Quite a mess for the grown-ups to clean up
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED JUNE 18, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Quite a mess for the grown-ups to clean up
In the capital, senators expressed outrage last week at the way the Clinton administration has botched the nation's nuclear security system.
First, Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary, who controlled access to America's top nuclear secrets, eliminated color-coding of Energy Department badges to indicate levels of security and access. Why? She said she found the practice "discriminatory."
Of course it's "discriminatory." It helps guards "discriminate" between authorized personnel and spies. Duh.
Next, overruling his own Pentagon, State Department, and intelligence agencies, Mr. Clinton personally granted a special exemption to Loral Aerospace and Communications -- whose CEO was the Democratic party's single largest individual contributor in 1996 -- to provide secret missile launch technology to Communist China (whose agents, in turn, Mr. Clinton entertained in Lincoln bedroom sleep-overs as they funneled millions in illegal cash to his re-election campaign.)
The Communist Chinese are now known to have stolen design secrets for the nation's most advanced thermonuclear warheads. In March of 1999 the Los Alamos National Laboratory fired Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born nuclear scientist, for allegedly copying classified nuclear-weapons data onto computer tapes, some of which have disappeared.
General Accounting Office agents made headlines just a few weeks ago when they bought the equivalent of cereal-box badges over the Internet and used them to bluff their way past security guards and metal detectors, penetrating the Pentagon, the State Department, Attorney General Janet Reno's outer office, and even the FBI and CIA.
Finally, two computer hard drives containing nuclear weapons secrets were reported missing from a high-security vault at Los Alamos, N.M., while a wildfire raged there May 7 -- though the disappearance was not reported to the Energy Department until June 1 and was made public till June 12. (The hard drives were reported found June 16. Fortunately, we all know enemy agents couldn't possibly copy significant data off a hard drive which went missing for as little as five weeks.)
When the news of the missing drives did finally break, Democrats -- who had been stalling the appointment of an Air Force general as the new custodian of the nation's nuclear arsenal -- finally threw in the towel, and the Senate voted 97-0 to confirm Gen. John Gordon to head the new National Nuclear Security Agency.
It's easy to say "Times have changed" in the 50 years since this nation last put spies to death for stealing nuclear secrets. But if the policy is that there are to be no more secrets, why not admit that, instead of continuing to spend all this public money on "black" defense projects, meantime withholding all kinds of data from the American public under the guise of "security"?
In fact, keeping our submarines at sea would make no sense if their routes of travel were regularly faxed from the White House to our nation's enemies, would it?
Mr. Clinton has a sworn duty to maintain the nation's defense security, and Mr. Clinton's point man in this latest scandal is current Energy Secretary Bill Richardson. So where was Secretary Richardson at the joint hearing of the Senate intelligence and energy committees on that date?
Nowhere to be seen. Mr. Richardson, a former Democratic congressman with no perceptible expertise in matters nuclear, who has been mentioned as a possible vice presidential nominee, has instead been running around the country, campaigning for Vice President Al Gore.
''Perhaps if the secretary would spend more time ensuring the safety of our nation's nuclear treasures and less time trying to get the vice president elected president, we wouldn't be here today,'' commented Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby, R-Ala.
Sen. Shelby has a point.
Supposedly it "doesn't matter" that Bill Clinton was a draft-dodger and that many in his administration keep mistaking Marine guards for bellboys. But can it really be a mere coincidence that an administration which from the first has seen the nation's military and security apparatus as a happy playground for Cloud-Cuckoo-Land experiments in social progressivity -- from quotas for "openly-gay" staffers to "sexual harassment" witch-hunts to the latest proposal for mixed-sex pink submarines -- now finds its security systems leaking like a sieve, and no one minding the store?
Of course, none of the blame will fall on the Clintons. Like the absent-minded drivers who weave from lane to lane and then speed on oblivious to the screeching brakes and smoking wreckage left behind them, they'll all be retired and swigging Knickerbockers on the porch by the time America's men in uniform have to pay the final price for this parade of folly.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available at $24.95 postpaid by dialing 1-800-244-2224; or via web site http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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