i suppose a dramatic miniseries portraying the events culminating in the FBI and EPA raid of the Rocky Flats Plant and it’s generally forgotten/hidden legacy

Former grand jury foreman McKinley chronicles his experiences in the 2004 book he co-authored with attorney Caron Balkany, The Ambushed Grand Jury which begins with an open letter to the U.S. Congress from Special Agent Lipsky:

I am an FBI agent. My superiors have ordered me to lie about a criminal investigation I headed in 1989. We were investigating the US Department of Energy, but the US Justice Department covered up the truth.

I have refused to follow the orders to lie about what really happened during that criminal investigation at Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant. Instead, I have told the author of this book the truth. Her promise to me, if I told her what really happened, was that she would put it in a book to tell Congress and the American people.

Some dangerous decisions are now being made based on that government cover-up. Please read this book. I believe you know what needs to happen.

can you imagine how massive an institutional failure has to be by the Department of Energy for the FBI to pretend to be on an anti-terror investigation so they can surprise raid a nuclear plant and catch DOE officials off guard? that would be prestige TV.

for every Chernobyl, there are dozens of declared EPA Superfund sites and for every EPA Superfund site, there are hundreds of unrecognized, covered up catastrophes. we almost never learn of them, let alone about them, in popular media. they are something local communities might talk about amongst each other: “don’t let your kids play there”, “don’t drink the water here.”, but the community leaders don’t want much hay made as it would scare off business or new arrivals. and, they or their family likely had a hand in a pocket over it way back when.

to be clear, nearabout every country with heavy industry has these places, but the closest the US has ever come to reckoning with their existence was CERCLA which was passed just before Reagan, so you can imagine how gutted and underfunded it is by now.

anyway i liked the Chernobyl series, as a TV series. the arc for the Shcherbina character was excellent. and it was pretty clear that once the scope of the situation became clear to leadership, state power was brought forward to solve it in a way that could never have happened in the US. i liked the line where Shcherbina grew frustrated with Legasov’s pessimism and said something like, “tell me exactly what you need.” so Legasov says something like, “500 tons of silica sand ready to be dropped by helicopters within 4 hours” or some crazy shit like that, expecting to be dismissed, and Shcherbina is like “ok” before it basically smash cuts to the material coming in. i remember thinking, “yeah, in the US, our leaders would be paralyzed by waiting on captains of industry to OK any solution, cover up the plant failure, imprison anyone who talked about it as spies, and declare the explosion in cancer rates across the entire country as an evil weapon of the chinese communists.”

I was able to watch it as it aired and definitely enjoyed it but remember thinking how some of it just smacked of anticommunist tropes snuck in all over.

But I was pretty new to real, radical leftism at the time and had a ton of questions about the validity of some of what the show portrayed, but knew I wouldn’t get honest answers from a general search.

So I posted on r/communism asking for people’s opinions on what the show got right and where the propagandist lies began. I got told it was all lies, complete western propaganda and that I shouldn’t be watching bourgeois media at all. That I was spreading liberal ideology by even mentioning the show, etc. I swear to god that (and many other) “communism” subs have been blatant astroturfed ops from the beginning. And it’s gotten so much worse since then, it’s hard to believe.

I wish this place had been around at the time because I would have loved a good analytical discussion on it. I think I was on the chapo sub at the time but foolishly thought most of the “communist” subs had enough crossover that I’d get the same response there.

Anyway, rambling comment nearing conclusion… I’m glad to finally see some good talk on it, what like 5 years later. Too bad I barely remember the show now.

(Also glad to see you posting again SFS, FWIW.)