You Won't Believe This

In the middle of the night on July 28, 2012,  three people cut through an outer security fence at the Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons Complex surrounding the building that stores America’s uranium stockpile for its nuclear weapons.  They walked through the hole they made in the fence into an area that was brightly lighted and they poured some blood they had brought with them onto a wall.  Then they cut through a second security fence and entered into the ultra high security area known as the “Intrusion Detection Zone”.  There they cut a third fence and entered through it under the view of security cameras and walked into the area past motion detectors.  There they cut a fourth security fence, entered through that hole and walked up to the most highly protected building in the entire world, the American Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.  That building holds the United States nuclear weapons-grade enriched uranium.  There they cordoned off a corner of the facility with crime scene tape, read a statement, read from a Bible they had brought with them, poured blood on the building and spray-painted comments on the facility.  With hammers they had carried in, they symbolically chipped away at a corner of the facility.  And they waited.  About two hours later, a security guard appeared and arrested the three intruders without even drawing his gun.

The Oak Ridge Nuclear Weapons Complex suspended all weapons- production operations for more than two weeks while they “retrained” their personnel.  The media reporting, including ABC News, and the New York Times (FN1) , as well as the hearings held in the U.S. Congress was concentrated on the security breach.  The trial for the three intruders, who are activists members of an organization known as “Transform Now Ploughshares”,  is currently scheduled for May 7, 2013.  Meanwhile in addition to personnel retraining, the fences, of course were repaired, reports were filed and America’s nuclear weapons-grade enriched uranium was safe – again?  Meanwhile, other members of the Transform Now Ploughshares group went to the “repaired” part of the outer fence and found that the security forces had repaired the wrong hole.  The hole the entrance group had cut remained there, still open, and readily visible from a security road only 20 yards away, which is patrolled several times daily, the hole in the fence still open and unrepaired AND conspicuous because of plastic ties the activists had tied to the fence cuts.

How can the U. S. military be so screwed up?  Well, it’s not guarded by any U. S. military forces.  They’re in Afghanistan and elsewhere.  And it’s not the local police either, or the state police.  It’s a corporation.  Actually it is several corporations because they keep having problems doing what should be a pretty simple and easy job, at least compared with combat.  DynaCorp was there at one time, Wackenhut provides some security,  Badcock was probably the corporation that had “responsibility” during the activists incursion. 

At any rate, these corporations currently “guard” much of America.  Private security guards have outnumbered government police officers since the 1980s.  Coordination between private and official agencies often ovelap and the private agencies now perform work previously assigned to official agencies.  Wackenhut for example has contracts to guard the Internal Revenue Service, the General Accounting Office, the Federal Reserve, Oak Ridge National Security Complex, Savannah River nuclear plant, Jet Propulsion Laboratory,  even Fort Bragg, and this is not a complete list.  They also have various resouces devoted to airports, ports, and specialized Global Response Teams and Executive Protection Services, etc. Wackenhut, DynCorp, Blackwater, Triple Canopy  are four of about forty-five “Private MIlitary Firms” that can be found on a partial list.  (FN2)

(FN1) http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/11/science/behind-nuclear-breach-a-nuns-bold-fervor.html?pagewanted=all

I knew these people.  About 15 years ago my wife and I marched with them every August 9, at Oak Ridge, TN, that date being the anniversary of the bombing of Heroshima.  The  actual account of their penetration into the nuclear site was rather amazing.  An earlier blog had described one of our marches back in 2000:   http://theprettypenny.blogspot.com/2002/08/oak-ridge.html

(FN2) "Capitalism:  Servant or Master” by John Womack, p.21     
 http://www.johnhwomack.com/John_Womack/Capitalism.html