Prof. Charges Pentagon Cover-Up

The Pentagon is accused of trying to hush a critic of the national missile defense proposal, a newspaper reports.

The News York Times reported in Friday's editions that MIT professor Theodore Postol claims the Defense Department is punishing him by trying to get university administrators to stop him from distributing a report widely available on the Internet.

The university, which has contracts with the Defense Department, has not taken action against Postol, but correspondence indicates the administrators might eventual do so, despite reservations.

The report concerns another NMD critic, Nira Schwartz, an engineer who used to work for military contractor TRW and has accused the company of faking tests of the system. The Pentagon commissioned the report to evaluate Schwartz's claim, and the final product was critical of her assertions.

Shortly after that, the Times says, the Pentagon said that classified information remained in the report. It declared Postol's letter secret because it contained that information.

"Just because it is made public doesn't mean it's declassified," the newspaper quotes Lt. Col. Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, as saying.

The letter from Postol to then-White House chief of staff John Podesta, posted on the Web site of the Federation of American Scientists, discusses a test of the national missile defense technology.

"I have obtained and analyzed the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization's (BMDO's) own published data from the Integrated Flight Test –1A (IFT-1A) and have discovered that the BMDO's own data shows that the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle (EKV) will be defeated by the simplest of balloon decoys," he wrote. "I also have documentation that shows that the BMDO in coordination wth its contractors attempted to hide this fact by tampering with both the data and analysis from the IFT-1A experiment."

In an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes II last December, Postol claimed the whole system currently being tested by the Pentagon is fatally flawed and that the Defense Department and the Justice Department have known that for years.

Earlier this month, in a Pentagon test of the national missile defense technology, an interceptor successfully destroyed a dummy warhead, despite the malfunction of a radar component. The previous two tests were failures.

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