Watchdog Bytes

Want information from the FBI? Do you really want it? Do you? Really?

Here’s how the FBI handles requests for information from the public: Wait a really long time and then ask you to forget you asked.
On Sept. 24, Watchdog sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the FBI. The information wasn’t exactly top secret — just the budget for the Fort Worth FBI office.
That day, David P. Sobonya, a public information officer, wrote that the request “will be processed .... and a response will be mailed to you at a later date.”
From the start, the FBI’s information “freedom” system was all class. While the request was emailed in September, it wasn’t received until Oct. 6 when it was assigned a request number: 1137915.
It’s like playing the “freedom of information” lottery. You don’t win until you get a number.
So November comes. A month has come and gone. Other federal agencies are sending watchdog budget figures in a day or a couple of weeks at most.
At the FBI, weeks are like seconds, months like minutes: “...A time frame for completion (of the request) cannot be provided at this time.”
In early December, Watchdog politely inquired why the budget for a small FBI office hadn’t been provided.
Sobonya wrote: “I checked on the status of your FOIA Request #1137915 and unfortunately, that request is still in the Work Process Unit and has not been completed as of this date.”
Work Process Unit? As far as we can tell, that’s where FOIA requests disappear, like political prisoners in the old Soviet gulags.
The kicker? Sobonya asked, “Do wish the request to remain OPEN or do you want it CLOSED?”
CLOSED is apparently FBI-speak for “you have wasted your time.” We guess OPEN means “you can’t take a hint, can you?”
No, we can’t. To be continued...
— Darren Barbee

Los Alamos mishap blows the doors off test bunker

Sign that something bad is happening: Government “shock and detonation” researchers hear a “loud unusual noise.”
Last week researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory blasted away two garage door-sized doors and moved concrete shielding blocks after firing a large-bore powder gun, according to a report obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. No one was injured in the blast.
The gun, which was not severely damaged, looks like an enclosed pipe with a breach at one end and a target chamber at the other, said laboratory spokesman Kevin Roark.
Pieces of the gun were found on the asphalt outside the building, according to a Los Alamos occurrence report posted on POGO’s Web site.
“I must say that this is a new twist in the long history of screw-ups by Los Alamos,” POGO’s senior investigator, Peter Stockton, said in a statement. “I have no idea in the world why they have a gun like this, let alone testing it.”
POGO referred to the incident as “researchers accidentally blow up building with a cannon.”
Damien LaVera, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration did some blasting of his own, saying “the only thing demolished in this case was POGO’s credibility. No building at Los Almos was destroyed in this incident, and any suggestion otherwise is the sort of irresponsible hyperbole we’ve come to expect from this group.”
Researchers were studying the effect of shockwaves produced by a 1.5 kilogram projectile fired at high speed by the gun, which Roark described as an “experimental apparatus.”
Roark added, “it was an unexpected result and unwelcome result, but ... when you do big science, these kinds of things happen.”
The slightly unsettling part: the shock and detonation team also studies the effects of nuclear weapons, among other explosives.

— Darren Barbee