With evidence suggesting Navy officials manipulated the choice, efforts to site a jet landing field should be scrapped

The U.S. Navy should withdraw its plan to build a practice landing field on an environmentally sensitive site in Eastern North Carolina, now that it has been embarrassed by disclosures in court documents. Those documents reflect e-mail messages among Navy officials essentially saying they felt pressured to justify the decision to build the field near the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge. In that light, the decision-making process was scarcely a process at all.

The News & Observer's Wade Rawlins reported yesterday that these officials, members of a Navy team doing an environmental study of the site, had e-mailed each other complaining about having to back up the decision by top Navy leaders to buy 30,000 acres straddling Washington and Beaufort Counties and build a field. That decision came after the Navy made up its mind in 2000 to move 10 new Super Hornet jet squadrons to the East Coast. Those squadrons were going to Naval Air Station Oceana and Fentress Landing Field in southeastern Virginia.

Then came the recommendation to divide the squadrons between Virginia and North Carolina (eight in Virginia, two here). E-mails show that recommendation may have been made because of noise complaints in the Hampton Roads, Va., area, or because the Navy wanted to put squadrons in North Carolina to get the state's members of Congress to support the new landing field.

In any case, some on the Navy team involved with the environmental study were uncomfortable: Wrote Alan Zusman, one of them, in an e-mail in September 2002: "Don't know about you, but I have a very uneasy feeling about our criteria and the process." In a reply, another team member, Cmdr. John A. Robusto, wrote, "Up until the preferred OLF (landing field) site was chosen everything made sense and all decisions could be logically explained. Now we have to reverse engineer the whole process to justify the outcome."

One factor complicating the outcome, of course, was the wildlife refuge. The guidelines for such a landing field include avoiding proximity to a refuge, which is one reason environmental groups are suing. Also questioned by Robusto was the reason for splitting up the squadrons. He wrote to his superiors during this same period about pressure his team was getting from the staff of the secretary of the Navy: "In a nutshell, they want us to fabricate reasons why split-siting...[is] beneficial to operational readiness. I have explained several times that there is zero operational benefit to split-siting."

These documents alone should force the Navy to cancel its site plans -- which already have been put on hold by a federal judge because of a court challenge by opponents.

This is not to say the Super Hornet squadrons should not be based in North Carolina; there might be significant economic benefit there, and such a move could strengthen the position of Cherry Point Marine Air Station in Havelock. And another site for a practice landing field, one that would not be near a wildlife refuge, also might be appropriate.

But to carry on with the legal fight now in progress would be, on the part of the Navy, a waste of taxpayers money. And those Navy officials who apparently wanted their decisions justified after the fact should be removed from their positions. For the Navy, these disclosures ought to be humiliating. For the citizens of Eastern North Carolina, they confirm their worst suspicions.