Scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Goddard Space Flight Center are up in arms over a new requirement by NASA that they submit to detailed FBI scrutiny of their backgrounds in order to obtain clearance to go to work. They are claiming that the agency may be trying to control or silence them about issues like global warming.
The new security clearance requirement, which involves interviews of neighbors and checks into the distant background activities of scientists, many of whom have worked at JPL and Goddard for as long as thirty years, is puzzling because both locations have little or no involvement in secret or national security research. Indeed, by law, NASA's activities and the research its scientists engage in are required to be publicly available.
"Almost nobody at NASA does classified work," says Robert Nelson, a veteran scientist at JPL who heads up the photo analysis unit on the Cassini-Huygens space probe project exploring Saturn and its moons. "I think this is really all about NASA director [Michael] Griffin putting a security wrap around us."
Nelson and 26 other JPL scientists and other employees have retained a Pasadena civil rights law firm to file suit in federal court in California to block the security program.
Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net
There's been a few reports in the last couple of years that indicate that literally hundreds of scientists have experienced pressure by the Bush Administration. Alot came out last January during hearings by the Committee on House Oversight and Government Reform committee chaired by Henry Waxman that officials either sent back scientists' reports that don't support official administration positions, being told to eliminate words like 'climate change' or 'global warming' from reports or having administrators from their respective organisations changed the reports completely misrepresenting their findings.
Every other agency has been politicized so...it's no wonder that NASA was as well. Michael Griffin, a NASA administrator last May told NPR interviewers that he didn't think that "global warming was a problem we need to deal with".
On one hand one may reason that doing background checks on personnel at possible targets like NASA isn't so illogical. But given the tension within agencies like NASA these days, some employees' and scientists' perception of this as an intimidation tactic may not be so unreasonable a conclusion.
by
chariotdrvr14 (1 articles, 0 quicklinks, 1 diaries, 134 comments)
on Thursday, August 30, 2007 at 4:19:11 PM
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