[Investigative journalist Tom Nugent is the author of Death
at Buffalo Creek (W.W. Norton), a book about the environmental impact
of coal mining. Donald R. Soeken, LCSW-C, Ph.D., is the founder of
Whistleblower Support Fund and a licensed clinical social worker who has spent
more than three decades counseling federal whistle-blowers and has been
profiled in NY Times, Parade, etc.]
Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons Security Breach Showed How
U.S.
System for Protecting Federal Whistleblowers Is Broken
Inquiry by Department
of Energy Inspector General
Fails to
Address the "Culture of Fear" at Y-12 Facility
By Tom Nugent and Donald R. Soeken, Ph.D.
Now that President Barack Obama has been convincingly reelected,
he can do the nation a huge service by quickly ordering his White House legal
counsel to review a potential national security threat that could produce a
catastrophe on the scale of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
That potentially devastating threat was nakedly exposed last
July 28, when three senior citizens armed only with Bibles and bolt-cutters
successfully invaded the country's major storage facility for enriched uranium.
Led by an 82-year-old, white-haired nun, the trio of elderly
peace activists (average age: 67) managed to cut their way through three
high-tech security fences . . . and then splashed blood and painted antiwar slogans
at the $500 million Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF),
supposedly the most heavily guarded nuclear weapons materials depot in the
world.
An enormous embarrassment to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
-- which has overall responsibility for security at the Oak Ridge (Tenn.)
Nuclear Reservation -- the debacle at the "Y-12" storage facility led to
numerous firings and blistering criticism aimed at the private contractor which
had been directing day to day security operations for DOE.
Predictably enough, the DOE Inspector General (IG), Gregory H.
Friedman, quickly launched a wide-ranging investigation into the massive
security breach. After several weeks of analyzing the breakdown in
detail, the IG issued a report that blamed the incident on "multiple system
failures on several levels" ( http://energy.gov/ig/downloads/inquiry-security-breach-national-nuclear-security-administrations-y-12-national ).
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