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Contributors
Cliff Kincaid- Contributor
Cliff Kincaid, serves as editor of the Accuracy
in Media (AIM)
Report. A veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff has
appeared on the Fox News programs Hannity & Colmes and
The O'Reilly Factor, where he debated O'Reilly on global
warming, the death penalty,
and the homosexual agenda. He was a guest co-host on CNN's Crossfire
(filling in for Pat Buchanan) in the 1980s, where he confronted
the then-Libyan Ambassador to the U.N. with evidence of Libyan
involvement in international terrorism. Through his America's
Survival, Inc., organization (www.usasurvival.org), he has been
an advocate on behalf of the families of victims of terrorism
and has published reports and held conferences critical of the
United Nations. His articles have appeared in the Washington
Post, Washington Times, Chronicles, Human Events, Insight, and
other publications. He served on the staff of Human Events for
several years and was an editorial writer and newsletter editor
for former National Security Council staffer Oliver North at
his Freedom Alliance educational foundation. He has written or
co-authored nine books on media and cultural affairs and foreign
policy issues. Cliff is married and has three sons.[go to
Kincaid index]
 Al-Qaeda
And Los Alamos
National
security and a loosely guarded radioactive
stockpile...
[Cliff Kincaid] 9/8/04
President
Bush wakes up every morning thinking about how he can protect
the American
people from terrorism. He should start
having some sleepless nights over the security problems at our
Los Alamos nuclear lab in New Mexico. Los Alamos has long been
targeted by foreign intelligence services, lately the Chinese
Communists, who stole designs for our most modern nuclear weapons.
That’s bad enough. But there is also a terrorist threat
to the facility.
Peter Stockton of
the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) says there is a
site at Los Alamos known as Technical Area 18,
which is in a canyon and is a repository for tons of highly enriched
uranium and plutonium. If al-Qaeda terrorists take over the facility
and detonate what is called “an improvised nuclear device,” they
could “take out a chunk of northern New Mexico,” he
says. “It’s very easily done and it’s very
quickly done.” The terrorists would simply place conventional
explosives on either end of the nuclear materials, slam them
together, and produce a detonation.
“It’s not quite the detonation of a Hiroshima or
a Nagasaki,” he explains. “But it’s one to
two kilotons, which is a significant bang.”
Stockton says it’s been shown and known for years that
there’s a serious security problem down there. Mock terrorist
attacks on the facility have been successful. “They simply
can’t protect the site,” he says.
Because of the threat,
Clinton Energy Secretary Bill Richardson four years ago ordered
that nuclear materials be removed from
Technical Area 18 by the end of this year. It won’t be
done. Bush Energy Secretary Abraham has ordered that the materials
be removed by the end of next September. So the security problem
and terrorist threat remain.
Stockton says, “This is a perfect case study. If they
can’t move the material and secure that facility, they
can’t do anything.”
In a never-ending series of lab scandals, Glenn Walp and Steve
Doran, two security officials brought in to investigate wrongdoing,
were fired for doing their jobs and uncovering corruption in
the labs. They had documented nearly $500,000 worth of improper
purchases by lab employees. Walp and Doran sued and won more
than $1 million in taxpayer-funded settlements.
One lab employee,
John Jennings, blew the whistle on his boss, Peter Bussolini,
a senior lab official who allegedly used lab
funds to make personal purchases, including camping gear, a flat
screen TV, power tools, a gas grill and performance tires. While
Bussolini and a subordinate were eventually indicted, Jennings’ life
was threatened, he was reprimanded, and then given a meaningless
job.
Among national reporters, Sharyl Attkisson of the CBS Evening
News has been virtually alone in covering these scandals in depth.
On the local level, Adam Rankin of the Albuquerque Journal has
been breaking major stories on a regular basis.
Many problems stem from mismanagement by the University of California,
which has run the labs since 1943 under a contract with the Energy
Department. Stockton says that Bush Energy Secretary Spencer
Abraham has made at least one good move, announcing that the
University of California will now have to compete for the contract
to manage the labs. But changes may not come quickly enough.
Stockton, who worked
for then-Energy Secretary Richardson, says the problem is bipartisan
and that Congress has failed to deal
with it. The Congress has never had an investigative hearing
into the problems at Los Alamos “as long as I know,” he
says. He thinks Congress is intimidated and “intellectually
insecure” in challenging management of the labs by nuclear
scientists.
The latest scandal
involves two tapes of classified nuclear weapons data that
are missing and possibly stolen. However, New
Mexico Senator Pete Domenici played down the scandal, saying
that perhaps the tapes didn’t exist in the first place.
Stockton comments, “If indeed they didn’t exist,
you would have known that in the first two hours of interviews” of
employees. “How you can bring this up seven weeks after
you’ve been investigating is beyond me,” he says.
Domenici, a Republican, “has been covering up their scandals
as best as he can,” says Stockton, while the other New
Mexico Senator, Jeff Bingaman, a Democrat, has “taken no
action” to expose and fix the problems and has been “sitting
on the sideline.”
President Bush should
take a personal interest in this problem, if he wants to protect
his own reputation as someone who wakes
up every morning concerned about our security. Of course, there
is something more tangible at stake than his reputation—our
lives. CRO
copyright
2004 Accuracy in Media
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