Go home towelhead! And take our nuclear secrets with you!

We have written before about the contributions of immigrants to American society.

Whether you are talking physics (Einstein), medicine (2007 Nobel Prize winners Capecchi and Smithies), icons (Jeans inventor Strauss, Google co-founder Brin, Yahoo co-founder Yang, Architect I.M. Pei) law (Supreme Court Justice Frankfurter), foreign affairs (Secretaries of State Kissinger, Albreight and Powell) or just general hotness (actress Salma Hayek), foreign-born American citizens have contributed talent and brains to help make America the greatest country on earth.

The list includes Moniem El-Ganayni, an Egyptian-born physicist who emigrated to America in 1980, became an American citizen in 1988, and who has worked for the Department of Energy in the field of nuclear warship technology for the past 17 years.

In October 2007 El-Ganayni's security clearance was suspended, preventing him from performing his duties at the Department of Energy's Bettis Atomic Laboratory.

Although the regulations allow an individual with a suspended clearance to appeal and respond to the allegations against him, El-Ganayni was effectively denied this right, since the DOE invoked national security, refusing to reveal the government’s allegations against him. His clearance was revoked and he was fired in May 2008.

The DOE claims that there are national security reasons to revoke Dr. El-Ganayni's clearance. Reasons so secret that they can't be revealed to anyone regardless of their level of clearance.

Dr. El-Ganayni claims that he was discriminated against due to his active involvement in the Pittsburgh Muslim community and his opposition to the war in Iraq. He, and the American Civil Liberties Union, claim that he lost his job for exercising his constitutional rights to freedom or religion and expression.

As El-Ganayni's attorney, Vic Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, said at the time, "What's really puzzling for my client is he has absolutely no idea why it's happening. No one has ever alleged that he's abused classified information. The only thing known is that he has been critical of U.S. foreign policy and that he's Muslim. And lo-and-behold they take his clearance, and 'we're not even going to tell you why.' As they do so often, they invoke national security because you know --it's a show stopper." The ACLU still has ongoing suits in an effort to at least find out what Dr. El-Ganayni might be accused of.

We in CFSO don't care why Dr. El-Ganayni lost his clearance.

We care that the process is flawed and unregulated, and that whatever the reasons behind DOE's actions, even if they are legitimate, there is no way for any outside entity to verify the fairness or correctness of their position.

We care that Dr. El-Ganayni lost his job for reasons which will never be made public.

That an American citizen lost his livelihood without any right to appeal because of an antiquated security clearance system that in DOE, as in the State Department, is the last bastion of bigotry and ignorant jingoism in our government.

And most of all, we care that this week, those short-sighted individuals who have been using "national security" as a shield and justification for gross abuses of the American constitution won again, to the possible detriment of every American.

They forced El-Ganayni to take his sorry Egyptian ass back to Egypt, where it belongs.

You can just see them, reading about his departure in their offices, shouting with glee:

"Yeah! Go back to Egypt! Take your elitist American PhD in Nuclear Physics, your jive 17 years of high-level classified experience with American military nuclear power systems and your hoity toyty intimate knowledge of American nuclear secrets with you! Go back to the Middle East! Yeah! That's what aaaahhhm talking about!"

We care, because if exporting American expertise and specialized knowledge concerning American nuclear power systems to the Middle East in order to prevent review of a security clearance determination doesn't scream loudly about the need for security clearance reform, we don't know what does.

As our friend Steven Aftergood, of the Federation of American Scientists, has said, "the security clearance process is a notoriously flawed instrument that lends itself to abuse. Of course I don't mean to suggest that those with clearances are all bad guys, or that those whose clearances are revoked are all good guys. Rather, the problem is that the security clearance system lacks an adequate error-correction mechanism."

In other words, as we have repeatedly written, there is little oversight and in some agencies (like the State Department) no oversight at all. In agencies outside the DOD/OPM process, there is nothing whatsoever to prevent any individual person involved in the security clearance process from the free expression of any bias or prejudice he or she chooses to express. Nor is there any objective oversight to prevent an overzealous agent from making the kind of mistake exemplified by our loss, and Egypt's gain, of El-Ganayni's expertise.

The result is not, as the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security has claimed, a "zero tolerance" policy for wrongdoing. Rather is is a policy in which security clearance adjudicators, mid-level un-elected government employees acting on their own without oversight or accountability, are placed in a position to decide personally for any reason they like whether other employees (usually carefully selected by expert and objective hiring authorities) will be able to work for our country or not.

Albert Einstein was denied a clearance to work for our country. So were hundreds of others of the world's greatest intellects (hence the interest in the subject by the Federation of American Scientists).

A single mid-level security employee, whose training has nothing whatsoever to do with Foreign Affairs, Nuclear Physics, Astronomy, Medicine, Computer Science, Chemistry, Economics, or any of the other disciplines practiced by the employees whose futures he or she controls, is in a position to personally veto the decision of the entire multi-person, multi-step, hiring process of an agency; and deny employment to a person who may have been hand-selected by the best minds in our country in order to perform a task that is vital to our growth or security. And the consequences may far outweigh whatever theoretical risk might have existed had the clearance been left alone.

In OPM and DOD, which handle over 90 percent of all security clearance cases, that adjudicator's decision would be subject to considerable oversight and a transparent process of appeal.

In the State Department, DOE and a handful of other agencies which clear their own staff, there is no oversight. And every advance in hiring mechanisms, every advance in diversity, every advance in any area within the mission of those agencies is subject to a veto by the vote of a person who, at best, is ignorant both of the subject matter and of the consequences.

It really is time to take a look at that.