Below is my column today in the Los Angeles Times. The column follows the recognition of the name for Area 51, which produced a great deal of media coverage.
Last week, the U.S. government declassified a report about a secret facility in Nevada. Such declassifications are nothing new but, from the report’s 400 pages, two words immediately jumped out: Area 51. The government had finally acknowledged the name of a controversial base in the desert north of Las Vegas where it conducted top-secret research.
The document’s release will do little to quash the glut of Area 51 conspiracy theories about recovered alien spaceships and government cover-ups. But the real cover-up there has nothing to do with UFOs. Area 51 was more than a national security site; it was also an alleged crime scene, and at least two good men may have died from what occurred there. They were not hurt by aliens but by their own government, which refused to declassify information they needed to understand what had happened to them.
During the 1990s, I represented Area 51 workers in two lawsuits. The suits, which forced the first official recognition of the base — though not its name — were the first against a “black facility,” one whose very existence is denied by the government. Over the course of the litigation, the contents of my office were classified, I was threatened with arrest, workers and their families were threatened with prosecution and we had to go as far as Moscow to find images to prove the existence of the base.
Area 51, as the newly declassified material makes clear, was a test site for Cold War technology, including the U-2 spy plane. But it was also, according to people who worked there, a hazardous waste site, at which classified equipment and materials were disposed of in an illegal and extremely dangerous manner.
When workers at Area 51 first came to me in the 1990s, they described how the government had placed discarded equipment and hazardous waste in open trenches the length of football fields, then doused them with jet fuel and set them on fire. The highly toxic smoke blowing through the desert base was known as “London fog” by workers. Many came down with classic skin and respiratory illnesses associated with exposure to burning hazardous waste. A chief aim of the lawsuits was to discover exactly what the workers had been exposed to so they could get appropriate medical care.
The first hurdle was the government’s refusal to acknowledge even the existence, let alone the name, of the facility. We supplied pictures of the base. We supplied affidavits from workers at the base. We even submitted pictures of planes taking off in Las Vegas and then the same planes landing at Area 51. At one point, I offered to drive the judge personally to the base and point at it from a mountaintop. (The government then acquired the mountaintop and barred the public.) Ultimately, the government confirmed the existence of the base only after we located Russian satellite pictures. It turned out that the Russians had a virtual catalog of pictures of Area 51 for public sale. You just needed a credit card.
That did not end the bizarre character of the litigation. My office was off-limits to anyone but myself. I was forced to meet with my clients in seedy motels and garages to avoid their being arrested. My last memory of one client, Wally Kasza, was of him sitting in a car in a Las Vegas garage with his oxygen tank and medications. He had only weeks to live but wanted me to promise to continue to fight to hold the government accountable.
In the end, we prevailed in demonstrating that the government had acted in violation of federal law. However, the government refused to declassify information about what it had burned in the trenches, which meant that workers (and their doctors) still didn’t know what they had been exposed to. The government also refused to acknowledge the name of the base.
The burning at Area 51 was in all likelihood a federal crime. But the government escaped responsibility by hiding behind secrecy: How could the law be applied at a place that did not exist for the burning of unknown things? Of course, Kasza did exist, as did his colleagues, including another worker who died, Bob Frost. But when they became sick — with rashes, racking coughs or dreadful skin conditions — they were barred from telling doctors where they worked or what they had been exposed to. After Frost’s death, an analysis of tissue samples from his body found unidentifiable and exotic substances that one of the nation’s premier scientists could not recognize.
The newly released report doesn’t clear up those questions, and it comes after the statute of limitations has passed for any crimes that may have been committed there. The report also contradicts statements given to the court in our case. Most notably, in 1995, the government’s lead counsel, Col. Richard Sarver, told Judge Philip Pro: “Your honor, there is no name. There is no name for the operating location near Groom Lake.” Hiding behind that fiction allowed government officials to avoid accountability for these unlawful operations.
The officials responsible for those alleged crimes have now retired. But the truth is still out there. The question is whether anyone really wants to know it.
Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University, was lead counsel in the Area 51 litigation.
Los Angeles Times August 20, 2013
Frank N Beans 1, August 21, 2013 at 8:05 am
Yes the truth is out there
Noam Chomsky: Sarah Palin Was Right About ‘Hope And Change’
First Howard Dean and now Noam Chomsky agreeing with Sarah Palin?
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It is agreeing with the truth, which no one owns.
When you hear the truth go with it, don’t corrupt your mind by rejecting truth because of personality.
Same with falsehood.
A similar situation is occurring with the chemicals used in fracking. I read where an emergency room nurse went into seizure after handling the contaminated clothes of an injured worker. The doctor trying to save her life was told the chemicals used in the fracking process was proprietary information, an industrial secret, like if they were common knowledge everybody would be out there fracking. The refused to reveal any information as the nurse lay dieing.
The chemicals used in fracking process leach into the groundwater and aquifers that supply much of our drinking water, but Dick Cheney made sure they were exempted from regulation under the Clean Water Act. How many people will be made ill and suffer and die as a result of greed and irresponsibility? It would be nice if someone could find a way to bring legal action to stop the contamination of the nation’s water supply caused by fracking, rather than pitying the poor saps who will die miserable deaths years from now, wishing something had been done.
What Tony said … definitely what Tony said!
Charles: Are we sure UFO’s do not exist there??
No, but the more plausible explanation is that the government, with infinite funding, does research and makes discoveries that they keep secret because they have potential military applications.
I think it is safe to assume government labs are significantly ahead of the public, by ten years or more, in all sorts of technologies, including in particular materials science, optics, sensing devices for eavesdropping or spying, cryptographic encoding and breaking, etc.
I believe there is some evidence of that practice in declassified materials.
“After Frost’s death, an analysis of tissue samples from his body found unidentifiable and exotic substances that one of the nation’s premier scientists could not recognize.”
Are we sure UFO’s do not exist there??
Yes the truth is out there
Noam Chomsky: Sarah Palin Was Right About ‘Hope And Change’
First Howard Dean and now Noam Chomsky agreeing with Sarah Palin?
Thank you for your courage. This is exactly why tyrants always want to “kill the lawyers”.
The war on American citizens by “their government” continues unabated.
Follow on to my previous comment:
In fact, isn’t the statute of limitations supposed to be a form of protecting citizens from persecution BY the government?
I don’t think it should apply to the government at all; it should only apply to people. If the statute of limitations is justifiable by any Right, then it is supposed to be a restraint on government, not a boon to it.
Government will literally kill you to keep its secrets. Don’t think it doesn’t happen still. Michael Hastings comes to mind…..
It seems to me that there should be no statute of limitations on cases impossible to try at the time due to perjury, official secrets, and other governmental obstruction of justice.
@OtteryS:
Yes, I thought the same thing when I was watching of an old timey show form the 1960s called The Outer Limits. It was about a test pilot getting caught in Time Limbo, and trying to save his kid on a trike from a truck. Anyway, the airplane looked very similar in some shots to the Blackbird spy plane. I thought this was weird, then I found something called an X-15 which explained it. This story was also a lot like Stephen King’s Langoliers. FWIW.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
With all that secrecy, it always puzzled me how Model Airplane News magazine (which is still being published monthly) published plans for a scale model of the U-2 sometime back in the 1950s. Accurate measurements for a scale model of the most secret airplane ever? How? No one ever admitted anything, but long before the U-2 was made public, model builders were building models of it from plans in a magazine.
Sadly, some smaller part of the frustration which Prof. Turley struggled with, occurs every time someone sues Wal-Mart, a doctor who has committed malpractice, or a mortgage company/servicing agent. Too often, the law really is an @ss.
Squeeky Fromm
Girl Reporter
“It’s all for the good of the Syndicate, Yossarian”, I mean Jonathon..
Un-American activities, carried out by our govt.
The US government and intelligence services appear to always be behind the curve. Now, anyone can look thanks to Google Earth. Keep in mind this picture is probably degraded somewhat from what military level pictures show. These stitched together images were taken with a camera 23,000 miles above the earth. Copy the coordinates below and paste them into the Google Earth search bar. You can zoom in and out, and move around, but alas, there is no “street view.”
37°13’55.02″ N 115°48’16.78″ W
The truth always has inherent value, but lies are priceless.
Fascinating. Thanks for hanging in there & getting as far as you could. Our government doesn’t look much better than the Soviet Union in some matters. I get a kick out of Rusia’s Putin today, not freedom’s best friend, actually giving Edward Snowden some accomodation while the US government wants the whistleblower in jail.
Great sorry. It is amazing how the Federal Government and the Pentagon play word games to hide the truth from families of veterans and government workers. I want to know what happened to those poor souls who may have been killed by illegal government activities at Area 51.