This is about the most bizarre new story I have heard in some time.
It seems so full of catch-22s its already up to a catch 110. Whaddya
make of it? spike
CRITIC ACCUSES PENTAGON OF TRYING TO SILENCE HIM:
As the debate heats up over whether the United States should build a
national missile defense, one of the program's leading critics, an MIT
professor, is charging the Pentagon with trying to silence him. This week,
three agents from the Pentagon's Defense Security Service arrived
unannounced at Theodore A. Postol's office at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology. They said they came to show the outspoken
physicist classified documents, Postol said. But Postol said he refused
to look at the papers stamped ''SECRET.'' Recalling the Army's attempt
to classify his critical analysis of Raytheon Corp.'s Patriot missile after the
1991 Gulf War, he believes the agents' visit was a ruse to prevent him from
speaking out further against the proposed antimissile system, which has
already cost at least $60 billion.
"By showing me classified information, they could say I was talking about
classified information. I saw it as a means of abridging my First-
Amendment rights." The surprise visit came more than a month
after Postol, once one of the military's top science advisers, made
headlines after a letter he wrote to the White House detailed potential
pitfalls in the Clinton administration's missile-defense plan and exposed
what he says is evidence of a cover-up. But shortly after the letter arrived
at the White House, officials sent it to the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile
Defense Office. Officials there promptly classified Postol's findings, even
though the letter had already been posted on the Internet.
The move echoed the Army's attempt to muzzle him after the Gulf War,
Postol said. Caryl Clubb, a Defense Security Service spokeswoman,
said the agents went to Postol's office to deliver a letter from the service's
deputy chief of staff for industrial security. The document detailed areas
in which Postol's White House letter contained classified information, she
said. "This entire episode is Kafkaesque," said Democratic US Representative
Edward J. Markey of Malden, who said he plans to ask the General
Accounting Office to investigate. "First, you have the government
classifying a report raising questions about potential fraud ... then you have
government agents showing up at the author's office, trying to force him to
read a classified document that he doesn't want to read." (Boston Globe)
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