Eideard

Skull Valley sheep kill 1968

A Utah military facility that tests chemical and biological weapons was locked down “to resolve a serious concern,” and authorities were working to reopen the base, officials said Thursday. All base personnel were safe and working, and no evacuation was needed, said spokeswoman, Bonnie Robinson. She would not say why the base was locked down…

About 1,500 employees and contractors are stationed at the base.

Dugway commander Col. William E. King IV said earlier authorities were “working as quickly and as thoroughly as possible to resolve a serious concern within the Test Area” but he didn’t elaborate.

“As you know measures like these (lockdown of our gates) are not taken lightly. No one is in immediate danger but these steps are required.”

The proving ground covers 798,214 acres and is located in the Great Salt Lake Desert, around 85 miles southwest of Salt Lake City.

Also a historic center for the development and testing of chemical and biological weapons.

Dugway has been a test site for weaponized anthrax as recently as 1998.

“I can’t remember which key Karl told me to press to hide all this crap!”

Computer technicians have recovered about 22 million Bush administration e-mails that the Bush White House had said were missing, two watchdog groups that sued over the documents announced Monday.

The e-mails date from 2003 to 2005, and had been “mislabeled and effectively lost,” according to the National Security Archive, a research group based at George Washington University. But Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said it could be years before most of the e-mails are made public…

The e-mail controversy dates back to the Bush administration’s 2006 firing of the top federal prosecutors in nine cities. After congressional committees demanded the administration produce documents related to the firings, the White House said millions of e-mails might have been lost from its servers. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and the National Security Archive sued over the issue in 2007, arguing the Bush administration violated federal laws that require presidential records to be preserved.

Court records have shown that the Bush administration knew about the e-mail problems as far back as 2005 and did nothing to fix them, Sloan said.

Monday’s settlement allows for 94 days of e-mail traffic, scattered between January 2003 to April 2005, to be restored from backup tapes. Of those 94 days, 40 were picked by statistical sample; another 21 days were suggested by the White House; and the groups that filed suit picked 33 that seemed “historically significant,” from the months before the invasion of Iraq to the period when the firings of U.S. attorneys were being planned.

Also requested were several days surrounding the announcement that a criminal investigation was under way into the disclosure of then-CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson’s identity. That investigation led to the conviction of White House aide I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal agents investigating the leak.

Given a few civil libertarian geeks in the White House, we may yet learn even more about the corruption and cronyism that was part and parcel of the Bush-Cheney Administration. We know who the capos were. It would be useful to track who collaborated with their various deceits on the federal and state level.

I’m confident New Mexico’s senator-for-life, Pete Domenici – a hack whose core constituency was the Pentagon and the Oil Patch Boys – was one of the cogs in the machine.