-Caveat Lector-
------- Forwarded message follows -------
Date sent: Fri, 31 Aug 2001 07:14:53 -0400
From: bherk <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Weaponizing Space - If you disagree with Bush,
Inc. you run the risk of serious harassment or worse
To: <Undisclosed-Recipient:;>
(It's been 40 years since President Eisenhower warned us about the
military-industrial complex - we really should have listened more closely.
Now, they are unashamedly stifling all dissent by using pseudo classifying
of documents - will jailing of dissidents be next?)
http://www.msnbc.com/news/620228.asp?bt=prgy
The scientist vs. the missile shield
Researcher raises questions about whether defense system
would work - and finds himself in cloak-and-dagger drama
By Matt Crenson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Aug. 27 - On Ted Postol's desk, behind stacks of paper
and scale models of Iraqi missile launchers, is a coffee mug emblazoned with
a warning: "Back off, man! I'm a scientist!" Maybe Postol should try a
T-shirt or a bumper sticker, because the mug doesn't seem to be working. The
Pentagon is all over him like medals on a four-star general. "What they're
trying to do is maneuver me into a situation where I can no longer talk,"
Postol says. "I intend to continue talking."
THE SUBJECT is national missile defense, a complex system of
radar-guided rockets designed to shoot incoming missiles out of the sky. The
Bush administration wants to build the system to protect America from rogue
states such as North Korea or Iraq.
"The technology to do so is within our grasp," Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld said in July, two days after one missile intercepted another
in a test over the Pacific Ocean.
Postol claims that test was rigged. He says the Pentagon knows it can
't field an effective missile shield and plans to build one anyway,
concealing the system's ineffectiveness with unnecessary secrecy.
Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, the spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization, says Postol's charges are unfounded and outdated because they
involve a component of the system that has been replaced.
Yet the Pentagon has taken the trouble of sending security agents to
Postol's office at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, classifying
his correspondence and demanding that the university confiscate documents
from him and investigate his actions.
LONE PROFESSOR
It seems mighty strange, this lone professor proclaiming that the
Pentagon, the president of the United States and several giant defense
contractors are all wrong and that he, Ted Postol, is right.
"They hate me for this. Of course they hate me," he says, brandishing
one of his thick technical papers. "I'm shoving it in their face."
Colleagues and foes alike call Postol a brilliant, tenacious and
egotistical man who never gives up. His adversaries often try to dismiss him
as a crank or a charlatan, but they cannot deny one fact: Last time Ted
Postol took on the Pentagon, he was right.
Postol is most famous for suggesting after the 1991 Gulf War that the
Patriot air defense system might not have been the smashing success that the
Army claimed - and then spending years proving it.
Working with George Lewis, another MIT professor, Postol analyzed
news footage of more than 40 Patriot-Scud engagements frame-by-frame, about
half of the Gulf War total. They concluded that not one Patriot appeared to
have stopped a Scud from reaching the ground.
The Army and Raytheon, the company that built Patriot, responded with
a barrage of criticism: News footage was too coarse-grained to show
anything, the camera's shutter speed was too slow, the flashes didn't
correspond with the exploding Patriots.
But soon, government investigators also began finding fault with
Patriot. Both the General Accounting Office and Congressional Research
Service found that Patriot's success rate was far lower than the 96 percent
claimed by the Army.
In a new review, the Army revised its own estimate of Patriot
effectiveness down to 60 percent. But almost everybody who was involved in
the debate agrees the real number is close to zero.
ARGUMENTS AND FACTS
It appears Postol knew what he was talking about. Whether that's
true this time is nearly impossible to tell, because he and his Pentagon
adversaries argue more about each other's alleged misdeeds than the facts.
Postol's most recent fracas with the Pentagon started last year when
he learned of a whistle-blower named Nira Schwartz who had sued her former
employer, the defense contractor TRW. Schwartz charged TRW had faked test
results performed for the national missile defense program.
Postol invited Schwartz to MIT, where she made her case to experts
from the university and the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group
opposed to the missile defense plan and dedicated to reducing nuclear arms.
"We actually were very impressed by her," says David Wright, a
physicist with the group. "It looked like (her case) really held up."
Schwartz's central claim was that TRW's kill vehicle, designed to
identify and destroy an incoming missile, could not tell the difference
between a real warhead and a decoy. Both the company and the Ballistic
Missile Defense Organization had declared a 1998 test of that capability a
success.
The issue is important because any country technologically capable of
launching an intercontinental ballistic missile could easily launch decoys.
In an April 2000 study, a group of missile defense critics - including
Postol - argued that simple decoys could render almost any missile defense
system useless.
Lehner disputes that assertion. Furthermore, he says TRW's kill
vehicle has been dropped in favor of one built by Raytheon, which can
distinguish warheads from decoys and "is going to get even better as time
goes by."
STUDY RAISES A RUCKUS
At the meeting with Schwartz, Postol focused on a study the
Ballistic Missile Defense Organization had commissioned to refute her
claim - the "Independent Review of TRW Discrimination Techniques."
The report's summary said that TRW could distinguish a warhead from a
decoy. But in the pages of charts and tables and impenetrable prose, Postol
says, he found abundant evidence to the contrary. It looked to him as if the
report's authors had ignored their own evidence to reach the conclusion the
Pentagon wanted.
In April 2000, Postol wrote the Clinton administration about his
discovery and attached supporting documents, including the report.
"I ... have discovered that the BMDO's own data shows that the
Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) will be defeated by the simplest of
balloon decoys. I also have documentation that shows that the BMDO in
coordination with its contractors attempted to hide this fact," Postol wrote
to White House chief of staff John Podesta.
Podesta passed the letter on to the Ballistic Missile Defense
Organization, which promptly classified it.
Postol was livid. As far as he knew, nothing he had sent to Podesta
was classified. In fact, the report Postol had gotten from Schwartz had the
words "Unclassified Draft" all over it.
In a second missive to Podesta, Postol complained that the BMDO had
no reason to classify the report or his letter except to silence him.
CLOAK-AND-DAGGER MOMENT
Five weeks later, three Defense Security Service investigators showed
up in Postol's office. The four men adjourned to a conference room, where
the investigators produced a folder labeled "Secret" and asked Postol to
read its contents.
It was a bizarre, cloak-and-dagger moment. If these men were
investigators, Postol thought, why were they giving him information instead
of trying to get it?
Postol assumed it was a trick designed to shut him up. He held a
security clearance through a defense contractor he did consulting work for.
If this "secret" folder contained information from the report that he needed
to make his case, he would be obliged by that security clearance not to talk
about it.
According to a government report of the incident, Postol refused to
look inside the folder. After some unpleasantness, the agents gave up and
left.
The next day, Postol wrote Podesta a third time to complain that
instead of responding to his first two letters, the government had sent
agents to harass him.
"It cannot be ruled out that this unannounced meeting was an attempt
at intimidation," Postol wrote. "I would therefore appreciate it if you
would have this matter fully investigated."
'The overall impression you leave from your correspondence is that your
brilliance is only exceeded by your arrogance.'
- JOHN PODESTA
Then-White House chief of staff, in a letter responding to Ted Postol's
complaints Podesta responded in a handwritten note: "I must say
that the overall impression you leave from your correspondence is that your
brilliance is only exceeded by your arrogance. Rest assured that we are
taking the issues you raised seriously and reviewing them at the highest
levels."
The General Accounting Office did investigate the agents' unexpected
visit. It concluded that the Defense Security Service had acted properly in
classifying Postol's letter and the attached report, because a Pentagon
lawyer had failed to blacken a few sensitive parts before passing the study
on to Schwartz. The FBI also investigated and determined that TRW was not
guilty of fraud.
THE NEXT LETTER
Things might have ended there. But two months before the GAO cleared
the Pentagon of harassing Postol, the professor wrote yet another letter.
Postol explains that when he wrote the White House last year, he had
good evidence that the report on missile decoys was phony. But this spring,
after hours of analysis, he says he finally deciphered the instructions TRW
used to tell its kill vehicle how to distinguish between a real warhead and
a decoy.
Those instructions, he concluded, were useless - in some situations
they might even guarantee that the kill vehicle missed its target.
Postol wrote the General Accounting Office, which was already
investigating Schwartz's claims against TRW. Again, his letter reached the
missile defense office and was classified.
This time the Pentagon took its case to Postol's employer. Valerie
Heil of the Defense Security Service wrote two letters to MIT demanding the
university confiscate the missile decoy report from Postol and investigate
how he obtained it.
MIT has not done that. President Charles Vest responded with a public
statement defending his professor's right to criticize missile defense and
expressing concern over the Pentagon's attempt to reclassify public
information.
Postol, who has never had warm feelings for Vest, considers that a
weak effort.
"I'm surprised that he hasn't added that his favorite flavor is
vanilla and his favorite color is blue, since being in favor of free speech
as a university president is not a very controversial position to take,"
Postol says. "He's more intimidated by me than by the U.S. government."
And that is where it stands. At this point, the "secret" report has
been bopping around the Internet for at least a year. Any North Korean or
Iraqi who cares to see it almost certainly has already, though it wouldn't
do any potential adversary much good because the Pentagon has abandoned the
TRW kill vehicle in favor of the one made by Raytheon.
MUM'S THE WORD
To people who pay attention to such things, the situation with Postol
has become a joke. But thanks to the classified status of the report and his
letters, nobody with a security clearance can talk publicly about it.
And there's the rub. Those who are best qualified to evaluate Postol'
s claims have either security clearances, strong opinions about missile
defense, or both. The rest of us can only gaze at the mysterious charts and
tables and weigh the accusations of a brilliant and fractious man against
the Pentagon's denials.
© 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
------- End of forwarded message -------
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