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Sunday, May 21, 2000
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
Area 51 known to 'vanish' from government landscape
By Keith Rogers
Review-Journal
It is no secret there's an air base at what is commonly known as Area 51 in Nevada.
The remote installation, on the dry Groom Lake bed 35 miles west of Alamo in Lincoln County, has been featured on nationwide television and in daily newspapers and magazines distributed throughout the world.
Books have been written about it. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union took satellite photos of it. And now, a private venture, Aerial Images Inc. of Raleigh, has made a business of spying on the secret base with a Russian agency, Sovinformputnik, offering new satellite images for sale on the Web.
The base also has been the subject of lawsuits that have gone all the way to the Supreme Court, only to yield to the government's prevailing need for secrecy. In 1998, the Supreme Court decided not to hear the cases, upholding a ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that the workers and widows are not entitled to learn what hazardous substances existed or how they were handled at the base.
Former workers described Groom Lake as the place where high-tech U.S. aircraft were tested against foreign radar systems. Coatings for radar-evading stealth fighter jets were burned in open trenches, they said, contrary to environmental laws.
Government officials don't acknowledge the existence of a "base" there. Instead, President Clinton's Feb. 1 letter to Congress refers to it only as "the United States Air Forces' operating location near Groom Lake, Nevada."
Former Nevada Rep. Jim Bilbray, however, knows there's an air base on the dry Groom Lake bed.
"I've been there," Bilbray said. "I know what's there.
"By the way there are no space men, either," he said.
Glenn Campbell, the former director of the Area 51 Research Center -- a citizen watchdog group based in Rachel, about 30 miles north of Groom Lake -- said the base "fades in and out of existence."
"It appears on satellite images but it vanishes whenever someone complains," said Campbell, who lives in Las Vegas.
"Working at a place like this is like going to work in Saudi Arabia," Campbell said. "You make good money, but you lose your rights. If you upset the local culture, you shouldn't expect a fair trial."
Clinton's letter backs up Campbell's observation. The letter exempts the place from all environmental and hazardous waste laws and stipulates that "information concerning activities ... has been properly determined to be classified and its disclosure would be harmful to national security."
George Washington University environmental crimes attorney Jonathan Turley said the letter allows the government to use secrecy to hide misconduct. Turley, who represented former base workers who claimed they were exposed to toxic fumes at the base, said the recent release of a redacted transcript from a teleconference hearing in those cases bolsters his abuse-of-secrecy claim.
"The Justice Department continues to use national security privileges to conceal the fact that it lied to the media and the public. This information contained nothing but a general statement of legal demands.
"Court seals are not a legitimate means to protect government officials from embarrassment or ethical charges," he said in a March 3 statement, after the transcript -- with much of the dialogue blacked out -- was unsealed by U.S. District Judge Philip Pro.
In a statement, Turley described his cases as "the first successful action against a black facility; the first acknowledgment of the existence of the base; (and) the first time the president was ordered to comply" with exemptions from hazardous waste laws through an annual, presidential declaration.
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