The Center for Public Integrity

A culture of cheating pervades the guard force at America’s premier processing and storage site for nuclear weapons-grade uranium, according to a new report this week by the Energy Department’s inspector general.

Contract officers and supervisors of the force at the Y-12 plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee, shared advance copies of test materials with patrolmen, said inspector general Gregory H. Friedman, rendering their responses unreliable. But he put the blame squarely on the Energy Department for mismanaging the facility’s operations.

The abuses he cited are not new. Eight years ago, Friedman blew the whistle on even worse cheating by the Y-12 guard force, disclosing that for years they obtained advance word of mock assaults meant to test their capabilities, and carefully redeployed their forces to produce impressive but faked results.

But this time, Friedman suggested the problem was not isolated. A contract official who works both at Y-12 and another “high-security DOE” site told Friedman’s staff that the official “had taken similar actions” to share written test materials in advance with the managers of that site’s guard force, his report stated.

Friedman’s report did not name the second site, but two government officials confirmed it is the sensitive facility known as Pantex, in Amarillo, Tex., the government’s principal factory for assembling, taking apart, and storing plutonium triggers for its nuclear arsenal. As a result, the reliability of the protective force for key components of that arsenal in two locations can now be considered open to question.

Closely-fought presidential campaigns can confound expectations by constricting — rather than broadening — public debate about significant policy issues, a phenomenon most recently on display during the debate between Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Rep. Paul D. Ryan.

The two men, offering a preview of the foreign policy issues expected to arise at the Oct. 16 and Oct. 22 debates between President Obama and Mitt Romney, mostly competed to demonstrate the muscularity of their teams’ approaches to a vexing set of international challenges.

Each vowed their party would play tough with Iran and stick by the current hard line leadership in Israel; spend whatever is needed for critical U.S. military operations and forces; safely extract U.S. troops from Afghanistan; and efficiently engineer the ouster of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad.

Ryan argued that Iran’s drive for a nuclear weapon has been relentless, and that it is closer now to achieving its goal than it was when Obama won election. Biden responded that Iran is more isolated now than ever before, and said international sanctions are seriously harming the Iranian economy.

Both men were actually right, but their convictions masked the fact that much mystery remains about how the drama over the Iranian program will play out.

Will the toll of tough sanctions eventually cause Iranian citizens to sack their leadership and reverse course? Could that happen soon? Will the sanctions — or the threat of the government’s ouster by its own citizens — convince Iran’s leaders never to mate fissile materials with the other components of a working bomb? Or will the heightened foreign pressures only goad Iran to move faster and farther along the nuclear path?

President Barack Obama signed an executive order last week creating new protections for national security and intelligence community whistleblowers, effectively sidestepping a congressional impasse provoked by the reservations of congressional Republicans.

The order — formally known as "Presidential Policy Directive 19" and signed by Obama out of public view on Oct. 10 and without a White House announcement — directs intelligence agencies to establish procedures for the protection of employees reporting waste, fraud and abuse.

The order is meant to address longstanding concerns that whistleblowers in the intelligence agencies lacked legal protections like those available to employees of the Department of Defense and other federal agencies.

The new order bans retaliation against whistleblowers in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other intelligence organizations. Until now, these agencies were not specifically prohibited from retaliating against whistleblowers. 

A House bill aimed at improving protections for most federal employees, known as the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act and passed by that chamber in September, lacked the safeguards ordered by Obama. Angela Canterbury, from the Washington, D.C. watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, said House Republicans had narrowed the bill’s focus due to worries that its provisions might encourage Wikileaks-type disclosures of sensitive information.

She called this a "red herring," explaining that by protecting those with security clearances who want to blow the whistle on wrongdoing at intelligence agencies, a new law could have encouraged them to “use safe internal channels.” The Senate has yet to take up its own version of the bill.

An alarming report published by the Department of Homeland Security in March 2010 called attention to the theft of dozens of pounds of dangerous explosives from an airport storage bunker in Washington state.

Like many such warnings, it drew on information gathered by one of the department’s “fusion centers” created to exchange data among state, local and federal officials, all at a cost to the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars.

There was just one problem with that report, and many others like it: the theft had occurred seven months earlier, and it had been highlighted within five days in a press release by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which was seeking citizen assistance in tracking down the culprits.

The DHS report’s tardiness and its duplication of work by others has been a commonplace failing of work performed by fusion centers nationwide, according to a new investigation of the DHS-funded centers by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

The centers were created with great fanfare over the past decade by Washington with the aim of redressing gaps in intelligence-sharing among local, state and federal officials — gaps documented by probes of the period before the Sept. 2001 attacks, when some of the attackers were stopped by police for traffic violations or other reasons, and then released.

In July 2009, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano called the fusion centers “a critical part of our nation's homeland security capabilities.”  About 70 of the centers now exist, located in major cities and nearly all states.

A major U.S. worry about the tumult in Syria — perhaps the major worry — has been the risk that part of that country's sizable arsenal of nerve agents and other deadly chemical weapons might fall into the wrong hands amid the chaos of a civil war. That's why remarks by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta at an afternoon press conference with the Canadian defense minister seem so alarming.

In response to a question about rebel claims to have seized some of that arsenal, Panetta said the intelligence community no longer knows for sure where all of Syria's chemical weapons are, and that as a result, he is unsure if they have been picked up by elements of the Syrian opposition. The opposition, as we know, includes extremist elements as well as rebels supplied with arms by Saudi Arabia with Western advice and encouragement. In short, the new claims emanating from Syria appear to have caught the intelligence community by surprise.

One of the Syrian weapons is VX, an odorless, tasteless chemical considered the most toxic nerve agent ever created. 

Here is the transcript of Panetta's remarks, as released by the Pentagon on Friday afternoon:

KADENA AIR BASE, Japan (AP) — Years before F-22 pilots began getting dizzy in the cockpit -- before one struggled to breathe in advance of a fatal crash, before two more went on television to say they refused to fly it -- a small circle of U.S. Air Force experts knew something was wrong with the costly stealth fighter jet.

Coughing among pilots and fears of contaminants in their breathing apparatus led the experts to suspect flaws in the oxygen-supply system of the F-22 Raptor, especially in extreme high-altitude conditions. They formed a working group a decade ago to deal with the problem, creating a unique brain trust.

Internal documents and emails obtained by The Associated Press show they proposed a range of solutions by 2005, including adjustments to the flow of oxygen into pilot's masks. But that key recommendation was rejected by military officials who expressed reluctance to add costs to a program already well over budget.

"This initiative has not been funded," read the minutes of their final meeting in 2007.

Minutes of the working group's meetings, PowerPoint presentations and emails among its members reveal a missed opportunity for the Air Force to improve pilot safety in the 187-plane F-22 fleet before a series of high-profile problems damaged the image of the aircraft and led to a series of groundings. Its production was halted last spring and the aircraft has never been used in combat.

The Air Force says the F-22 is safe to fly — a dozen of the jets began a six-month deployment to Japan in July — but flight restrictions remain in place, preventing its use in high-altitude situations where pilots' breathing is under the most stress.

Japan, Taiwan, and China have been contesting ownership of five deserted islets and three rocks in the East China  Sea since oil reserves were detected nearby more than forty years ago. But new tensions were stoked this month when the Japanese government nationalized the islands by purchasing them from a Japanese family. 

This week, both Taiwan and Japan sent vessels there, prompting the Japanese to shower the rivalrous boats with water balloons launched from slingshots. Okay, not really. It wasn't balloons that Japan fired, but the hi-tech version of a middle-schooler's backyard weapon: a water cannon.

Although the United States transferred the islands' post-war administration to Japan in 1971, its official position on their sovereignty now is neutral, a stance that came under question in this fun exchange at a press conference Tuesday, Sept. 25, by George Little, the acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs:

        Q:  George, U.S. forces and Japanese self-defense forces are conducting a joint exercise on Guam, simulating the defense of a small island against an unnamed aggressor.  Does this have anything to do with the recent tensions between Japan and China over the Senkakus? 

            MR. LITTLE:  This is merely an exercise, and I wouldn't tie it in any way to island disputes….. 

            Q:  George, having the Marines train the Japanese on how to hit the beach and take an island, how does that jibe with the overall position stated that the U.S. does not take a position in these island disputes? 

            MR. LITTLE:  Repeat the first part of your question for me. 

A little over five weeks ago, the Pentagon’s F-35 program got a new deputy manager, and a few days ago, he gave a candid “outsider’s” appraisal of the most costly weapons program in history — one that was noteworthy for its appraisal of how poorly the troubled aircraft program was run during the past decade and its criticism of the chaotic way that the Pentagon has been buying such high-tech weapons.

Maj. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, a seven-year Air Force acquisition veteran who last managed the KC-46 tanker program, warned an Air Force Association audience on Sept. 17 at National Harbor, Maryland, that “some of you may cringe at what I say.” Then he disclosed that the F-35’s buggy software “scares the heck out of me,” that its computer-driven logistics system is “frightening,” and that the relationship between the Air Force and the plane’s lead contractor Lockheed Martin is “the worst I’ve ever seen.”

The Pentagon intends to spend over $1.5 trillion over the next thirty years on the F-35, which it considers critical to the country’s military future. It’s a “joint” program because the plane is to be used by the Air Force, Navy, and Marines, an approach initially conceived to save costs. But Bogdan said that describing these as variants reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what the effort has become: “It’s three separate airplane programs that have common avionics and a common engine.”

Not only that, the program has eight foreign partners and two foreign customers, a number the Pentagon hopes to grow. Partly as a result, its management has been a mess: Cost overruns so far have hit a billion dollars and production and flight testing are years behind schedule. In his 15-minute talk, Bogdan used the words “complex” or “complicated” 17 times, at one point asserting that “there is not a more complex program on the planet.”

Since the September 11 terrorist attacks, Americans have been haunted by the idea that terrorist groups around the world could set off a “dirty bomb” — a simple explosive device that would scatter radioactive material to the winds, devastating a city.

Thankfully, that threat has never materialized. But the government’s watchdog is sounding alarms that terrorists looking to acquire the radioactive materials for such an attack could find them easily and unsecured at hundreds of hospitals around the country.

A report released Tuesday by General Accountability Office has found that only one out of every five hospitals that use high-risk nuclear isotopes for diagnosis and treatment have the recommended safeguards needed to secure the materials.

Over 1,500 hospitals in the U.S. use radiological sources that could be turned into dirty bombs, according to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which shares purview over nuclear technologies with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.  NNSA has spent $105 million to upgrade security at 321 hospitals, but the agency warns it will take until 2025 to upgrade all of the hospitals on their list.

“The longer it takes to implement the security upgrades,” warns the GAO report, “the greater the risk that potentially dangerous radiological sources remain unsecured and could be used as terrorist weapons.”

The improved security features, which include enhanced security doors, increased surveillance equipment and the installation of tamper alarms, have also been slowed by the voluntary nature of the upgrades.  Because the hospitals are not required to undergo these upgrades, facilities looking to cut costs can decide the security upgrades aren’t worth the expense.