The document in question is at
http://www.fas.org/sgp/othergov/dod/safety.pdf
++++++++++++++++++
http://www.reviewjournal.com/lvrj_home/2006/May-21-Sun-2006/news/7488359.html
May 21, 2006
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Warnings for emergency responders kept from Area 51 workers
By KEITH ROGERS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
In legal battles that spanned a decade, the government refused to
acknowledge that fumes from open-pit burning of stealth coatings used
on its radar-evading warplanes harmed workers at the secret Area 51
installation along the dry Groom Lake bed where high-tech aircraft are
tested.
Yet in an unclassified May 19, 2005, "Safety Supplement" that was
pulled along with other technical documents last month from a Web site
at Robins Air Force Base, Ga., emergency responders are warned about
the danger of inhaling "hazardous byproducts of burning wreckage" of
F-117A Nighthawk fighter jets.
"Do not use portable gas rescue saw in an explosive atmosphere. This
may cause ... (a) fire resulting in injury or death to pilot and rescue
personnel," the supplement warns.
The nation's fleet of 52 of these black jets are coated with the same
hazardous materials -- stuff that gives off cancer-causing dioxins when
ignited -- that former Area 51 workers have said were stored in
55-gallon drums and hauled from Lockheed hangars in Southern California
to the Groom Lake installation during the 1980s and burned in open
pits.
The acts have been contended to be criminal violations of Environmental
Protection Agency laws in a pair of lawsuits filed in 1994 by George
Washington University professor Jonathan Turley on behalf of former
Area 51 workers and the widows of two whose deaths, Turley says, were
spurred by their exposure to fumes from the burning of stealth
coatings.
In September 2004, President Bush, like his predecessor, sent a
memorandum to the chiefs of the EPA and the Air Force, saying it was of
"paramount interest" to exempt the Groom Lake installation from
adhering to federal, state, interstate or local laws regarding solid
waste or hazardous waste if classified information would be disclosed.
In April 2003, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found the
Justice Department did not abuse national security when information was
struck from court documents in the 1994 cases.
The same panel ruled in 1998 that Turley's clients were not entitled to
learn what hazardous materials were used at Groom Lake or how they were
disposed. That same year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear an
appeal of the ruling sought by Turley.
In interviews last week, Turley, one of the former workers, and other
open records advocates viewed the once-public existence of the F-117A
emergency responders' safety supplement as an admittance the Pentagon
was wrong when Justice Department attorneys succeeded in keeping
pertinent information redacted in the name of national security.
Instead, they said, the government was trying to hide embarrassing and
potentially damaging information.
In light of the "Safety Supplement" that was marked "Approved for
public release; distribution unlimited," Turley said he is "looking at
the possibility of renewed litigation related to Area 51."
"There are some cases pending that may assist us in that effort," he
said in a telephone interview. "In the interim, this type of report
should renew calls for the Nevada delegation to hold hearings on what
occurred at Area 51.
"This document indicates they are attempting to warn workers about any
future such burning," Turley said. "The problem is we have a host of
workers who may have been injured or killed by this very same conduct
and we are still hoping that Senator Reid will use his authority in the
Senate to hold hearings on the issues."
A spokeswoman for Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the Senate minority leader,
said she couldn't provide a reaction from the senator last week to
Turley's comment, other than to say his office was "still looking into
the issue."
An Air Force spokeswoman at the Pentagon, Capt. Olivia Nelson, said the
technical order that contained the safety supplement on the F-117A and
other sensitive information about Air Force One shouldn't have been
posted on the Robins base's Web site because it was "not intended for a
general public audience."
"It sounds to me like somebody made a mistake putting it up there in
the first place and we corrected the mistake," Nelson said.
Mike Coonfield, the civilian Web site administrator at Robins Air Force
Base, said Thursday he was asked by Air Force officials to remove the
document about a month ago.
"I was asked because of the lack of a better term, the furor of some
other base that described things that may or may not be publicly
accessible," he said. "I was asked to remove that TO (technical order)
and a couple others off the Web site to avoid any future problems."
The existence of the F-117A safety supplement surfaced last month after
an April 8 story in the San Francisco Chronicle claimed the Web site
posting of the technical order exposed the defenses of the presidential
jetliner, Air Force One.
A few days later, an independent writer and policy analyst, Stephen
Schwartz, said he "started poking around the Web" to explore the Air
Force One documents and found a technical order that dealt with rescue
and mishap response information pertaining to stealth jets,
particularly the F-22A Raptor and the F-117A Nighthawk.
That order contained a list of documents dated, Feb. 1, 2006, about two
weeks before Air Force officials revealed that F-117A fleet was
destined for the "boneyard" in 2008 because Nighthawks have become too
expensive and difficult to maintain and better replacements such as the
Raptor are available.
Schwartz, former publisher and executive director of the Bulletin of
the Atomic Scientists, drew the connection to the stealth hazardous
materials warning and the Area 51 workers' cases.
He found the safety supplement April 12 on a Web page maintained by the
Air Force Civil Engineering Support Agency. It was removed a few days
later.
"It listed all the different materials they're made of and what happens
to them when they burn so that you have to know what happens when you
breathe it," he said by phone Wednesday from Chicago.
To not have given the Area 51 workers the same information and then for
the government to go to great extent to have similar information
redacted from court documents "is incredibly wrong and quite unfair,"
he said.
"The people who built the planes were told, 'Forget it. You're not
going to get this information because it's classified,' and yet it's
not," he said.
For the F-117A, the safety supplement lists "hazardous byproducts of
burning wreckage" as hydrogen cyanide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides,
carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons,
hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, phosgene and formaldehyde.
A former Area 51 worker who was on the list of plaintiffs in Turley's
cases said Thursday he is angry that the Air Force warns emergency
responders about these hazardous byproducts but won't compensate him
and his former co-workers.
"It pisses me off to no end," said the worker, who spoke on condition
of anonymity. His identity was protected in the lawsuit as well.
"What is the secrecy surrounding settling up with these workers who
were injured by open-pit burning?" asked the former Area 51 worker who
suffered lung damage.
He noted that Lockheed, the aircraft manufacturer, "has admitted they
destroyed that material in that fashion, trucked it across state lines
and disposed of it by orders of the Air Force."
Lockheed compensated its injured workers, he said, so "what is the big
mystery?"
Steven Aftergood, with the Project on Government Secrecy at the
Federation of American Scientists, a nonprofit policy research and
advocacy group, said the existence of the safety supplement "tells me
that the Air Force doesn't have a clear understanding of what is truly
sensitive and what is not."
"Removing this document from easy access may actually reduce safety and
security by making the job of the emergency responders more difficult,"
Aftergood said. "They are making up the rules as they go along."