WMD
at home
Senator, activist
gain with teamwork
It's a safe bet that Mitch McConnell and Craig Williams would never have
crossed paths at a dinner party or political fund-raiser. But it's good for Kentuckians that something else brought them together,
even if it was WMD-at-home. We saw a benefit of their teamwork this week. A report confirmed that the
Defense Department has indeed unlocked funding for chemical weapons disposal
in Madison County and Pueblo, Colo. Funding had been shut off for the two sites, where weapons will be chemically
neutralized, in an apparent attempt to divert the money into beleaguered weapons
incineration programs. McConnell, Kentucky's senior senator, and Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo.,
did the heavy legislative lifting. But the non-profit Chemical Weapons Working Group, based in Berea and headed
by Williams, held the key to getting them the information they needed to
do their jobs. It's unnerving that U.S. senators must rely on a non-profit non-governmental
organization for reliable information about Pentagon actions. But as McConnell said in a tribute in the Sept. 12 Congressional Record:
"One of our biggest challenges has been to keep those in charge of weapons
disposal at the Department of Defense accountable to the citizens of Kentucky.
... Without the efforts and diligence of Craig and his organization, it would
have been close to impossible.'' Williams, a Vietnam veteram and former woodworker, "has been another set
of eyes and ears for the Kentucky delegation, keeping us abreast of what is
going on -- or not going on -- at the depot,'' said McConnell. "But for Craig and the CWWG, hundreds of thousands of Americans would continue
living indefinitely with the specter of an aging and increasingly unstable
chemical weapons stockpile looming in their midst."