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Who heckled Hu?
The protester, wearing a White House-issued press credential, who screamed at President Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao on the South Lawn has a history of such behavior.
On July 25, 2001, Wang Wenyi confronted Jiang Zemin, then China’s president, while he was in Malta. In an incident recounted today on the Austin-based Stratfor.com website, a respected review of international affairs and public policy, the woman berated Jiang about harassment and oppression of practitioners of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement banned in China. Wang is a Falun Gong practitioner.
“Wang’s previous encounter with Jiang, and her participation as a key speaker at (a Falun Gong) March 27 rally in Washington should have been enough to top off the White House that she might cause trouble at Hu’s arrival ceremony,” Stratfor.com noted. “Either White House security totally missed these prior events in security reviews before approving Wang’s press pass, or they overlooked them. It would not, at first, seem plausible that her history could have been overlooked — since one of the mandates of the security services is to protect the president from such embarrassments — but on close review, it appears to be the more likely of the two scenarios.”
The White House said Wang, a New York pathologist, was granted credentials as a journalist for Epoch Times, a Falun Gong-associated publication. Stephen Gregory, a spokesman for the paper, said Wang was to act as a journalist, not an activist, for the Hu visit. She has been charged with disorderly conduct and could face more serious charges for interrupting a foreign dignitary.
Because she was amid a tangle of reporters and camera operators on a press platform on the South Lawn, it took about three minutes for Secret Service officers to get to Wang and haul her away. Before they did, she shrieked at Bush to get Hu to stop harassing Falun Gong devotees. And she told Hu that his days are “numbered.”
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