Will the Missile Shield Work? It's a Secret:
>>> Let nothing stop the defense contractor / campaign contributor gravy train. Particularly not those pesky details!
washingtonpost.com
...The Pentagon has made a decision that threatens to keep the American public and Congress in the dark about how things are going with the Bush administration's high-priority missile defense program.
As revealed in Defense Daily, a defense trade publication, the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency has decided to classify as "secret" details of targets and countermeasures to be used in all future flight intercept tests of the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense system. Beginning with the next test, now scheduled for late July, the policy will be to withhold specifics about the targets or decoys used.
...Equally disturbing is the agency's new policy of withholding information from the Pentagon's own independent review offices, such as the Director of Operational Test and Evaluation. If independent review of testing progress is stifled, the Pentagon itself will be unable to make reasonable judgments about the program's viability.
Of course, if the intent of the Missile Defense Agency is to prevent unwanted criticism, it could go further. It could make the classification policy retroactive. It could apply it to all missile defense programs, air-, land-, sea- and space-based. It could classify descriptions of flight tests. Finally, it could also classify information used to prepare budget requests for congressional review.
If this were to happen, it would become practically impossible for Congress, the popular press, defense trade journals and the American public to evaluate missile defense development. Defense Department press releases on missile defense tests might become undependable, revealing the good news on successes but using classification to skirt the bad news in failures.
Oversight might not be such an issue if missile defense weren't so costly. Most experts expect the Ground-Based Midcourse System alone to cost more than $70 billion, and the full, layered system planned by the Bush administration to cost more than $200 billion. In today's dollars, this is roughly eight times the cost of the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb. |
