Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State by Garry Wills

Author:Garry Wills [Wills, Garry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: American Government, Arms Control, History, International Relations, Military, Non-Fiction, Nuclear Warfare, Political Science
ISBN: 9781101486191
Google: E9hKXrghTRYC
Amazon: B00475AXCO
Publisher: Penguin Books
Published: 2011-01-25T00:00:00+00:00

In reversing the appeal, the majority sent the case back to the original court for any further proceedings “consistent with the views expressed in this opinion.”18 Biddle saw little point in going back. But the air force was very anxious to get rid of this case, and it agreed to settle for an award close to the one first granted, if the women would agree to a “final release” of all claims against the government. The story seemed to be over, and it was—for roughly half a century (forty-seven years) .

In 2000, the accident report that was withheld from the Court saw the light of day. The daughter of one of the RCA engineers who died in the crash, Judy Palya Loether, was only seven weeks old at the time of the accident, but she grew up with a great curiosity about the father she never knew. She was also a constant surfer of all things online. In 2000, while looking around on her computer for information about what her father did and how he died, she came across an entry, “Accident-Report.com,” which promised to supply people with records of government airplane crashes. She did not know that there had been a Supreme Court case that hinged on the production of such a report, but she wanted to know if she could find anything about her father’s crash.

Accident-Report.com belonged to Michael Stowe, a studious collector of aviation information. He had learned in 1996 that the Clinton administration, fighting the overclassification of documents, had declassified the air force accident reports with low (restricted) rank and an expired date. Stowe determined, at great cost, to acquire the microfilms of these reports—one thousand reels of them, at thirty dollars each. To help support his research hobby, he began supplying information on crashes, for a small sum, over the Internet. From this fortuitous connection between Ms. Loether and Mr. Stowe, the whole story of the air force’s concern with the cause of a particular crash was finally revealed.

Ms. Loether purchased the report of her father’s last flight, and sought out other relatives of the RCA engineers, to show them the report—all 220 pages of it (with fifteen photos of the wreckage). They read the report carefully, looking for details of any secret project the plane was involved in. There were none. Instead, the report told a horror story of incompetence, neglect, bungling, and tragic error. The plane had a troubled history, and it took off without heat shields that would keep the engines from overheating. When the outer left engine lost power during the plane’s climb, the pilot tried to turn it off but inadvertently turned off the outer right engine. The copilot cut power to the left engine, but it was soon in flames. The inner left engine then went out, and the one working engine on the right side kicked the plane into a hard swerve to the left. The pilot, with only one of his four engines working, could not feed that engine more power without accelerating a spin.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.