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The Ambushed Grand Jury: How the Justice Department Covered Up Government Nuclear Crimes and How We Caught Them Red Handed [Apex Press, 3-04], written by lawyer Caron Balkany and grand jury foreman Wes McKinley, tells the story of how a grand jury, secret by law to protect the privacy of those being questioned, can serve purposes never envisioned by the founding fathers.
On June 6, 1989, it appeared that the fox would finally take responsibility for oversight of the henhouse. On that day the FBI served subpoenas on the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant, operated by Rockwell International Corporation and located just upwind of Denver, Colorado. Rocky Flats manufactured plutonium pits, the trigger of thermonuclear bombs. Poisonous plutonium‚a fissile, radioactive, chemically aggressive heavy metal‚will inevitably shorten your life, if a mere speck of it lodges in your body.
The FBI had evidence, in the form of heat sensitive photos taken from the air at night and on weekends, showing that Rockwell had defied a government shutdown order forbidding it from running its plutonium incinerator. The incinerator's faulty filtration system allowed plutonium dust to escape and scatter in the high winds sledding down off the front range toward Denver. The FBI agent in charge of this investigation was Jon Lipsky.
Beyond the secret midnight burnings of plutonium, Lipsky also sought to prove that Rocky Flats was guilty of illegal incineration and illegal storage of hazardous and radioactive wastes, illegal discharges to Walnut Creek and Woman Creek, and false statements to the EPA and to State Officials. To prove any of these charges conclusively, Lipsky needed witnesses within the plant, and witnesses from that well-paid, paranoid subculture were hard to find.
Jacque Brever, a Rocky Flats plutonium worker and single mom, decided to disclose her participation in one clean-up of those clandestine burnings, because she feared that Rockwell would try to weasel out of its large legal predicament by blaming the workers. Feeling a target on her back anyway, she gave testimony, but she felt she wasn't believed. Then her co-operation with the investigation got leaked. In retaliation her co-workers contaminated her with radioactive materials that seriously damaged her health.
Assistant US Attorney Ken Fimberg convened a Special Grand Jury to hear the evidence gathered by the FBI. The jury, chaired by Wes McKinley, a conservative rancher from southeast Colorado, received instructions to report on its findings at the finish of these secret meetings. But before the jury could write its report, Fimberg completed a plea bargain with Rockwell International that resulted in a moderate fine, but no criminal prosecution of Rocky Flats executives, which the jury wanted, and no admission of crimes so punishable that Rockwell would lose its status as government contractor.
Even though the case was settled and the jurors were warned that revealing any secret Grand Jury proceedings was illegal and could result in their criminal prosecution, the jurors nonetheless wrote their very damning report. But they could find no legal way to make their report public, and it remains sealed to this day. Clearly the covert grand jury format came in handy for seeming to slap the wrists of Rocky Flats while making none of its dirty secrets known.
Fast forward to 1997, when former grand jury chairman Wes McKinley learned that the Department of Energy planned to convert the abandoned, contaminated and condemned Rocky Flats site into a public recreation area, where children would be encouraged to frolic and cavort. Notable here is the half-life of plutonium‚250,000 radioactive years. McKinley approached Caron Balkany, a Santa Fe lawyer and anti-nuclear activist, known for her volunteer participation in a successful lawsuit by Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety against Los Alamos National Laboratory for its illegal radioactive airborne emissions. McKinley wanted Balkany to help him figure out how to circumvent the grand jury secrecy restriction so that, while avoiding criminal prosecution, he could still inform the citizenry what a public health disaster it would be to open Rocky Flats to public recreation.
Rocky Flats is but one localized infection of a systemic and chronic disease. Years ago, before the rolling WIPP trucks and before the Santa Fe Relief Route, I got bogged down trying to understand the obfuscating legalese of the Price-Anderson Law‚the nuclear insurance act. I was researching how radioactive shipments, such as fully-assembled nuclear warheads, routinely traveled through the heart of Santa Fe. I wanted to know if Price-Anderson provided for victim compensation should such a shipment meet with misadventure. Then I heard Caron Balkany explaining that law, and the light bulb came on:
Congress passed Price Anderson at the dawn of the nuclear age with the professed purpose of insuring the public against nuclear accidents. But the law's real purpose was to lure corporate contractors into investing in dangerous nuclear endeavors by capping their financial liability at a token amount. US taxpayers would fork out the remainder, when and if the government admitted that compensation for nuclear damage should be paid. Throughout sixty-odd years of radioactive mess-making, including the partial meltdown at Three-Mile Island, the Energy Department has instead consistently denied that any harm has befallen. Hence the Rocky Flats playground.
Setting limits on corporate financial liability for nuclear contamination implicitly sanctions carelessness. So will the children getting cancers after fun-filled outings at Rocky Flats receive any compensation? Take your family picnics elsewhere.
The Ambushed Grand Jury is a nuclear detective story, a true crime book, and a page-turner about the courageous and amazingly persistent four-year effort by Balkany and McKinley to track down the evidence and to make their own case against Rocky Flats, in defiance of the grand jury secrecy stricture. An unlikely assemblage of heroes--FBI agent Jon Lipsky, plutonium worker Jacque Brever, and rancher McKinley--risked their careers and safety to prove that Rockwell International ran a rogue enterprise at Rocky Flats. They hoped that once they made their case Congress would have no choice but to hold hearings on that particular nuclear atrocity. Congress, controlled by Republicans, wasn't interested.
So instead, Balkany and McKinley wrote The Ambushed Grand Jury, intending it as a substitute citizens' hearing, to cast light on the cold indifference of the nuclear industry to public health and safety and the abject servitude of US officialdom toward corporate nuclear profiteers. Did the dirty Rocky Flats experience give pause to those whose hands hold the fate of the earth? In its afterward, the book reports:
"In 2003, at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the Energy Department, on a limited basis, resumed the Rocky Flats mission of plutonium pit production which had been closed down since the FBI raid of 1989. A new bomb production plant called the "Modern Pit Facility" is planned for increased weapons production." Two of the five sites vying to be the next Rocky Flats are in New Mexico.
