In the 1953 the state secret privilege was enacted in the united states V. Reynolds case. The privilege was invoked because the area of conflicts was a classified and upgraded B-29 bomber, and due to its secretive nature, government officials saw it as a threat to national security. This led them to believe that the most viable option was the dismissal of said evidence, as we were in the cold war at the time. But I don’t see this as warranted, at the time the Chinese had a bomber, the KJ-1, that was designed and inspired by the American B-29. In my eyes, if a potential enemy has already designed a bomber that directly mirrors its counter part then its only a matter of time before they discover the rest of the secrets of that project. But I digress, the cause of the enactment of the state secret privilege lies souly on those who chose to enact it and the man that signed the affidavit. many may argue that its cause was the risk that the Chinese government may obtain state secrets but even if china wasn’t the threat, surely Russia, Korea, or other regimes would have. It seems that each adversary is just an excuse not to disclose information, weather a war with them is possible or justified or not doesn’t matter, the fact that they are considered a threat is all that is needed to hide the truth from American citizens, like Reynold and the other widows that are left wondering to this day.

On January 5^th, 2018, a man close to Nikolas Cruz, the shooter of the stone man Douglas high school, contacted the FBI threw the public access line, or PAL for short. He urged FBI officials to conduct a wellness check on Cruz because he reported that Cruz had been acting erratically, had a spoken desire to kill people, and had fire arms readily available to him; on February 16^th, 2018 the FBI stated “the caller provided information about Cruz’s gun ownership, desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts, as well as the potential of him conducting a school shooting”. In a perfect world Nikolas Cruz would have been apprehended and questioned for these issues, but sadly that isn’t how everything turned out. For whatever reason, the FBI chose to ignore these reports, and on February 14^th, 2018 Cruz entered Stoneman Douglas high school armed to the teeth. By the time the chaos stopped seventeen people had succumbed to their injuries, fourteen of which were students the other three were staff members, seventeen others were also injured in the pandemonium. We could dive into this and say that the credibility of the informant was lacking or that the FBI agent misheard the report but this is overtly false. There is no other cause, the confidant did everything he should have by reporting the strange activity, lest he was liable for physically going to the school to stop the shooting. The fault encompasses one entity outside of the shooter, and that entity is the Federal Bureau of Investigation. They were told a month prior to the shooting that Cruz was a concern to public welfare and they did fucking nothing, they just sat there and waited. It physically sickens me to think that we as American citizens cant rely on the Bureau of investigation to investigate and protect the American populous, which is literally in their name; that’s the equivalent to opening a dictionary and finding out that every page is just excerpts of Dr.Seuss.

Notra Trulock III was the head of the Office of Energy Intelligence (OEI), which is intelligence and counterintelligence branch of Department of Energy (DOE), from 1994 to 1998. He accused Wen Ho Lee, a scientist at Los Alamos National laboratory (LANL), of mishandling and potentially out sourcing sensitive nuclear weapons documents, court documents confirm that there were fifty nine counts of this happening (referenced on page four of the cited transcript). He stated that Lee was working in conjunction with two other DOE officials, Robert Vrooman, a counterintelligence officer of LANL from 1988 to 1998, and Charles Washington, who was the acting director of the counterintelligence division of the DOE from 1995 to 1996. In 1995 two LANL scientists confronted Trulock and expressed their concerns about an intelligence leak that could have reached the people’s republic of china (PRC), specifically ones that surrounded the W-88 nuclear warhead. It was at this time where Trulock launched an investigation and found that Lee, Vrooman, and Washington were top suspects among thirty two other potential informants that had met the criteria of the kindred spirit analytical group’s (KSAG) administrative inquiry (AI) findings. later in the suit Lee plead guilty to one count of retention of national defense information, which in lamens terms means the mishandling sensitive information, and served nine months in Santa Fe county detention facility but was later released because he was needed to find/produce lost tapes that were copies of united states intelligence. After admitting that he indeed copied government secrets he informed the court that said tapes were destroyed at a previous point in time. He never returned to prison because he said that his treatment in prison was unjustified, all that I could find was that officials of the detention center shackled him at times and kept him in solitary for the nine months he was imprisoned; to me that’s not unwarranted he stole government nuclear secrets, that’s treason. But nevertheless, what caused this? Some may say that the fault lies with Lee, but I believe that Lee wouldn’t have been able to commit these crimes if he was never employed by the DOE. I understand that people can slip through the net that attempts to catch people like Lee but that excuse only goes so far. The government could have conducted more thorough background checks or kept a closer eye on those who could pose a risk to Americas welfare. Although this seems like a great challenge, there is no option to dismiss it, keeping the country safe is imperative, especially when nuclear secrets are at risk of being exposed to foreign governments.

References

Notra Trulock V. Wen Ho Lee V. United States of America

Click to access 021476.U.pdf

Stoneman Douglas high school shooting and FBI negligence

https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-statement-on-the-shooting-in-parkland-florida

the Chinese copy of the B-29: the KJ-1

https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/kj-1-china-tried-to-develop-the-american-b-29-wwii-bomber-into-its-first-awacs-aircraft

Reynolds V. United States

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/345/1

Wen Ho Lee biography

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/345/1