Lawrence Livermore Lab On The Chopping Block?

guttentag writes "According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Bush's Homeland Security plan calls for transferring $1.2 billion of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's $1.5 billion budget to a new Department of Homeland Security under Tom Ridge. However, the plan transfers only 4 percent of the lab's employees. Ridge's explanation of the numbers: "I cannot give you the kind of explanation you need to deal with that imbalance." LLNL funded and houses the ASCI White supercomputer, among other cool projects." While Livermore has an impressive research record, we would miss most the laser lab from Tron.

Re:Damn, downsized AGAIN

[Amazing Quantum Man]

WTF do we need with an Office of Homeland Security. This just sounds like an American equivalent of the KGB.

I'd just like to point out that KGB stood for "Ministry for State Security".

<PARANOID-CONSPIRACY-THEORY>
Hmm.... that sounds an awful lot like... "Office of Homeland Security"
</PARANOID-CONSPIRACY-THEORY>

Re: Department of Homeland Security

[Black Parrot]

> Can someone explain for a non-USAian, the semantic intricacies that makes "Department of Homeland Security" mean something else than "National Security Agency"?

Sorry I can't remember where I saw it, but one cynical pundit said it was Bush's strategy to get the Congress off his back by tying them up in committee turf battles for the next few years.

I cite the pundit for humor's sake, but it's almost certain the the primary motivation is to send the public a signal that "we're doing something!" At this point it hardly matters what they do, so long as they can point to something. (Surely, this is what drove the "dirty bomb plot preempted" announcement yesterday. Expect more fluff announcements over the next week or two.)

Re:Don't worry. Yet.

[FredGray]

I would add that this action by those government officials had remarkable timing, being exactly coincident with the presentation of the homeland security re-org plan. Remember the Rove Doctrine [nytimes.com]: there's nothing so sacred that it can't be twisted to political advantage.

Let the impeachments begin. Bush and Ashcroft have maximally violated their oaths to protect and defend the Constitution.

Re:Don't worry. Yet.

[Anonymous Coward]

Precedent was established in 1942 during WW II.

The only WWII precedents that I can think of are 1) interning Japanese-Americans, for which a recent Congress apologized, to the tune of giving survivors and their descendants big heaps of money. Presumably no one, even in the Bush government, wants to go around rounding up citizens based solely on their descent anymore.

And 2) the case of a sub full of German soldiers and spies who landed in NY (?) and were tried in front of a military tribunal. Their lawyer presented a spirited case and appealed it to the Supreme Court demanding that they be given a fair jury trial. The appeal was denied, and most of the men were sentenced to death. But they weren't citizens.

If you know of any legally affirmed (by Congressional law, executive order, or judicial decision) precedent for holding citizens with no lawyers and no trial, present it here.

Re: Thats called vigilance

[Black Parrot]

> Drop the inane, idiotic extensions of your patrician banter. It would be absolutely, astoundingly idiotic not to pursue and capture these people in the planning stages.

Yes, that's exactly what law enforcement does in the USA.

But then they take the accused felon to a judge and file charges, and the judge sets or denies bail, and the accused felon's lawyer gets involved, etc.

The administration is leaving out a very important part of the procedings.

BTW, People interested in this topic might want to check out the links that neocon posted [slashdot.org] in a different thread, and which provide a bit more information about this than most of the media have been offering.