paracels issue” to act against the State.

The announcement also claims that Dinh libeled (read: dared to criticize) “the Prime Minister, a few comrades in leadership position of the Party, the government.”

Even that allegation, however, is preposterous. The cited evidence was not that Dinh “libeled” anyone, but more like Dinh was “participating in discussion” of publications by someone else, and it was those other publications that were supposedly “libeling” the high-ranking comrades.

Quan Quoc Nguyen, Ph.D. (pictured), from Sacramento, is accused of “terrorism,” and his alleged terrorist acts consist of handing pro-democracy flyers to his friends. He has been held since November 2007.

Also standing trial with Nguyen are a Thai citizen and a Vietnamese citizen. The three are affiliated with Viet Tan, a political party based in the United States opposed to communist rule. Viet Tan (itself not free from controversy among anti-communists) has created a web site called FreeThemNow.net to demand the release of these and other political prisoners.

Many California politicians have joined the call for their release, including both Senators Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer (here). Quan Nguyen’s own U.S. Rep. Dan Lundgren joined with Reps. Zoe Lofgren and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fl) in a congressional resolution calling for Vietnam to let him go. In the state legislature, his assemblyman Dave Jones joined with Van Thai Tran and 53 other assembly members in a letter to Vietnam’s president seeking his release. State Senator Lou Correa wrote Quan Nguyen a letter of encouragement.

Quan’s wife, in an interview with the Bolsavik from December 2007, stands steadfastly behind him. “I’m not in Viet Tan,” she said, “but I support what Quan is doing.”

With the U.S. leading the Global War On Terrorism, charges of “terrorist” have become the favorite label for the government of Vietnam to slap on political dissidents. As the Wall Street Journal’s Asia edition noted here, “In Vietnam, arguing that people deserve an alternative to the Communist Party is considered terrorism.”

The most ridiculous of these terrorism charges was leveled in 2006 at another U.S. citizen, San Jose resident Cong Thanh Do. For good measure, Vietnam alleged that Do had a plan to attack the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi. Read here.

Next thing you know, the purported victim the United States demanded Do’s release, and eight months later Do was invited to the White House to meet with President Bush on human rights policy.