The National Research Council had barely made its report public recently when Craig Williams, of the Kentucky-based Chemical Weapons Working Group, began dismissing it as fit perhaps for the bottom of a bird cage but nothing else.Williams was not happy with the report, a report that endorsed incineration in Anniston and other sites while stressing the need for utmost safety and improved training among other things.
Williams is a supporter of neutralization, an alternative to incineration, and oddly enough he praised the NRC for a study it did not long ago endorsing that method of destruction of the chemical weapons stockpile in Kentucky. It’s pretty clear, then, that Williams is fine with the NRC as long as it endorses alternative technologies, such as neutralization, and rejects incineration.
We’ve come to expect these kinds of pronouncements from Mr. Williams. But what came next was surprising. In the wake of the report’s release, Williams gave information to this newspaper that can best be described as half true.
Three of the scientists, Williams insisted, had financial ties to the Army or chemical weapons disposal facilities.
“If that ain’t as close as you can get to a conflict of interest then I don’t know what is,” Williams told the paper.
So Williams named names: Dennis Bley, W. Leigh Short and William Rhyne.
It was spooky stuff Williams was putting forward and the newsroom began digging to check it out.
Reporting found that Bley is involved in a company that has financial ties to chemical demilitarization, but it is with a neutralization program, the program Williams supports.
Short has been retired since 1999, and has not drawn any income from his company — a subsidiary of a company that is contracted to operate the incinerator in Utah — since he retired.
Rhyne, whose company has connections to chemical weapons incinerators — is a member of the alternative technology committee of the NRC. Interesting that Williams had no problem with Rhyne being involved in the NRC study of neutralization.
Then again, it’s interesting that Mr. Williams would try to sell this load of malarkey in the first place.
The NRC has determined that incineration is the best way for this community to move forward with the destruction of the chemical weapons stockpile. As long as that incineration is conducted in the safest way possible, we should take the NRC members’ advice and move forward, despite Mr. Williams’ misleading attempts to discredit their work and their reputations.
