[892] in peace2
Pentagon vs. MIT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Corrina C Chase)
Fri Jul 27 10:44:27 2001
Message-Id: <200107271444.KAA11991@department-of-alchemy.mit.edu>
To: peace-list@MIT.EDU, nutso-flaming-pikans@MIT.EDU
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 10:44:03 -0400
From: Corrina C Chase <corrina@MIT.EDU>
This article is from the New York Times. Perhaps we should all encourage
Vest to do the right thing here? This is in my book a big deal.
-ccc
P.S., sorry if the formatting's off- I hate macs and pasting into telnet.
July 27, 2001
M.I.T. Physicist Says Pentagon Is Trying to Silence Him
By JAMES DAO
ASHINGTON, July 26 - A leading critic of the military's missile defense testing
program has accused the Pentagon of trying to silence him and intimidate his employer,
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, by investigating him for disseminating
classified documents.
The case has raised questions about whether a document can be considered secret if it is widely
available to the public. And it has touched off a dispute between the critic, Theodore A. Postol, and
M.I.T. over how to balance academic freedom with the university's obligations to cooperate with
Pentagon investigators.
At issue is correspondence between Dr. Postol, a physicist, and the General Accounting Office, an
investigative branch of Congress, in which he accused the Pentagon of using doctored data to
defend missile defense technology.
Dr. Postol said his conclusions had been based on an unclassified report, which he disseminated
over the Internet and can now be downloaded from Web sites around the world, including one in
Russia.
But after Dr. Postol began distributing the report last year, the Pentagon determined that it
contained secret information. This month, Defense Department investigators asked M.I.T. officials
to stop Dr. Postol from disseminating that information and to confiscate the document from him.
The university has not done so. But in an e-mail message to Dr. Postol on Monday, Charles M.
Vest, the university president, said M.I.T. might be required to ``move forward with at least the
initial steps'' ordered by Defense Security Service, a Pentagon agency. Dr. Postol provided a copy
of that message to The New York Times.
``They are basically threatening M.I.T. that it will lose its contract to run this big laboratory if they
don't abide by these demands,'' Dr. Postol said in an interview.
The institute operates the Lincoln Laboratory at Hanscom Air Force Base in Lexington, Mass.,
under contract with the Defense Department to do research into missile defense, weather
forecasting, military surveillance and other sophisticated technologies. The lab's contract with the
Pentagon was worth $319 million last year.
M.I.T. officials declined to speculate today on whether Dr. Vest would cooperate with the
Pentagon's requests. But Dr. Vest issued a written statement that raised questions about the
investigation of Dr. Postol.
``While M.I.T. certainly abides by the laws that protect national security, we also believe that the
legitimate tools of classification of secrets should not be misused to limit responsible debate,'' the
statement said. ``Trying to treat widely available public information as `secret' is a particular
concern.''
Pentagon officials declined to discuss details of their investigation. But Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a
spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, argued that the department was
obligated to stop Dr. Postol from disseminating potentially damaging information, even if it was
readily available.
``Just because it is made public doesn't mean it's declassified,'' Colonel Lehner said.
Dr. Postol agreed that the information was potentially damaging, but only because it showed that
the Pentagon was far from developing effective antimissile weapons.
For years, Dr. Postol has argued that the Pentagon's prototype antimissile system could not
distinguish between decoys and enemy warheads. He has joined forces with an engineer, Nira
Schwartz, who has accused her former employer, cobi TRW,coei
a military contractor, of faking tests and evaluations of the technology to make it appear more
successful than it was.
The latest dispute arose when the Pentagon hired five scientists, including two from M.I.T.'s
Lincoln Laboratory, to review TRW's technology in the wake of Dr. Schwartz's accusations. The
resulting report disputed Dr. Schwartz's assertions and has been used to defend the missile
defense program on Capitol Hill.
But Dr. Postol, who in the 1990's successfully challenged the effectiveness of Patriot missiles in
the Persian Gulf war, analyzed the report and concluded it had distorted data to make it appear that
available technology could reliably distinguish warheads from decoys. In fact, Dr. Postol
contends, that technology does not yet exist.
The Pentagon and TRW have denied that assertion.
Dr. Postol first raised concerns about the Pentagon report in a letter to the White House last year.
Not long after, the Pentagon determined that officials had inadvertently not removed classified
information from the report before releasing it, including the tables and diagrams Dr. Postol has
used to attack the testing program.
But Dr. Postol, who has done work for the Pentagon and stands to lose his security clearance,
contends that the Pentagon's actions smack of a cover-up. He has recruited supporters in
Congress. el3 Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the
House Committee on Government Reform, has asked the Pentagon to review Dr. Postol's
accusations about the report. Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, has
asked the General Accounting Office to study the Defense Department's classification policy.
``The question that naturally arises is whether such a policy really protects national security or
whether it merely serves to stifle the ability of Dr. Postol to communicate his views,'' Mr. Markey
asks in a letter sent to the accounting office today.
