Washington Times-EDITORIAL • June 19, 2000
Bill Richardson's express checkout
"Americans can be reassured," Bill Richardson said a year
ago. "Our nation's nuclear secrets are today safe and secure."
Well, the secretary of energy's secret is out: He and his
employees apparently can't keep one, not even if Americans' lives
depend on it. On Friday Mr. Richardson announced that
investigators had found two computer hard drives said to contain
information on nuclear weapons that experts describe as highly
sensitive. Department of Energy (DOE) officials said further
testing was necessary to confirm that they were the two devices
missing since early May. Interestingly, searchers found them
behind a copying machine in an area that the FBI had already
searched twice. Their miraculous reappearance, not unlike that of
Hillary Clinton's old billing records, suggests that whoever may
have had the devices nervously returned them in the uproar of
their disappearance. Whether their absence was a matter of
espionage or of incompetence is not yet certain. What troubles
lawmakers of both parties in the meantime is that there seems to
have been no procedure in place to require immediate notification
of top DOE officials of the problem. Nor was any system in place
to track who went in and out of the secure area where the hard
drives were stored. Complained Rep. Bart Stupak, Democrat of
Michigan, "Most Americans would find it hard to believe that the
public library has a more sophisticated tracking system for
Winnie the Pooh than Los Alamos has for highly classified nuclear
weapons data." Why have an express checkout line at a nuclear lab
of all places?
Mr. Richardson says he's changed all that. Officials at Los
Alamos will now have to keep track of who comes and goes in the
secure area and with what. Why hadn't he foreseen the need for
even library-level security? Mr. Richardson says that he failed
to take into account something he refers to vaguely as the "human
element," as in, "[A]ll I am saying is that what we haven't taken
into account here, and this is a regret I have, is the human
element, the human error."
Unless Mr. Richardson is suggesting that DOE is somehow at
risk of alien espionage, the statement is almost meaningless.
Most security measures are designed with "human" incompetence or
espionage in mind. Try and imagine the outrage of people such as
Mr. Richardson if a utility executive explained that information
on the operation of a nuclear power plant had fallen into the
hands of terrorists because he had failed to consider the "human
element."
Mr. Richardson says he will explain himself in person to
lawmakers as early as this week. He ducked an appearance before
the Senate Intelligence Committee last week, no doubt to get his
"spin" straight and to avoid TV cameras. Given that America's
nuclear secrets still aren't safe and secure a year after he
promised they would be, one important question he should expect
to answer is why he should keep his job.
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The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
Shalom, A Salaam Aleikum, and to all, A Good Day.
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