[893] in peace2
NYTimes.com Article: M.I.T. Physicist Says Pentagon Is Trying to Silence Him
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (corrina@MIT.EDU)
Fri Jul 27 10:48:27 2001
Reply-To: corrina@MIT.EDU
Errors-To: articles-email@ms1.lga2.nytimes.com
From: corrina@MIT.EDU
To: peace-list@mit.edu
Message-Id: <20010727173625.32A7115C27@email4.lga2.nytimes.com>
Date: Fri, 27 Jul 2001 10:36:25 -0700 (PDT)
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by corrina@mit.edu.
Ok, that formatting was unreadable. I'm very sorry. Here it is again with the little NYT commercial blurb.
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M.I.T. Physicist Says Pentagon Is Trying to Silence Him
By JAMES DAO
WASHINGTON, 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.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/27/politics/27MISS.html?ex=997255385&ei=1&en=0de5c7cc2358e187
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