A physicist and expert on national security says that the Pentagon is trying to silence his criticism of the US missile-defence programme.

Theodore Postol, Professor of Science, Technology and National Security Policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), has said for years that the technology required to create an effective missile shield over the United States does not exist.

The Defense Security Service, which handles military clearance for the Pentagon, has now asked MIT to recover the documents used by Postol to support his claims, and to persuade him to stop discussing them.

Postol has security clearance because he is a frequent adviser to the Pentagon on national-security issues.

Indefensible: Postol, seen here with a model of a mobile missile launcher, says the system is ineffective. Credit: AP/SEVANS

Last year, Postol accused the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) of doctoring the results of a series of tests on the Pentagon's prototype missile-defence system to make it appear to be effective. In a letter to the White House in May 2000, he wrote that the BMDO's own data show that the system is less accurate than random guessing at telling real missiles from balloon decoys.

As evidence, he provided an unclassified report by the Department of Defense, detailing the BMDO test results. He also disseminated the report over the Internet.

But soon after, the Pentagon reclassified parts of the report as secret and sent three agents to discuss the issue with Postol at his office at MIT. “I told them my policy is if anybody asks me for the report I give it to them,” Postol says of the meeting. Earlier this year he provided it to the General Accounting Office, an investigative branch of the US Congress.

According to Postol, who now stands to lose his security clearance, the Defense Security Service's request to MIT is a clear attempt to keep him quiet. He points out that the documents are freely available on the Internet.

Many academics who specialize in government or military affairs have security clearance, and if the government can prevent public information from being discussed merely by declaring controversial material secret, says Postol, it could have a chilling effect on scholarship. “There are profoundly important issues of academic freedom at stake here.”

The Pentagon has declined to discuss the case, but argues that holders of security clearance are required to keep secrets safe no matter how they were obtained, and even if they were obtained before they were made secret.

MIT President Charles Vest says that “MIT defends the right of our faculty to serve as responsible critics within the limits of the law”. He did not say what action, if any, the institute will take. But he expressed concern in a statement that the government would try to classify widely available information as secret in order to limit the debate by academic experts.

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