Rep. Lantos to Yahoo: 'Morally, You Are Pygmies'

Rep. Tom Lantos called Yahoo's failure to come clean on its China disclosures "inexcusably negligent behavior at best, or deliberately deceptive behavior at worst." He then asked Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang perhaps the least answerable question imaginable: Would he agree?

"I think we made some errors in preparing, and obviously gathering, the facts for the February '06 testimony," Yang responded. "I think that we could have done that better, and we're not proud of that. We have apologized for providing information at the time, and we didn't know we had full information, and I feel that we're having a dialog now about how to move forward and understand the impact of government-to-company, as well as multi-party, discussions with our industry peers...I do believe it's very important that we figure out how to move forward here."

Almost two years later, Yang still wanted to redirect the discussion back to the topic of creating that interactive dialog - the same topic whose relative importance back then prompted his company to team with Microsoft to craft a pre-cleansed, written response to Congress.

"What is your view, Mr. Yang, of the fact that once Mr. Callahan discovered that he provided a duly constituted Congressional committee with wrong information, inaccurate information, he failed - or anyone else at Yahoo failed - to advise the Congressional committee that the original testimony given under oath was inaccurate?"

Yang began his response slowly, almost patronizingly, by saying he had already apologized for that. But then he added, "I would say that we made no effort to conceal it. We filed it in the Hong Kong Privacy Commission filing in October of '06."

There's the buzzer again. "It's not the Hong Kong Privacy Commission that held the hearing! It's the Foreign Affairs Committee of the United States Congress that held the hearing, and...which was misled by your chief counsel." After this came several minutes of back-and-forth between Lantos and both Yahoo executives, at the end of which came the apparent admission that no one at Yahoo has been held responsible or reprimanded for the decision to come forth to Hong Kong but not to the US.

What has Yahoo done to assist Shi Tao's family since his imprisonment? Lantos later asked Yang, with his mother and other members seated directly behind him. In February '06, Yahoo admitted it had not reached out to Shi's family. Today, Yang had to admit nothing more had been done since that time. He reminded everyone he'd only become CEO again just last June, but turned to one side and acknowledged their presence. He said it was an honor to get to know them, and then added, "I do hope that this does bring a level of dialog that we haven't had. It's not because we don't want to help them. It is obviously a very complicated issue."

Why is it so complicated? Lantos pressed on. "I think that Yahoo should do more," Yang began.

"Well, you couldn't do less," Lantos proclaimed.