A pair of F-117A Nighthawks taxi Feb. 13 at Nellis Air Force Base. Photo by Gary Thompson.

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."