The
New York Times blared the allegation on its front page on Tuesday: "Missile Contractor Doctored Tests, Ex-Employee Charges." The headline was technically true — but the article hardly warranted such prominent
placement (above the fold, no less) or such great length (nearly a full page following the jump).
Hours after it broke, the Pentagon downplayed the story; and it was right to do so. Nira Schwartz has said that TRW, her former employer and a missile-defense contractor, rigged tests to make a faulty sensor look like it worked. Her claims deserve an airing — defense companies aren't above
fudging results — but also suspicion. She was, for instance, fired. She's now posing as a whistleblower, but it's just as possible she's a disgruntled engineer hoping for a windfall. As the Times put it: "She seeks to recover for the government more than a half-billion dollars, some part of which a judge could award her as compensation."
The merits of her claim are also questionable. Schwartz has inspired two Defense Department reviews that have basically cleared TRW — which in turn explains why the Justice Department has refused to join her case.
What's more, the sensor now under scrutiny isn't even part of current missile-defense design. The TRW interceptor, which housed the sensor, was rejected in favor of a competitor built by Raytheon. There's always a chance the Pentagon will revert to TRW, of course, but no real indication that this is currently on the table.
So even if Schwartz is right and TRW in fact designed a lousy sensor, it's like Ford issuing a recall notice on the Model T. That's front-page news?
If John McCain decides to run for president as a third-party candidate, ballot-access laws wouldn't be an obstacle. Some observers have suggested that "sore loser" rules, which forbid candidates who have lost primaries from jumping to another party for the fall ballot, would cripple McCain's chances. Not so. At the presidential level, only four states have sore-loser laws: Mississippi, Ohio, South Dakota, and Texas. Of these, only Ohio would have any bearing on McCain's calculus; he can't win Texas, and the other two states aren't exactly high-stakes battlegrounds.
Bill Bradley, bowing out this morning: "My commitment to the things I fought for — to a new politics, to the values that I cherish, to the things that I think exemplify those values — will never change." Well, that's a relief.
