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We've had great difficulty sending/receiving this text due to intentional interference with email traffic. 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: (317) 780-5200 Fax: (317) 780-5209 Internet: lindat@iquest.net ************************************************** 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