Black Crawling Systems Archive Release 1.0/Black Crawling Systems Archive Release 1.0 (L0pht Heavy Industries, Inc.)(1997).ISO/tezcat/UNSORTED/1_1_Murder__Note_the_De

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Subject: 1/1 Murder: Note the Defense Contractors named
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AEN NEWS

Courtesy of one of our great sources
who prefers to remain unknown.


        Summary:  Kohn, Howard.  Who Killed Karen Silkwood?, New York,
New York, Summit Books, 1981.  Kohn is an award-winning investigative
reporter and Senior Editor at Rolling Stone magazine.  He investigated
the Silkwood case since 1974.

Summary

        This book went far beyond the film.  The anti-nuclear movement
got its jump-start as a result of Silkwood's murder in Oklahoma City,
Oklahoma.  But Silkwood was not the only martyr to the cause.  Many
others lost jobs, forfeited savings, had to go into hiding, and lost
their good names due to smears after they came forward to testify to the
blatant cruelty to nuclear workers, smuggling nuclear material and
selling it on the black market, loss of privacy, illegal wiretapping,
secret surveillance, and illegal and unethical practices with regard to
intentional violations of nuclear safety guidelines.
        Many law enforcement personnel in Oklahoma City were later
discovered to have been members of the Red Squad, cooperating with
Kerr-McGee's goons in illegal practices after having attended a secret
spy school alongside CIA-types from all over the world.
        Silkwood, an employee, had been secretly collecting evidence
about Kerr-McGee's violations which were endangering the lives of untold
numbers of people, not just at Kerr-McGee's plant, but at all the
government nuclear plants all over the country to which Kerr-McGee's
defective fuel rods had been shipped, rods which could create meltdowns.
        Fuel rods are about as thin as a pencil, eight feet long, metal,
and stuffed with plutonium pellets, after which the rods are welded shut,
a precision weld which had to be smooth.  The welds were then tested and
x-rayed for defects.  The Atomic Energy Commission was paying Kerr-McGee
for the rods.  But the real profit for Kerr-McGee was in the fact that
they were getting in on the ground floor of nuclear energy, being the
first oil company to do so, which later gave them a monopoly.
        The way fast-breeders work puts incredible pressure on the rods.
If plutonium leaks out of a rod through one tiny hairline crack, the
other rods can blister and swell, which, in turn, can block off the
coolant.  The rods then overheat, fuse together, creating a meltdown, the
big one.  There was a new book out called We Almost Lost Detroit about
the only fast-breeder to go on line in the United States, a commercial
nuclear plant named Fermi near Detroit, the one that had a criticality
and almost melted down.
        After collecting substantial evidence against Kerr-McGee,
Silkwood was on her way to a secret meeting to turn over the evidence to
David Burnham, a New York Times reporter who had broken the Frank Serpico
story, and to Steve Wodka, a union official from Oil, Chemical and Atomic
Workers International.  On her way to the meeting, Karen Silkwood was
killed when her Honda was run off the road, crashing head on into a
cement culvert lining a creek a mile past the Kerr-McGee factory.
        Silkwood had been a trophy-winning race car driver on the
autocross circuit where she had to nimbly navigate by twisting, braking,
and racing her Honda through numerous pylons in a matter of seconds.  She
had won first place.
        The night of her murder, Burnham and Wodka visited the site.  The
evidence they saw there told the story:

        The car had crossed the center line, moving left to the wrong
side of the road, and had gone off onto the left shoulder, a grassy
embankment that dropped away sharply from the pavement.  Yet the car had
skittered a good length along the shoulder, almost a hundred yards,
parallel to the road.  "Why the hell didn't she get back on?" Wodka
wondered.  It was almost as if another car had driven alongside and
forced Karen to stay on the shoulder.

        Jack Tice, chairman of the local union, said that recently Karen
had been upset and alarmed because she thought someone was out to get
her.  She was sick with a bad lung infection, her voice "full of gulps
and hissing exhalations."  She was jumpy, anxious, and lacking sleep.
She started taking Quaaludes to help her sleep.  During the autopsy, it
was discovered that she had taken one Quaalude the previous night.  In
her notebook, she had written, "the company knows something's going on."
        She was reporting in once a week to Wodka, telling him of the
evidence she was collecting in her manila folder.  Wodka recorded some of
the conversations, recordings which were later used at trial.  In the
recordings, she spoke of the photomicrographs, the X-rays, and the
missing plutonium.
        During her daring investigation, she also spoke to James Noel, a
science teacher, friend, and former co-worker at Kerr-McGee.  Noel had
made notes in his daily journal, notes which also were later used at
trial.  He wrote that she said, "There's just so much wrong.  Every day
I'm finding out stuff you wouldn't believe.  I swear, you wouldn't
believe it."  He also wrote down her quote about the nuclear material
unaccounted for - seventeen kilograms, which was about forty pounds.  His
journal was later introduced as evidence at the trial.
        Silkwood had already decided to leave Kerr-McGee.  In one of her
last conversations with her sister, Rosemary, she had asked Rosemary to
pick up job applications for her.  Rosemary told her to come home the
next day.  Silkwood had responded, "I just gotta finish one thing first."
        After the murder, the Highway Patrol swiftly and prematurely
concluded that she fell asleep during this ten minute drive, resulting in
a one-car accident, despite evidence to the contrary.
        While waiting for Silkwood, Wodka's motel telephone was
inexplicably dead during the critical hours.  Later he began using pay
phones due to his suspicions.  Wodka's union boss, Tony Mazzocchi,
authorized him to hire an investigator, A. O. Pipkin, a former policeman
who specialized in traffic accidents.  Pipkin concluded it was no
accident, that Silkwood was not alone on the highway, that she was not
asleep, and that another vehicle had rammed her from behind.
        He discovered in the left rear bumper of Silkwood's car a two
inch long, three quarter inch wide gouge in the steel.  On the fender
next to the bumper, was another large dent.  Finding these "mighty damn
suspicious," Pipkin performed extensive tests.  The dents, made by a
blunt object, contained no road film, indicating that they had been made
the night of the accident.  According to Newtonian physics, if Silkwood
had been asleep, her car would have drifted right, following the slope of
the road.  Instead, it had shot left, up over the crown in the center of
the road onto the left shoulder where it then straightened out,
"indicating she was awake and trying to return to the pavement."

        Another thing:  the impact of a limp, sleeping body against the
steering wheel would not have so drastically altered its shape.  The
wheel had been concaved to the point of fracture, the halves shoved so
far forward they almost overlapped.  Obviously, Karen had braced her
hands against it....The tracks and furrows were those of a car squirting
over the center line and spinning off the road, not drifting.  The rear
left wheel actually spun off first, making three tracks instead of two in
the mud and grass where it left the road.
        It appeared that Karen's autocross experience had kept her from
panicking and helped her regain control.  She had managed to hug the
shoulder, driving next to the road for two hundred and forty feet.
Perhaps her assailant was hogging the road, preventing her return.  In
any case she was still on the grass when the culvert loomed.  The car hit
the short north wingwall [of the V-shaped creek culvert] and jumped.
Karen's final act was to clutch the steering wheel as the car sailed with
savage accuracy across twenty-four feet of creek bed into the south wall.

        The Highway Patrol then tried to say that the dents were because
the tow truck operator had banged the car into the culvert cement wall
while lifting it out of the creek.  But the tow-truck driver, Sebring,
said his men never banged the car.  There had been no jarring or scraping
sound.  Not only that, but Sebring had pulled the car out over the grass
in order to not bang it up any more.  "It didn't come close to the
wingwall....It was a good five, six feet away."
        Wodka thought the new Highway Patrol report was perhaps a "put-up
job."
        Pipkin also ran chemical tests on the dents.  The dents contained
fragments of metal and rubber, but no concrete, evidence clearly
contradictory to the Highway Patrol report.  In response, the Highway
Patrol decided not to take their own samples.  In fact, they hadn't
examined the car since the accident.  When pressed for more information,
they said the case had been turned over to the Federal Bureau of
Investigation.  Questions should be directed to them.
        Strangely, however, Pipkin had never been contacted by any agents
from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
        The idea that she had fallen asleep in a drug stupor was
ludicrous.  Six toxicologists said fifty milligrams "is not necessarily
enough to induce drowsiness," while one government toxicologist said it
was.  Her adrenalin was probably pumping because she was so excited, and
shivering as well because it was so cold.  The shoulder of the road was
like a washboard.  Who could have slept through it?  And it was on an
incline.  She would have had to struggle to keep the car headed straight
all that way.  No one could do that while asleep.  Her arms had to have
been braced to have bent the steering wheel so far back.  No one does
that while asleep or in a stupor.
        One Highway Patrolman said he had placed all of Silkwood's
possessions in her car, which was then towed to a garage.  He said he had
picked up some papers from the mud, placing them in the car as well.  A
police officer from another town, Guthrie, had also witnessed the papers
strewn in the mud and creek, about fifty of them.
        But later investigation revealed that none of the her possessions
in the car included her prized and hard won folder of evidence.  The
papers that were there bore no Kerr-McGee insignias, no photomicrographs,
no copies of Kerr-McGee documents, none of the hard evidence she had
painstakingly spent seven weeks collecting, but only about a dozen union
papers, none of which had evidence of having been in the mud or the
creek, and none of which bore the Kerr-McGee insignia.
        Someone stole the documents out of her car in the garage.  That
was when the cover up began.
        White she was investigating, Silkwood spoke of dishonesty,
disregard, and fraud committed by Kerr-McGee.  Prior to Silkwood,
attempts to unionize in Kerr-McGee's various factories and mines were
few, all dismal failures.  In one, coal miners had struck for six
months:  Kerr-McGee never budged an inch.  In another, an entire town
refused credit to any potash workers to stop the walk out.  In another,
Kerr-McGee refused to pay any compensation to Navajo mine workers:  Out
of a hundred uranium miners, eighteen were dead and twenty-one were
terminal with a rare lung disease.  During Silkwood's unionizing efforts,
one strike led to a Kerr-McGee ultimatum:  Either go back to work or else
their jobs would be given away.  Kerr-McGee fought the union further with
petty harassments, transfers, threats of violence, and ugly remarks.
        When she began her attempts to unionize, partially it was because
she had realized how poorly the workers had been educated about the
deadly effects of radiation.  Even after being poisoned numerous times,
no one at Kerr-McGee had ever informed Silkwood that plutonium causes
cancer.  None of the other workers had been informed either.  Eighty
percent of the workers had under two years experience.  Workers thought
it was harmless play to shoot at each other with uranium pellets from an
air gun.  Kerr-McGee had done its best to keep people uninformed:  In
compliance with a regulation to notify the public that it was going into
the business of nuclear energy, Kerr-McGee put the ad in the smallest
newspaper around that no one read.
        An anonymous tipster revealed that there had been numerous
spills, that the floorboards of a truck had been eaten all the way
through with plutonium, and that there were holes in the Kerr-McGee
gloveboxes used by workers to stuff the pellets into the fuel rods, all
charges which were later corroborated.
        Kerr-McGee attempted to make do with secondhand equipment and
untrained kids on a staff which had a sixty percent turnover rate.
        Kerr-McGee had ordered defects in the welding of rods to be
ground down and disguised to get around the Atomic Energy Commission
requirements, shorten production time, and increase profits.  The defects
in the welding included bubbles, occlusions, voids, hairline fractures,
and cracks.  It didn't matter what the quality of the weld, Kerr-McGee
was passing all of them, a practice which got worse as they speeded up
their time table from one pellet lot every three weeks to one every
week.  Silkwood pointed out to her union supervisor that she had one
particular weld she would love for him to see because of how far down
they had to grind it to get rid of the defects.
        On one occasion, five gloveboxes had leaks.  The room was so hot
that the health physician ordered it shut down for clean up, but the
supervisor overruled the health physician and ordered production to
continue on as if nothing were wrong.
        In one spill after another, Silkwood had to collect her urine and
feces into bioassay kits to be saved for later analysis in the lab to
determine whether she had been poisoned internally.  In one spill, she
had been assigned to vacuum up spilled plutonium.  After the task was
completed, she discovered plutonium splattered on her face and hands
resulting from the previous user not cleaning the vacuum after the last
spill.
        In another spill, a leak had been detected in a glovebox she had
been using which required another round of bioassay kits.
        Silkwood discovered that gloveboxes which were damaged with
blisters and cracks had simply been covered over with masking tape.  A
bunch of plutonium pellets were rolling around in the bottom of a desk
drawer.  Contaminated wipes were used to clean equipment.  Equipment for
self-monitoring was not used.  Spills were tracked from one room to
another.  Spills weren't recognized or dealt with properly.  Dirty
filters were used in the mouthpieces of respirators.  Pipes and gaskets
were leaking and corroded.
        When a spill happened, Kerr-McGee was supposed to stop production
to decontaminate.  Instead, workers were forced to work in respirators
the rest of the week:  Decontamination occurred on the weekend, if at
all.  There was failure by Kerr-McGee to minimize contamination.  There
was also poor monitoring of safety and health conditions.  Samples of the
air were taken, but were either not counted immediately or the results
were delayed.  During the night shift, there was no repairman on duty.
Plutonium was stored in such a way that risked criticalities.  There were
cracks around the glovebox windows.  The tape used to seal the cracks was
peeling.  Uranium dust was found in the workers' lunchroom.
        In similar spills at other plants, a pipe for radioactive waste
had been inadvertently hooked up to the workers' drinking fountain.
Every time they took a drink, they were dosed.  In another plant, the
dose of radiation had been found to be eight times more than allowed by
code in the workers' lunchroom.
        In another instance, a sick worker fainted.  Silkwood rescued the
worker when a Kerr-McGee health physician tried to use a packet of
smelling salts but didn't know enough to break it open first.  When the
resuscitator arrived, it was useless because the adaptor was broken.
Finally, an ambulance took the worker away.
        When alarms went off indicating a leak or a spill at Kerr-McGee,
workers were told to ignore it as a false alarm.
        Silkwood was a spirited fighter.  At one point she became upset
with the fact that her supervisors would not enforce safety regulations,
but bothered to enforce dress code regulations:  When the heaters broke
down at work, they refused to allow Silkwood to wear a sweater under her
company uniform.  The next day, she protested by not wearing any
underwear beneath her uniform.  When her supervisor confronted her, she
told him she was only following company rules.
        Because she had the strength of her convictions, she was asked to
run for a position on the bargaining committee for the upcoming contract
talks, a position with no pay and a lot of work.  The workers voted and
elected her.
        When a co-worker, Jean Jung, was dosed, Silkwood told her to go
get a nasal smear immediately, the test revealing plutonium in Jung's
nostrils.  The health physician on duty told Silkwood she had no business
being present with Jung, who was terrified, shaking, and crying.
Silkwood informed him to read the contract:  She was staying put to hold
Jung's hand.  Then the health physician replied that he was not going to
do any more talking.
        When she discovered the Kerr-McGee fraud where defects in the
fuel rods were being masked over, she volunteered to get the hard
evidence by stealing the X-rays to turn over for public scrutiny.
        Silkwood helped to organize a union meeting for the workers to
attend so they could learn from the experts about radiation.  Dr. Donald
Geesaman had worked as a physicist and researcher for the Atomic Energy
Commission for thirteen years.  When his experiments revealed that
plutonium gas caused cancer, he requested a review of radiation
standards.  His superiors not only refused, but fired him for
insubordination.  He was now a professor.  Geesaman informed the workers
that they don't have to have a criticality to die from plutonium:  Just a
small speck could cause cancer.
        Dr. Dean Abrahamson was a physicist, physician, ordained
minister, and professor.
He had resigned from Babcock & Wilcox when he realized they compulsively
sought loopholes for their nuclear business.  He told the workers that
they should have been informed from their very first day on the job that
plutonium causes cancer.  He quoted Dr. Glenn Seaborg who had named
plutonium.  He said that it "is fiendishly toxic.  It's a thousand times
more deadly than nerve gas, twenty thousand times more deadly than cobra
venom."
        The workers were told that the standards were overly optimistic
because they had been based on animal research.  Exact data was hard to
come by because cancer takes twenty or thirty years to develop in
humans.  "The human experiments are going on right now....You're the
guinea pigs."
        At work, she was found to be contaminated three times in three
days, having to go through the painful scrub down with Clorox, Tide, even
harsher abrasives, and a bristling brush.  But two of those days she had
spent doing paper work at her desk, never going near plutonium.
        That was when they decided to check her apartment.  Everything
Silkwood had touched at home was contaminated.  The source was a package
of baloney in the refrigerator.  Men wearing moon suits and life-support
gear showed up to take away all of her possessions in steel drums.  In
three hours, her place was stripped, the contents held in the custody of
Kerr-McGee.  As Silkwood stood watching in shock, crying, Morgan Moore, a
high official with Kerr-McGee dropped by with his company lawyer in tow.
        This was a significant event in many ways.  It was significant in
the sense that it provided Kerr-McGee with the opportunity to search
Silkwood's home and all of her possessions.  They could even search
behind the walls.  It was also significant in the sense that their
response to Silkwood's shock, hysteria, and contamination in her home, an
unprecedented event, was not to seek medical treatment or counseling for
her, but to seek legal counsel for themselves.
        Later Silkwood called Wodka, crying and upset, saying she thought
she was dying.  Wodka consulted Dr. Dean Abrahamson, who told Silkwood
she needed a full body count for which she had to fly to Los Alamos, New
Mexico, one of only six places in the country which was equipped with an
in vivo counter.  Only after Wodka insisted, did Kerr-McGee pay for
Silkwood, her boyfriend, and her roommate to fly to Los Alamos, all three
to be tested.
        Silkwood then stopped by her home, slipped past the quarantine
signs, and retrieved her package of evidence.  "They didn't get the
stuff," she later told Drew, her boyfriend.  She then had to find another
hiding place.
        The Atomic Energy Commission came to interview her at length
because a contamination in someone's home had never happened before in
the history of nuclear power.  Wodka flew in as well.  Wodka asked the
Atomic Energy Commission to stay at a different motel, suspecting motel
workers were tipping Kerr-McGee to the supposedly surprise inspections.
        During the interview, it was discovered that Silkwood had eaten
two sandwiches made from the hot baloney.  Atomic Energy Commission
inspectors patronizingly informed her that there had never been a single
case of anyone dying or being seriously injured from this kind of
accident, a notion that Wodka found unbelievable.  Silkwood also told
them that she couldn't have accidentally brought home any plutonium
because she always monitored herself prior to leaving work.  Besides, she
hadn't been near any on the last two of the three days.
        The Atomic Energy Commission brought with them a man who
specialized in keeping up a good image for nuclear power by controlling
headlines and stopping discussion in the community.  As a result of his
cover up efforts, none of Silkwood's neighbors ever found out her home
had been contaminated.
        The Atomic Energy Commission then interviewed Jack Tice, asking
him if Silkwood would have dosed herself with radiation, and asking him
who the anonymous tipster had been.
        Prior to flying to Los Alamos, Silkwood had given Wodka part of
the evidence, two notebooks full of her written documentation.  She said
that the rest of the evidence was in a safe place.
        When Los Alamos had first been created, it was a secret city:
None of the government workers could vote, file legal papers, or send
uncensored mail.  For all practical purposes, they didn't exist.  "For a
while all the plutonium in the world was kept there in a storeroom,
inside a cigar box."
        A Los Alamos scientist also spoke to Silkwood patronizingly,
telling her that most nuclear materials lost their ability to hurt anyone
after only a few months or years.  What he did not tell Silkwood was that
plutonium is different:  It stays active for 240,000 years, a fact which
Silkwood already had learned from Drs. Geesaman and Abrahamson.
        When she returned to work, Kerr-McGee had assigned a security
guard to track her every move, following one step behind her everywhere
she went.  Kerr-McGee said it was for her protection.
        Later that night at a union meeting, she told Jung, "Somebody's
got it in for me, Jean.  The way I got dosed was no accident.  Somebody's
out to get me....But those [Atomic Energy Commission] inspectors act like
I did it to myself."
        After the union meeting was when she was supposed to meet with
Burnham from the New York Times and Wodka to deliver all the evidence.
The meeting place was the Holiday Inn Northwest.  When Wodka arrived, the
motel "had lost his reservation and given away his room.  He would have
to bunk the night with Burnham.  Burnham had a room, but the phone in it
was dead."  Once they received the news that Silkwood had been killed,
the phone magically began working again.
        After investigating the case only a short time, Burnham had to
leave.  Over his objections,  he was ordered back to Washington, D.C. by
his editors.  Later, he quit writing articles altogether because "the
case had been officially closed.  The Justice Department, relying on the
FBI's investigation, had ruled that Karen's death was an accident."
        After Silkwood was murdered, her boyfriend, Drew, discovered her
camera was missing from his apartment.  He suspected his place had been
searched.  He installed new locks.  He also felt certain he was being
followed and kept under surveillance.
        Many strange things happened during the investigation.  For
example, the tow-truck operator normally on duty during the night watch,
George Martin, was called to tow Silkwood's car out of the culvert.  But
half way there, he was called off of this job by radio, a particularly
peculiar event since it had been a Code Two call, meaning someone was
pinned inside a vehicle.  Instead, Ted Sebring, the day man, was called.
Sebring had to leave a party and come out in his nice clothes to tow the
car.  It was suspected that this move was to buy time for someone to
steal Silkwood's manila folder of evidence.
        After Pipkin had called in his conclusions regarding his traffic
accident investigation, he obtained a second opinion from Dr. B. J.
Harris, a structural engineer.  Harris concurred:  It had been a hit and
run accident.
        Only four days after Silkwood's murder and sometime after Pipkin
had called in his conclusions, a road crew was destroying all the
evidence, ripping up the dirt and grass on the shoulder of the highway,
changing the slant of the road, eliminating the rising crown in the
middle of the road.  Strangely, only a few miles on either side of the
culvert was being repaved.  The measurements Pipkin and Harris made would
never be the same again.
        Some of Tice's union workers were chased down the highway at high
speeds.
        Sherri, Silkwood's roommate, was terrified because "on her first
night in her new apartment burglars had broken in and ransacked the few
things she had left."
        A news crew did tests on Pipkin's theories on the newly paved
road using a car identical to Silkwood's, without knowing the road had
been repaved.  Half the time the driver found that it went left and half
the time right.  Only later, from viewing helicopter footage did the news
crew understand why:  The road crown had been eliminated.
        During the investigation and subsequent courtroom proceedings,
Kerr-McGee was meticulous in following headquarters' instructions to not
discuss the case.
        It was discovered that in 1971, a few Kerr-McGee employees were
internally contaminated, but after the 1972 strike, it only got worse.
After a citizen, Ilene Younghein, complained to the Atomic Energy
Commission, they decided that people around the Kerr-McGee plant should
be interviewed to find out whether they wanted to live next door.
Kerr-McGee responded by writing to the Atomic Energy Commission that
interviews were not "a proper subject of inquiry."  Several months later,
Kerr-McGee wrote a letter which they had two cities and one county send
to the Atomic Energy Commission, each saying exactly the same thing word
for word about how everyone liked the plant:  This was their public
survey, a put up job using manufactured evidence.
        When nuclear power first emerged, the Atomic Energy Commission
had a conflict of interest:  On the one hand, it was supposed to promote
the use of it, while on the other, be its policing agent as well.  The
local Atomic Energy Commission proved to be simply yes-men to Kerr-McGee.
        The Atomic Energy Commission was building an experimental nuclear
reactor called a fast-breeder, a name given because of the ability of
plutonium to reproduce itself.  Two other fast-breeders had been
attempted, but had to be shut down due to accidents.
        In response to Ilene Younghein and her concerns, Atomic Energy
Commission officials told her that you could get more radiation under a
pine tree than you could from inside or outside a nuclear reactor.
        The Atomic Energy Commission was required to set up a public
documents room so the public could see the results of inspections done at
Kerr-McGee.  But they weren't required to inform the public about the
room, its purpose, or its location.  When Younghein, a local citizen
investigating spills, finally located it, she discovered cardboard boxes
piled in a heap, filled to overflowing with papers lying every which
way.  There was no index and no organization.
        Further, when Younghein attempted to make copies of some of the
documents exposing spills at Kerr-McGee, she discovered there was no
copier at the library where the Atomic Energy Commission had chosen to
put its public documents room.  So she had to patiently transcribe it all
by hand for days.  She discovered that the anonymous tipster had been
telling the truth.  Kerr-McGee had been having accidents.  In one of
them, plutonium had eaten through a truck's floorboards, spilling onto
the ground where the wind could take it anywhere.
        When Younghein complained to the Atomic Energy Commission again,
they patronized her with assurances that any violations that may have
occurred had been corrected, that the truck had been buried, and that she
needn't trouble herself anymore.
        The Atomic Energy Commission issued a report which virtually
exonerated Kerr-McGee on all thirty-nine violations which Silkwood had
accumulated against them.  Of the thirty-nine, it said, only twenty had
merit.  Of the twenty, only three were violations, just technicalities,
for which Kerr-McGee was slapped on the wrist.  There were no fines, no
penalties, no punishments.
        An honest congressional investigator named Stockton found the
Atomic Energy Commission report extremely inept:

         Every point of controversy had been glossed over.  Health and
safety conditions at Cimarron (a vaguely worded conclusion that
everything was okay).  The contaminations of Karen in her apartment (a
one-sentence speculation that they were self-inflicted).  The alleged
defects in the fuel rods (a declaration that all fuel rods were up to
snuff, though there had been some "irregularities").  The "missing"
pounds of plutonium (no discussion of any sort).

        Stockton confronted them about the fact that the possibilities
were wide open as to who contaminated Silkwood's home because the back
door was always left open, a country custom.  When asked why they hadn't
dusted for fingerprints, the spokesman for the Atomic Energy Commission
replied that Kerr-McGee people had already cleared everything out by the
time they arrived on the scene and that Kerr-McGee had already concluded
for the most part that Silkwood had done this to herself.  Stockton
wondered how they could possibly have made such conclusions so quickly:
The spokesman said that it was logical because she was such a
troublemaker.  When Stockton countered that it was even more logical to
assume that Kerr-McGee had done it, the spokesman became very
uncomfortable and denied responsibility for sorting out who the bad guys
were, passing the buck to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
        Another Atomic Energy Commission/Nuclear Regulatory Commission
spokesman admitted to Stockton that Kerr-McGee did have missing plutonium
problems in 1974 where they had to reinventory twice.  But the mechanism
for taking the inventory of plutonium involved allowing the company to
self-select the test site on pipes, self-perform the test, and then guess
as to the total amount left in all the rest of the pipes.  When Stockton
suggested that the Atomic Energy Commission would be at the mercy of the
company, the Atomic Energy Commission inspector disliked the implication
and replied, "You're assuming Kerr-McGee would have a reason to do that."
        Around this time period, congress attempted to resolve the
conflict of interest that existed within the Atomic Energy Commission,
turning it into two agencies.  The Nuclear Regulatory Commission would
now be responsible for regulating.  The Energy Resource and Development
Administration would now be responsible for promoting.  "On closer
inspection the reform seemed to be only on paper.  The acronyms had
changed, but not the people or the policies."  It was literally the same
inspectors working out of the same offices, but with a new name.  "The
old Atomic Energy Commission regional director, James Keppler, was the
new Nuclear Regulatory Commission regional director."
        In one story written by Burnham, facts given indicated that out
of over three thousand violations which had occurred in 1973 and 1974,
the Atomic Energy Commission had handed down rulings involving only eight
small fines.
        Peter Stockton, a congressional investigator for Congressman
Dingell, had become interested in the case.  Even before he decided to
investigate, someone from the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy dropped by
to influence Stockton to not bother with the case since Silkwood was "a
real mess, a weirdo."
        Next, Stockton became suspicious when, after requesting a
briefing with the Atomic Energy Commission, six top-ranking officials
from the Atomic Energy Commission gave him his briefing:  It was
overkill.  Their briefing amounted to slandering Silkwood and dirty talk
about her sex life, subjects which Stockton did not find relevant.  Their
point was, who are you going to believe, a perverted kook or a
"four-square corporation like Kerr-McGee?"
        Stockton's boss, Congressman Dingell, referred the investigation
on to the General Accounting Office, "which is a repository for
Kind regards,

***********************  V  *************************
          DEATH TO THE NEW WORLD ORDER
****************************************************

Linda Thompson
American Justice Federation
Home of AEN News
& news videos, "Waco, the Big Lie,"  "America Under Siege"
3850 S. Emerson Ave.
Indianapolis, IN 46203
Telephone:  [phone]
Fax:  [phone]
Internet:  [e-mail]

**************************************************
   Remember Waco.  The Murderers are still free.
***************************************************

The Army courtmartialed Spc. Michael New
for not wearing a U.N. hat, but the Army won't
courtmartial the 160th and 158th Special Operations,
82nd Airborne, Ft. Hood Cav and 10th Mountain Div.
soldiers who helped MURDER CHILDREN at Waco.

What's wrong with this picture?

********************************************

Do you pay taxes because you are afraid if you don't, the feds will take
your paycheck, your house, your car, and put you in prison?
Funny, when the mafia does it, that's called CRIMINAL EXTORTION.

THIS YEAR, JOIN 50 MILLION AMERICANS AND JUST SAY NO.

                    And never give up your guns.

***********************************************
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world;
the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself.

Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
                                                         -George Bernard Shaw