No Fraud in Missile Defense, Says Pentagon

MIT Professor Ted Postol never met a missile defense scheme he liked, but his years-long battle to prove that researchers committed fraud to hide problems with missile defense is finally at an end. The Boston Globe reports that the final Pentagon investigation has cleared two researchers at MIT's Lincoln Lab, a federally funded research arms primarily involved in defense. The researchers were alleged to have covered up evidence that a missile defense test involving a TRW system had failed to distinguish a decoy from a warhead.

Should anyone (besides the guys accused of fraud) care? Hard to say. The design in question isn't even used in current-day missile defense, but then again, the integrity of MIT research is important. As the article notes:

Top scientists at MIT and elsewhere had criticized the university for not doing more to pursue MIT Professor Theodore A. Postol's charges against the Lincoln Lab staff members who had prepared a review of a Pentagon missile test conducted in the Pacific Ocean in 1997. In not letting MIT do its own investigation, the US government made the university vulnerable to charges that it was giving up its independence in exchange for millions of dollars in defense contracts.

The report's author, Brendan B. Godfrey , a civilian scientist working at the Pentagon, wrote that the two Lincoln Lab scientists in question , Ming-Jer Tsai and Charles K. Meins Jr. , were not responsible for research misconduct. He said their report left out certain pieces of information they should have discussed, but that there were reasonable explanations for their omissions.

Both scientists still work at the Lincoln Lab, created in 1951 as a federally funded research and development arm of MIT. The lab, which is in Lexington, primarily does defense research.

By all accounts, Godfrey, the Pentagon scientist who conducted the investigation, did a thorough job, but that doesn't resolve the fundamental dilemma: Was the Pentagon the proper authority to conduct an inquiry into possible wrongdoing of MIT employees? Of course, the researchers accused of fraud would probably question whether Postol, who has long been involved in missile defense controversy, really had the data to back up his accusations.

Either way, the test in question is now ten years old, maybe it's time to put this one to rest. The more important question is oversight of current tests.