Return-Path: Received: from minuet.skypoint.net by skypoint.com with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0tg7nF-0004yCC; Sat, 27 Jan 96 04:23 CST Received: by minuet.skypoint.net (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0tg7W0-0004tYC; Sat, 27 Jan 96 04:05 CST Received: from iquest1.iquest.net by minuet.skypoint.net with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #6) id m0tg7W0-0004tjC; Sat, 27 Jan 96 04:05 CST Received: from iquest.net by iquest1.iquest.net with smtp (Smail3.1.29.1 #11) id m0tg7Jg-000BByC; Sat, 27 Jan 96 04:53 EST Received: from ind-004-236-172.iquest.net by iquest.net with smtp (Smail3.1.28.1 #16) id m0tg7Iq-000338C; Sat, 27 Jan 96 04:52 EST Message-Id: Date: Sat, 27 Jan 96 04:52 EST X-Sender: lindat@iquest.net X-Mailer: Windows Eudora Version 2.0.3 Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" To: news@aen.org X-UIDL: 822792154.025 From: lindat@iquest.net (Linda Thompson, American Justice Federation) Subject: 4/4 Murder: Note the Defense Contractors Named Status: U Part 4 of 4 parts continued If this arrives garbled, please let me know. 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. quick, perceptive, and ahead of her time with regard to feminist causes. Her history showed that she had courage to fight the good fight. A direct quote from a tape made by Wodka of one of their phone conversations reveals the answer regarding her stance on nuclear power: In the final month of her life she had been ready to join the movement, had there been a noticeable one at the time: "Steve, we have eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys who didn't get any schooling, so they don't understand what radiation is." The voice grew simultaneously softer and higher. "They don't understand, Steve! They don't understand!"....Just before she hung up, Karen had mentioned a public hearing scheduled for the next day at the State Capitol. It involved the Black Fox nuclear reactor near Tulsa. Representative Thomas Bamberger was inviting people to come and give their opinions. "I think one of us ought to go over there," Karen had said. "Somebody's got to tell them they better hold off on that shit!" When the judge finally forced the Kerr-McGee lawyer to turn over the Kerr-McGee files to Sheehan, their records indicated that the final figure of missing plutonium was sixteen pounds, when only four weeks prior to Silkwood's murder, the figure had been forty pounds. The excuse was that it had been stuck in the pipes. Gerry Spence, the famous country lawyer, was hired by Sheehan to try the case in court. When Spence deposed FBI agent Olson, there were more than thirty objections made under the excuse of national security. During one objection, the judge retired to chambers to listen to the argument for national security. Upon returning to the courtroom, he said the matters should remain secret, then proceeded to formally identify Srouji as a government agent. FBI files indicated that they attempted a classic smear on Stockton, using unnamed sources passing on unverified rumor. When asked whether there had been any pressure applied to the FBI to stop investigating the Silkwood case, Srouji indicated that the Oklahoma City bureau had been stopped by an order from the Justice Department. Srouji also claimed to have copies of Reading's transcripts of wiretaps and bugs on Silkwood. When asked about Mr. DeLorenzo who was her publisher for the book, Srouji indicated that he was with the Central Intelligence Agency. It was he that had asked her to write the book and he that had paid her. Two so called friends of Drew and Karen, Steve Campbell and Bob Byler, turned out to be spying on them while working for the Red Squad, turning over their information to Reading at Kerr-McGee. During his deposition, Campbell admitted he became friends with Drew on orders from Reading, turning over information to Reading after spying on Drew and Karen. So Reading had been receiving information about and photographs of Silkwood secretly through the Oklahoma City Police Department. They had been working with Kerr-McGee all along. All the cops claimed they were doing this unofficially for their old buddy, Reading. Reading, it turns out, had been high up in the Oklahoma City Police Department years ago. Kerr-McGee hired him away to be their security chief, someone who came with ready-made connections to the police department. Reading had already sworn he had not even heard of Silkwood until her home was contaminated. But Sheehan had gathered incontrovertible proof that Reading was gathering a dossier on her almost a month prior to the contamination at her home. Drew, Silkwood's boyfriend, put together a quick summary of the events: October 10 - Silkwood organized the union seminars; October 12 - Silkwood and Drew ran into Campbell and Byler, who pretended to be their friends; October 16 - the union won the election to keep their union; October 17 (approximately) - Campbell and Byler met with Reading at Kerr-McGee; November 5 - Silkwood was contaminated; November 6 - Silkwood was contaminated; November 7 - Silkwood was contaminated, her home inspected and found to be contaminated; November 13 - Silkwood was murdered; Sheehan felt that no jury in the world would believe it was a coincidence that Campbell and Byler met with Reading within such a short time, two days at the most, after the union won the vote of the workers to keep their union. One of Sheehan's investigators was a priest, Father Bill Davis. At one point, Taylor had attempted to get him to wear a small microphone under his priest's collar. Father Bill refused, saying, "I'll do one or the other, but not both. It's a clash of symbols. With one I'm telling people I can be trusted, but with the other I'm deceiving them." Father Bill investigated another car accident that had happened. A union member's car had been sideswiped, almost forcing him off the same highway, only a few days after Silkwood had been murdered. The man refused to talk. Oklahoma City Police had labeled the incident a prank. Father Bill also investigated another strange occurrence: John Thomas Cook was murdered by a shot to the head. He had been an oil rigger in Oklahoma. Dying, he used his blood to write the letters AEC (Atomic Energy Commission) on the wall. "But his message had nothing to do with the government AEC: it was about a sex triangle and jealousy and suicide." Taylor's sources said the Central Intelligence Agency had been involved in this entire thing from the very beginning: The agency had known about the smuggling and killed Silkwood because she had found out. It had been this same source that had tipped Taylor that Srouji's publisher was CIA. There were agency ties in many places. They had people stationed in Oklahoma City because of Kerr-McGee. There were agency overtones written all over an outfit like Audio Intelligence. When Sheehan tried to get a deposition from Jack Holcomb, the head of Audio Intelligence, Holcomb left the country immediately. The same thing happened when they tried to serve Bill Lovin from Georgia Power: He took his family, left the country, and fled to Germany, never even bothering to sell his furniture, but leaving it all still sitting in the house. When Sheehan and investigator Royer tried to serve J. W. Hand, an Audio Intelligence salesman living in Dallas, dropping the papers inside his screen door then leaving, within five minutes they were pulled over by someone in a white car with a red flasher on the dashboard claiming to be a policeman. He demanded identification from the driver, Royer. When he ordered Sheehan to produce identification, Sheehan said, since he was a passenger, his identification was not any of the officer's business. The officer then arrested Sheehan for refusing to identify himself and for resisting arrest, hitting his chin on the car and kicking his legs open. When Royer objected, the officer said, "The way I hear it, ain't nobody gonna miss him up there. They don't much appreciate what you're doing, and we don't either." Then, two more cops drove up, sirens blaring, handing back the papers which had just been legally served on the salesman from Audio Intelligence. The cops called them litterbugs, handing back the summons, saying, "I believe you fellas dropped this." In jail, Sheehan went into meditation and refused to eat. Angry and alarmed, his jailers allowed him a second phone call. Sheehan called the judge in the Silkwood case, explaining to the clerk how he had been "arrested without just cause, interfered with in the service of a federal subpoena, thrown in jail, and denied arraignment." Taylor and Father Bill began making phone calls to everyone in the press, the church, and in high places, an attempt to lessen the likelihood of Sheehan's death by supposed random violence. After three days, they were released from the phony arrest charges. One witness, Roy King, had been former personnel director at Kerr-McGee. He had been called to identify Karen's body the night of her murder. After that, he had called Karen's family to inform them, then dropped by the police station. While at the police station, a Highway Patrol officer told King that a lot of Kerr-McGee papers had been in Karen's car and invited him to go the next morning along with the officer to collect them from her car. The next morning, the officer arrived to inform King that there was no need to pick up the Kerr-McGee things because someone had already collected them. Shortly after the murder, King woke up at home dizzy and cold. It was winter, the windows were closed, and he could smell gas. A gas company repairman came and checked, even taking the meter apart. Apparently someone had crept in, turned off the gas in the heater, waited till the pilot light went dead, then turned the gas back on. Apparently someone had tried to kill King. It might not have had anything to do with Karen's death, King thought; and then again, it might. While waiting to hear whether the judge would hear the entire suit, Sheehan became upset with the possibility that they wouldn't be able to expose all of the evidence: "The CIA has been reformed, isn't that what we've been told?" he said into a luminous sky. "The Rockefeller Commission, the Church Committee, the Pike Committee, they reformed it. What a crock! Anytime the CIA doesn't want a case prosecuted the case doesn't get prosecuted. Justice be damned! Same as always - nothing's changed." The missing plutonium was critical to the case because it established motive. If Kerr-McGee was involved in smuggling nuclear material, with or without the participation of the Central Intelligence Agency, all the rest fell into place. Of the three parts of the law suit, the judge decided only the contaminations part would be heard. The parts about her death and cover up were thrown out. Sheehan had narrowly missed disaster. Congressman Leo Ryan's party had asked him to accompany them on their mission to investigate Jim Jones and the People's Temple. The congressman was going to visit Guyana to look into the first amendment rights of the members of the cult who had followed the Reverend Jim Jones there. Sheehan was tempted to go along, but stayed with Sara instead to help with rallies and fundraisers. The only member of Kerr-McGee management to testify for Silkwood was Jim Smith. He said Karen had been an emblem of disloyalty and revolution. Her idea of reform was to scrap all of the gloveboxes and most of the fuel rods and start over. It was difficult as well as infuriating to talk with her. But - but she had been right, Smith testified. Shoddiness and shortcuts and profiteering were everywhere in the factory. Karen's list for the AEC had been true in spades. One time, Smith said, he had to buy a hundred gallons of white paint to brush over the walls. The walls were cinderblock, full of crevices, in which plutonium had gotten lodged. The paint was to seal it in. But paint is not very permanent, and before long, thousands of tiny flakes, embedded with plutonium, were in the air. Also, behind the factory, on nine hundred acres, there were waste ponds for low-level debris. Ducks and migrating geese would swim and cavort in the ponds, enchanted in their ignorance. And runoff from the ponds once got into the Cimarron River. Whitening and distended, sand bass were washed ashore. A company crew had to take shovels and dig cemetery craters for hundreds of dead fish. Smith was on the stand three days, all told. He had a lot to tell. The "surprise" inspections of the AEC were a sham, he said. He and the other supervisors knew of them in advance....In that way a considerable number of violations were kept from the AEC. In addition, there was the incident of April 1972. Two maintenance men had been repairing a pump when a gasket seal ruptured above them. A plutonium mist had rained down. But the two men left for lunch, a meal they ate that day at the Hub Cafe, and all through the beef stew and corn bread, they had no idea their hands, hair, and clothes were hot, no idea at all until they got back to Cimarron. But no HPs [health physicians] were sent to the Hub Cafe, even though, by law, there should have been an all-out cleanup: the stools, napkin holders, salad bar, toothpick jar, everything. No one was notified, not even the AEC. "Management didn't want to risk a public panic," Smith said. The AEC inspectors did find out, but not for more than a year and not from Kerr-McGee. It was told by Mister Anonymous to Mrs. Younghein and reported by her to the AEC. Smith went on to testify about the missing plutonium. He said Kerr-McGee would not tell him what the final figure was, which was strange, since he was the one doing the cleanup. He ran boiling nitric through the pipes to flush out any remaining plutonium. On the last flush, the got three grams of plutonium, which was way less than an ounce. Spence asked him on the stand, "So if a Kerr-McGee witness gets up here and tells the jury that forty pounds is still in the pipes, why, he wouldn't be telling the truth, would he?" Smith answered, "Let me put it this way, if there's forty pounds still at Cimarron, I don't know where it is." Another witness testified about having been a former Kerr-McGee employee. He told how he sandpapered or ground down bad welds from fuel rods that had been rejected. They shipped them anyway because production was so far behind. He did this on orders from his supervisor. Former employees testified about how the real number of contaminations was probably twice what the Kerr-McGee files said it was: Without graph paper, red-alert machines couldn't record the measurements taken of air purity. They sat that way for hours. One worker had been contaminated from a barrel spouting waste "like water from a garden hose." Even after being scrubbed down, workers had to sometimes wear rubber gloves home because, already being raw, they just couldn't rub enough to clean off the plutonium. One former health physician testified that no effort was made to control the plutonium because it was a lost battle. None of the workers had heard it causes cancer until the union seminar Karen put together, or, even later, while reading coverage of the Silkwood case. Kerr-McGee didn't say a word about it in orientation or in their safety manuals. "When the workers got contaminated, Kerr-McGee played down the contaminations, leading to carelessness and more contaminations." Working in a respirator was practically useless because of the poor fit, fogging, and sweat. Kerr-McGee had promised Silkwood a special one because she had such a narrow face, but in two years of waiting, it never came. Oxygen tanks proved to be just as unreliable: Workers ran out of oxygen in their tanks while deep inside storage vessels. Desperate for air, they would rip off the top of their protective suits in order to breathe, taking in radioactive air. Nitric acid used in production rotted the rubber gloves and gaskets. The acid combined with radioactive waste had to be solidified before being put in the storage barrels for shipping. But the process sometimes was not permanent. Then the acid would eat the barrels, allowing nuclear waste to rupture the barrel and escape. That was how it had eaten through the floorboards of a transportation truck. That was also why it was floating in underground streams. Since the Kerr-McGee facility was located in Tornado Alley, special procedures had been designed to move the plutonium into a vault during a tornado alert. But former workers told how that had been a farce: It was too much trouble. The vault had grown dusty with disuse. Inspectors had been fooled or lazy or naive. Workers had been ordered to say nothing during inspections. "Before inspectors arrived, hasty cleanups were ordered, spills painted over, broken equipment hidden away....The lies and deceptions were reaching a point of numbness" for those who attended the trial. After court and after hearing all of this testimony, Spence said, "If this keeps up, I'm gonna go home a radical." An anonymous call came in to Sheehan's law office to offer them a tip. The caller wouldn't give his name. He told of a friend who was a trucker. The trucker had been asked to join an outlaw gang of truckers who were doing hits for the mob using their trucks rather than guns. Hit and run assassins, they ran people off the road with their semis. They had done jobs in Seattle, Albuquerque, and one right here, that Karen Silkwood girl. Further investigation was unable to uncover any hard evidence, though. During Mazzocchi's testimony, he said Silkwood's contamination was disruptive to their union strategy because it was poor timing, made Silkwood highly visible, and had no news value because she was just one in a series of contaminations over the years. Kerr-McGee would have been the only one to benefit. When Kerr-McGee's lawyer asked how Kerr-McGee could possibly benefit, Mazzocchi answered, "By blaming it on her, doubt was cast on her credibility. And it gave Kerr-McGee an excuse to go into her apartment and search for her documents." During the trial, the film, The China Syndrome, had opened, a film which depicted a "hit and run goon squad to frighten whistlel-blowers." At this point, Kerr-McGee's lawyer requested a mistrial. At this point in the trial was when the accident at Three Mile Island happened in Pennsylvania. Pregnant women and small children were advised to leave immediately, while one million people around Three Mile Island were advised to get ready for possible evacuation. "A succession of human errors and machinery breakdowns - by themselves not at all uncommon - had brought the reactor to crisis." A hydrogen bubble had formed. If it continued to grow, it could press on the cooling pumps, stop the cooling process, and cause a meltdown. At this point, Kerr-McGee's lawyer asked for another mistrial. Two months prior to Three Mile Island, the Rasmussen Report had fallen into disrepute, labeled unreliable by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission had spent years saying a meltdown was a one-in-a-million event. Three Mile Island was not the most severe nuclear accident. Accidents at Rocky Flats in Colorado got that distinction. Fires in the weapons factory burned through filters causing plutonium dust to shoot into the air. The wind had blown it everywhere. Cancer was sharply rising in both Denver and Boulder. The Detroit plant and England plant were both shut down after partial meltdowns. In Detroit, citizens had not even been informed until months afterward. A fire at Browns Ferry in Alabama raged for six hours, destroying control wiring. Only a jerry-rigged backup prevented a meltdown. Fifty thousand gallons of nuclear waste had gone into drinking fountains in St. Paul, Minnesota. A jet making an emergency landing in Japan had almost run head-on into a nuclear reactor. It had been conventional fuel rods which may have created the bubble at Three Mile Island. Kerr-McGee had sold its rods to Bobcock & Wilcox, which, in turn, supplied Three Mile Island. The Atomic Energy Commission investigator admitted during the trial that he could have taken fingerprints at Silkwood's home after the contamination, but didn't. He also admitted that he had not investigated further when it was discovered that her contamination was from Lot 29, a lot that had been shipped two months before her contamination. He also admitted that he had not investigated further when it was discovered that over forty pounds of plutonium was unaccounted for. When asked whether he had checked financial records of people involved, including those of upper management, a standard procedure when valuables are missing, Kerr-McGee's lawyer objected. The jury never got to hear the answer, but Spence felt he had made his point with the jury. On the stand, a Kerr-McGee official who had been a member of the design committee swore their factory was not located in the middle of Tornado Alley. He didn't think there was a Tornado Alley in Oklahoma. That night a tornado passed within five miles of the plant, ripping limbs from trees and killing a cow. Sheehan commented later, "No doubt about it - God's on our side....Next time they lie, they'll be afraid of lightning striking." In court, the Kerr-McGee official, Moore, who had showed up at Silkwood's contamination at home with his lawyer in tow, had to be asked five times whether or not he had ordered that Silkwood be put under guard escort on the day of her murder. Finally after the fifth time, he admitted to it. He also admitted to having put out false stories to the press, making headlines that some of the contaminations had been the result of sabotage by workers rather than leaks for which Kerr-McGee was responsible. When Kerr-McGee presented testimony by a solitary doctor to say that the level of contamination was not significant in terms of causing cancer, Spence made the point that this doctor had attended college on a government scholarship, attended medical school on a government scholarship, and ever since been working at Los Alamos, a government facility, altogether a government expert "bred, fed, and led by the feds." The majority of the evidence, evidence which tied the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kerr-McGee, the Oklahoma City Police Department, and their Red Squad together in the case, was never allowed to be introduced in the trial. The conspiratorial nature of events never got a fair hearing, nor did the evidence of all their illegal spy activity. Yet, in court, the Kerr-McGee lawyer painted Silkwood as a sneaking spy for the union. Paul asked, "Have you heard anything about Kerr-McGee using anybody to spy or sneak around? No, you haven't." Sheehan was enraged. Spence closed his argument with the following: This is the story of a smart-alecky boy. One day he caught a tiny bird. Holding it in his hands, he decided to trick a wise old man, "Old Man, what do I have in my hands?" he asked. The old man saw the bird's head peek out and said, "A bird, my son." "Ah, but is it dead or alive?" Whatever the answer, the boy thought, he'd fool the old man. If the old man guessed dead, he'd let the bird fly free. If he guessed alive, he'd crush the bird with his fingers. But the old man only smiled. "My son, " he said, "it's in your hands." Ladies and gentlemen, it's in your hands. During jury deliberations, Kerr-McGee lawyers had been heard discussing the case out in the hallway: "This trial is a farce - Congress should be deciding these issues, not a jury. What do six people from Oklahoma know about nuclear science? Why should they have any say-so? They're just six ordinary people. Nobody elected them." Pressure to stop the anti-nuclear movement continued. Two activists were "gunned down, assassination-style," one dying on the operating table and one, the mother of two children, surviving with a bullet lodged next to her spine. Other members of the movement found themselves the victims of "vandalism, burglaries, and beatings." When the jury completed their deliberations, they returned with the conclusion that Silkwood had not smuggled out plutonium or contaminated herself, that Kerr-McGee had been negligent in its operation to allow plutonium to escape from their facility which caused her contamination, that actual damages be awarded in the amount of $505,000, and that punitive damages be awarded in the amount of $10,000,000 as penalties against Kerr-McGee. Although Karen had been the first victim officially recognized in court, the toll of the dead and dying long preceded her. Out west in the fifties the army had ordered GIs into foxholes near the epicenter of atomic tests; scores of men, maybe more, had come away with leukemia or other forms of cancer. A cancer had killed John Wayne, a cancer caused perhaps by nuclear fallout. One of the big bombs had been blown up when the Duke was in Utah for the movie The Conqueror. Half a dozen others from the movie set had died of cancer too, as had the many Navajo miners, and all those nuclear workers on Mancuso's charts, and some others, more unlucky yet, killed in freak accidents by radioactive substances that ate them alive. If there was any redemption to this, it was the men of science, the Gofmans and Mancusos, still fighting for tougher radiation standards. After her murder, Silkwood's headstone for her grave was inscribed with a quotation Karen had chosen for use in her high school yearbook, "It is not only the most difficult thing to know oneself, but the most inconvenient thing too." After the trial, supporters and activists gathered to put up a memorial, a tribute to Karen Silkwood near the accident site on the highway. Next to her engraved image, it read, "Born 2-19-1946, Died 11-13-1974, Vindicated 5-18-1979." After the trial, investigator Stockton began to get angry with the smears on himself, Karen, Dingell, and Seigenthaler. He decided to sue James Reading, Jackie Srouji, Larry Olson, Kerr-McGee and the Federal Bureau of Investigation for libel, for violations of his civil rights, and for conspiracy that prevented him from doing his duties as an officer of public trust, all in an effort to bring out the secrets, secrets about smuggling plutonium and police state tactics. Sheehan put together a law firm called the Christic Institute, "not so much a place for lawyers as for people of conscience." Weeks after the trial, Taylor received a call from one of his resources in the Federal Bureau of Investigation who told him that he had found a lengthy report in a top-secret file: "The FBI knows exactly what happened. It's all right there on page three." There was a narrative of that night, he said: from the Hub Cafe to the highway culvert. Karen had been followed as she left the cafe. She had driven south on Highway 74, toward Oklahoma City, but then she had swung west, making a detour down a dirt road, to the old barn on the ranch of Sherri's grandmother. Coming back to the highway, Karen encountered her pursuer. There was a brief chase; the other car banged into the Honda. Karen jockeyed about and ended up on the shoulder. The other car raced alongside. And seconds later there was the sound of a crash, then quiet, except for the fleeing wheels and the howl of the wind, a howling like a ghost gone mad....But how could the FBI be so specific, so definite? A year after the trial ended, Robert Kerr Jr. ran for office, a senate seat in Oklahoma, his father's old job. He lost the election, lost big time. Ultimately, Kerr-McGee decided to get out of the nuclear business rather than clean up their act and make the improvements requested by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. 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