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(回答先: NASA長官シャトル墜落事故原因、迷宮入りを示唆（つまり米政権はお蔵入りにした意と言うサイン） 投稿者 ウソで塗り固めた人生 日時 2003 年 5 月 16 日 07:13:55)
２つの報道メディアが以下のように秘密を暴いた。シャトル事故独立調査委員会は元海軍提督が委員長だが、連邦政府（NASA)から独立した組織だという議会の触れ込みだった。しかし、実は民間委員５人は連邦政府（NASA)から１３万4千ドルのチェック（小切手）を秘密で得ている事が判明。
これが意味する事は何か。政権側は、事故調査の結果をコントロールしたいのだろうと推測せざるえない。
政権側は事実を隠蔽したいのだろう。
つまりこれは事故ではなかったことが自明だろう。
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NASA Paying Civilian Members of Board Probing Shuttle
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By Kevin Spear, Jim Leusner and Gwyneth K. Shaw
Sentinel Staff Writers
May 11, 2003
Civilian members of the board investigating the shuttle Columbia disaster -- outsiders who were added to reassure Congress and the public that the board would be fully independent of the space agency -- are actually being paid executive-level salaries by NASA.
The agency quietly put the five civilians on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration payroll, at pay rates of $134,000 a year, in order to take advantage of provisions that allow boards composed exclusively of "federal employees" to conduct their business in secret.
If the civilians had not been hired by NASA, a federal law would have required the investigating board to meet publicly, justify any closed-door sessions and keep transcripts and minutes that would ultimately become public records.
Each of the 13 board members is now classified as a federal employee. Besides the five civilians and chairman, other members include four active-duty military officers, two federal transportation officials and a NASA executive. And as a result, the board says it is legally permitted to meet in secret and promise "confidentiality" to NASA employees and others among the more than 200 individuals it has interviewed.
Last Tuesday, board Chairman Harold Gehman Jr. said that transcripts of these interviews will be kept secret from the general public, and even from Congress. Said Gehman, a retired Navy admiral who is being paid at the rate of $142,500 per year, "Those are never going to see the light of day."
Gehman, in a prepared statement Friday night, said the board's motive was not to withhold information from the public. He added: "The board determined it could provide a much deeper and richer review of NASA policies and procedures if it employed standard safety investigation procedures, which are incompatible with [open-government] provisions."
The statement did not respond to a question about his pay.
Gehman's insistence on confidentiality has rankled members of Congress, who say the board's report -- now expected in July -- must be accompanied by the documents that drove the conclusions. And public-policy critics say the salaries call into question whether the board is truly independent from the agency it is investigating.
"Three words -- conflict of interest," said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "The upshot is, we don't have an independent investigating board. This means NASA is investigating itself. This defeats the whole purpose of having an independent inquiry.
"What they did was hire outsiders and convert them into an internal board. It's just baffling."
Each of Gehman's five civilian board members insists that accepting money from NASA has in no way compromised the investigation. And indeed, board members and Gehman have been publicly critical of the space agency and its management "culture," questioning whether it has paid adequate attention to maintenance of the aging shuttle fleet and tolerated potentially unsafe conditions.
But one of those five, former astronaut Sally Ride, acknowledges that the public may see the board differently.
"I don't see it an issue for the Board members to be on the federal payroll -- this board, unlike most pro-bono government committees, is essentially a full-time job (for which people should receive some compensation)," Ride wrote in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel last week. "But one might ask whether it should be NASA's payroll."
But Ride added that President Bush did not step forward to appoint a special commission, as did President Reagan when the shuttle Challenger disintegrated in 1986.
"Since the White House hasn't picked up the mantle on this investigation, but rather has left it to NASA, I don't see an alternative payroll source -- or alternative source for funding the investigation itself," Ride wrote.
Still, the combination of the board operating in secret, with members being paid as much as $2,500 a week by NASA, may heighten a controversy that began more than three months ago when NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe announced he was establishing the board.
"When you're investigating a tragedy of this magnitude, the only way to restore credibility is to be open about the investigation," said Jane Kirtley, a University of Minnesota media ethics and law professor, former executive director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and open-government advocate.
Grumbling starts early
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, as it is now known, was controversial almost from the moment of its creation: 10:30 a.m. EST on Feb. 1, 90 minutes after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas, killing its crew of seven.
That's when O'Keefe activated the "Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board," part of a contingency plan created by NASA in 1995. The seven-member board was to consist of four top military aviation and safety officials, two civilians from the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation, and a NASA employee. O'Keefe announced on Feb. 2 the addition of Gehman as its chairman.
The 1995 plan spelled out how the board would operate. Related NASA procedures include granting a "privilege" of confidentiality to witnesses, meeting in private and seeking the cause of an accident -- not whom to blame. It was modeled after accident safety investigation procedures used by the military.
"If you really want to get to the bottom of an accident and its causes, you want a witness to feel like what they say is not going to be in a headline or a court of law," said Bryan O'Connor, a former astronaut who is now head of NASA's Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. "You want them to know it will only be used to prevent future mishaps, not to fire them."
O'Keefe's announcement came under immediate criticism, not because of the board's secrecy provisions but because of concerns it was too closely tied to NASA.
"The fact of the matter is, so far the commission that's there now was appointed by NASA, is staffed by NASA and reports back to NASA, and I'm afraid that's just not going to be credible," said Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, the ranking Democrat on the House Science Committee's Space subcommittee, in comments echoed by members of both parties.
O'Keefe acted quickly, changing the board's charter so that it no longer reported directly to him. Then, Gehman began adding other civilian board members: first, Roger Tetrault, a retired military and energy services contractor executive, and Sheila Widnall, a former Air Force secretary and current Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor, by mid-February; and finally Douglas Osheroff, a Stanford University Nobel laureate; John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University; and former astronaut Ride, now a professor on leave from the University of California at San Diego, on March 5.
NASA "has taken the necessary steps," O'Keefe told a congressional committee on Feb. 27, "to ensure the board's complete independence."
Public wasn't informed
But there was something that O'Keefe didn't tell Congress: what was being done to ensure the board would be able to conduct the military-style investigation envisioned in the NASA policy. Gehman was initially the board's only civilian appointee. He was put on the government's payroll Feb. 2 in the Office of Personnel Management, which calls itself "Federal Government's Human Resources Agency."
And Gehman, who chaired a military investigation into the 2000 terrorist bombing of the destroyer USS Cole, wanted the Columbia board to operate the same way. So every subsequent civilian appointee was put on NASA's payroll, again without any public mention.
The reason was an obscure law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires appointed boards and commissions to publicly advertise their meetings, whether open or closed; keep minutes of all sessions; and generally make their records available to the public.
But boards are exempt from that act if they are made up of full-time federal employees. And from the early days of the board, Gehman has acknowledged, he didn't want to operate under the act's rules.
That meant making sure every board member was a "federal employee." So NASA, dipping into a special $50 million congressional appropriation to fund the investigation into the Columbia tragedy, gave each of the new members a "NASA excepted service appointment" for up to one year, at a salary rate of $134,000, or about $500 per day worked.
Tetrault, who retired in 2000 as chairman of McDermott International Inc., said he initially offered to work for free -- but was told he had to be paid.
"As I recall, we had to be designated as a Safety Investigation to preserve witness privilege, which we thought was essential to getting individuals to open up to us," he wrote in an e-mail response to the Sentinel last week.
Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington, D.C., public-interest lawyer who has won several suits involving challenges to the advisory committee act, said the action "seems to be an obvious effort to subvert the [FACA] statute.
"You don't point to a board of full-time federal employees and say you're having an independent review, " he said. "What's problematic is not that they are receiving compensation. It's that they used that to get around the statute -- and public accountability."
NASA, however, insists that the decision to make board members government employees was merely to enable the board to carry out the 1995 NASA contingency plan.
In a statement issued by NASA chief spokesman Glenn Mahone on Friday, the agency declared: "Ignoring a fully functional federal employment structure seemed neither a timely or desirable solution -- especially in the face of a validated contingency plan for just such an emergent situation."
Differences over pay
It's not unusual for some government boards to pay their members. The panel set up as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission, provides an option of $134,000-a-year pay rates for its 10 members, plus expenses. A spokesman said members are not full-time employees and some decline the pay.
The legislation that set up that panel exempts it from FACA and allows private hearings, but it also requires it to hold public hearings and question witnesses under oath. The reason for the exemption: It's expected that the commission will interview CIA and FBI officials about national-security issues.
But many see the Gehman board as more comparable to the presidential commission ordered by then-President Reagan in 1986, when the shuttle Challenger broke up 73 seconds after liftoff.
The first sentence of Executive Order 12546 stated the Challenger panel was subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. It said the 11 civilian members "shall serve without compensation for their work on the Commission," other than travel expenses.
Eugene Covert, who headed MIT's aeronautics and astronautics department when he served on the commission, said he thinks taking a salary "would tend to bias what [board members] do."
"I just think in general, pro bono work should be pro bono work."
Unlike the Gehman board, the Challenger commission operated under a presidential charter, with high-profile chairman William Rogers who'd been secretary of state and attorney general. It held a series of public hearings at which NASA executives were questioned under oath about their decisions to allow the shuttle to fly despite known failures in the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters.
In the end, it won praise for exposing flaws in the solid rocket boosters -- and inadequate safety practices by NASA's management.
Challenger commission member Robert Hotz, the retired editor of Aviation Week, said the commission did most of its work in public -- with sworn testimony -- forcing witnesses to either be uncomfortably honest or commit perjury.
"And they chose to be uncomfortable," Hotz said. "Secret testimony is bull---- in an accident investigation. Space is not an in-house thing. It's a public thing, a non-military thing."
In fact, most of the Challenger Commission files -- a total of 108 feet -- are available to the public at the National Archives. Only the equivalent of four small boxes are exempt under national-security and privacy grounds, said Steve Tilley, chief of special access at the National Archives and Records Administration.
Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, said he could not imagine one of NASA's toughest critics on the Challenger commission, the late Nobel physicist Richard Feynman, being asked to become an agency employee before joining the board.
"It's as if all of the members of the 9-11 Commission were hired as employees of the CIA," Aftergood said. "Their credibility would be totally shot if that happened. It would be outrageous and laughable."
Panel wins praise
Members of the Columbia board reject any implication that taking money from NASA has compromised them in any way.
"I could care less whether I am a government employee," Widnall wrote in an e-mail to the Sentinel last week. "I think it is just a matter of convenience. I do not compromise my independence in any way. I'm way beyond that -- anyone who knows me would agree."
Added Tetrault: "It is certainly my belief that we have acted independently from NASA and on occasion have been very critical of some of their practices."
In fact, no one has accused the board of pulling its punches and members of Congress say they have been impressed with the panel's work and openness. On the other hand, the board has done very little work in public. It has had 13 media briefings, but only nine public hearings, all of which featured presentations by experts who are asked to "affirm" -- but not swear to -- their truthfulness.
The board has yet to publicly interview any senior NASA shuttle managers who were directly involved in making key decisions during the Columbia mission. Most of the time, the board and its staff work out of a Houston office building, or travel in small groups to various NASA facilities.
Board members, and investigators working for them, have interviewed more than 200 people. And led by Gehman, who has spoken out on the subject several times, they say confidentiality during those interviews is essential to candor.
"Certainly you have to appreciate the fact that people working for NASA will not feel comfortable making critical statements about their employer unless these are privileged," Osheroff said in a Sentinel interview last week. "This allows us as a board to gain much more insight into how NASA functions."
And Ride, who served on the Challenger commission, said it's not the money nor the secrecy that troubles her -- but what the public might think about the appearance of working for NASA.
"As you've already figured out, this is a pretty independent-minded and stubborn group of people on this Board, so the investigation won't be compromised," she wrote.
"But a vigorous response to the report would be better assured if the report were 'owned' by Congress or the White House."
Gehman has said the board's report will likely be released sometime in July, so Congress can read it during its August recess. That could produce a lively set of hearings this fall over how the board came to its conclusions.
Rep. Gordon, a persistent NASA critic, thought he had extracted a promise from Gehman earlier this month to provide Congress with transcripts of all interviews conducted by the board, minus only the names of the witnesses.
Last week, Gehman reversed himself according to Gordon and several other committee sources. Congressional officials say they are still hopeful in getting information they are seeking -- in some form.
"Clearly, our committee, to do our job properly, has got to have this information," Gordon said. "Otherwise, all we are going to do is have their final results without having the internal data to see where it's a logical result. Certainly there are appropriate confidentialities that ought to be protected, but that can be done consistent with providing this information."
He and others cite as a model the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigates major airplane, train and bus accidents. The agency holds all of its hearings in public; takes testimony under oath; and releases transcripts or summaries of interviews, though omitting the names of eyewitnesses.
"The really accurate model is the National Transportation Safety Board," Gordon said. "Why should we not have access to this kind of information? The 'everybody does it' argument is simply not accurate and not valid."
Gehman, however, is adamant about confidentiality. "There is a long, rich history between the executive branch and the legislative branch about accident investigations," he said in a brief interview in Houston after the board's media briefing last Tuesday, adding that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld grants of confidentiality by the military in accident safety investigations.
"We are a member of the executive branch, and we will do whatever the protocol requires for that. But my offer [to Congress] does not include looking at privileged witness statements."
U.S. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who chairs the House Science Committee's Space subcommittee, said he is confident both sides can reach agreement.
"There's no need for there to be a turf battle here between the executive and legislative branches," Rohrabacher said. "We respect Adm. Gehman; he's got our confidence, and any type of a fight over executive privilege to keep certain information from us will do nothing but destroy his and the whole commission's credibility."
Robyn Suriano contributed to this story. Kevin Spear may be reached at 407-420-5062 or kspear@orlandosentinel.com. Jim Leusner can be reached at 407-420-5411 or jleusner@orlandosentinel.com. Gwyneth K. Shaw can be reached at 202-824-8229 or gshaw@orlandosentinel.com.
Copyright (c) 2003, Orlando Sentinel
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This article originally appeared at:
http://www.nynewsday.com/news/nyc-nasa0511,0,1770094.story
Visit Newsday online at http://www.newsday.com
もうひとつの媒体も同様に報道
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"Independent" Columbia board members actually paid by NASA
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By Kevin Spear, Jim Leusner and Gwyneth K. Shaw
National correspondents
May 11, 2003
Civilian members of the board investigating the shuttle Columbia disaster -- outsiders who were added to reassure Congress and the public that the board would be fully independent of the space agency -- are being paid executive-level salaries by NASA.
The agency quietly put the five civilians on the NASA payroll, at pay rates of $134,000 a year, to take advantage of provisions that allow boards composed exclusively of "federal employees" to conduct their business in secret.
If the civilians had not been hired by NASA, a federal law would have required the investigating board to meet publicly, justify closed-door sessions and keep transcripts and minutes that would become public records.
Each of the 13 board members is now classified as a federal employee -- besides the five civilians other members include four active-duty military officers, two federal transportation officials and a NASA executive.
As a result, the board says it is legally permitted to meet in secret and promise "confidentiality" to NASA employees and others among the more than 200 individuals it has interviewed.
Last Tuesday, board chairman Harold Gehman said interview transcripts will be kept from the public, and even from Congress.
"Those are never going to see the light of day," said Gehman, a retired admiral who is being paid at the rate of $142,500 a year.
He elaborated in a prepared statement Friday night: "The board determined it could provide a much deeper and richer review of NASA policies and procedures if it employed standard safety investigation procedures, which are incompatible with [open government] provisions."
The statement did not respond to a question about his pay.
Gehman's insistence on confidentiality has rankled members of Congress, who say the board's report -- now expected in July -- must be accompanied by the documents that drove the conclusions. And public policy critics say the salaries call into question whether the board is truly independent from the agency it is investigating.
"Three words -- conflict of interest," said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. "This defeats the whole purpose of having an independent inquiry."
Each of Gehman's five civilian board members insists that accepting money from NASA has in no way compromised the investigation.
And indeed, board members and Gehman have been publicly critical of the space agency and its management "culture," questioning whether it has paid adequate attention to maintenance of the aging shuttle fleet and tolerated potentially unsafe conditions.
Controversy from the start
But one of those five, former astronaut Sally Ride, acknowledges that the public may see the board differently.
"I don't see it an issue for the Board members to be on the federal payroll -- this board, unlike most pro-bono government committees, is essentially a full-time job (for which people should receive some compensation)," Ride wrote in an e-mail to the Orlando Sentinel last week. "But one might ask whether it should be NASA's payroll."
The Columbia Accident Investigation Board, as it is now known, was controversial almost from the moment of its creation: 10:30 a.m. EST on Feb. 1 -- 90 minutes after the shuttle Columbia disintegrated 200,000 feet above Texas, killing its crew of seven.
That's when NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe activated the "Space Shuttle Mishap Interagency Investigation Board," part of a contingency plan created by NASA in 1995.
The seven-member board was to consist of four top military aviation and safety officials, two civilians from the Federal Aviation Administration and Department of Transportation, and a NASA employee. O'Keefe added Gehman as its chairman on Feb. 1.
The 1995 plan spelled out how the board would operate, including granting a "privilege" of confidentiality to witnesses, meeting in private and seeking the cause of an accident -- not whom to blame.
It was modeled after accident safety investigation procedures used by the military.
O'Keefe's announcement came under immediate criticism, not because of the board's secrecy provisions but because of concerns it was too closely tied to NASA.
"So far the commission that's there now was appointed by NASA, is staffed by NASA and reports back to NASA, and I'm afraid that's just not going to be credible," said Rep. Bart Gordon of Tennessee, the ranking Democrat on the House Space subcommittee, in comments echoed by members of both parties.
O'Keefe quickly changed the board's charter so that it no longer reported directly to him. Then, he began adding public members: retired military contractor executive Roger Tetrault on Feb. 6; former Air Force secretary and current MIT professor Sheila Widnall on Feb. 16; and Stanford University Nobel laureate Douglas Osheroff; John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University; and former astronaut Ride, now a professor at University of California at San Diego, on March 5.
NASA "has taken the necessary steps," O'Keefe told a congressional committee on Feb. 27, "to ensure the board's complete independence."
But there was something that O'Keefe didn't tell Congress: what was being done to ensure the board could conduct the military-style investigation envisioned in the NASA policy. Gehman, a retired Navy admiral, was initially the board's only civilian appointee. He was put on the government's payroll Feb. 2 in the Office of Personnel Management, which calls itself "the Executive Branch's personnel office."
Gehman, who chaired a military-style accident investigation into the 2000 terrorist bombing of the destroyer USS Cole, wanted the Columbia board to operate the same way. So subsequent civilian appointees were put on NASA's payroll, again without public mention, as full-time federal employees.
That would exempt the board from an obscure law called the Federal Advisory Committee Act, which requires appointed boards and commissions to publicly advertise their meetings, keep minutes and generally make their records available to the public.
From the early days of the board, Gehman has acknowledged, he didn't want to operate under the act's rules. So NASA, dipping into a special $50 million congressional appropriation to fund the investigation into the Columbia tragedy, gave each of the new members a "NASA excepted service appointment" for up to one year, at a salary rate of $134,000, or $515 per day worked.
Tetrault, who retired in 2000 as chairman of McDermott International Inc., said he initially offered to work for free -- but was told he had to be paid.
"As I recall, we had to be designated as a `Safety Investigation' to preserve witness privilege, which we thought was essential to getting individuals to open up to us," he wrote in an e-mail response to the Orlando Sentinel last week.
Eric Glitzenstein, a Washington, D.C., public interest lawyer who has won several suits involving challenges to the advisory committee act, said the action "seems to be an obvious effort to subvert the [Federal Advisory Committee Act] statute."
"You don't point to a board of full-time federal employees and say you're having an independent review," he said. "What's problematic is not that they are receiving compensation. It's that they used that to get around the statute -- and public accountability."
Remembering Challenger
NASA, however, insists that the decision to make board members government employees was to enable the board to carry out the 1995 NASA contingency plan.
In a statement issued by NASA chief spokesman Glenn Mahone on Friday, the agency declared: "Ignoring a fully functional federal employment structure seemed neither a timely or desirable solution -- especially in the face of a validated contingency plan for just such an emergent situation."
It's not unusual for some government boards to pay their members. The panel set up as The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9/11 Commission, provides $134,000-a-year pay rates for its 10 members, plus expenses, though a spokesman said some decline the pay.
The legislation that set up that panel exempts it from the Federal Advisory Committee Act and allows private hearings, but it also requires it to hold public hearings and question witnesses under oath.
The reason for the exemption: it's expected that the commission will interview CIA and FBI officials about national security issues.
But many see the Gehman board as more comparable to the presidential commission ordered by then-President Ronald Reagan in 1986, when the shuttle Challenger exploded 73 seconds after liftoff.
The Challenger commission operated under a presidential charter, with high-profile chairman William Rogers, who had been secretary of state and attorney general.
It held a series of public hearings at which NASA executives were questioned under oath about their decisions to allow the shuttle to fly despite known failures in the O-rings in the solid rocket boosters.
Member Robert Hotz, the retired editor of Aviation Week, said the commission did most of its work in public -- with sworn testimony -- forcing witnesses to either be uncomfortably honest or commit perjury.
"And they chose to be uncomfortable," Hotz said. "Secret testimony is bull-- in an accident investigation. Space is not an in-house thing. It's a public thing, a non-military thing."
Kevin Spear, Jim Leusner and Gwyneth K. Shaw write for the Orlando Sentinel, a Tribune Co. newspaper.
Copyright (c) 2003, South Florida Sun-Sentinel
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