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Saturday, March 8, 2003

Several Lab Workers Say They Were Slandered in Testimony

By Adam Rankin
Journal Staff Writer
    A number of Los Alamos National Laboratory employees let interim director Pete Nanos know they are angry over testimony presented at last week's congressional hearing.
    Several employees within the Office of Security Inquiries met privately, face to face, with Nanos this week to share their concerns over being slandered by the testimony.
    "Our response to them has been very consistent," said LANL spokeswoman Linn Tytler.
    She said the employees who met with Nanos were "irate."
    "We have clearly told employees that, as citizens of this country, they have every right to express their opinions regarding any of these travails," she said.
    On Thursday, the Journal received an anonymous letter stating LANL security employees met with Nanos "to express their outrage at being slandered" in testimony by former lab investigators Glenn Walp and Steve Doran.
    Tytler said she and Nanos have told employees they are free to contact New Mexico's congressional delegation as well as the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which is heading the congressional investigation into management and business issues at the weapons lab, and tell their side of the story.
    She said no gag orders have been placed on employees; they are completely free to tell their version of events that were related to Congress or overlooked during the various reviews.
    "The only thing we ask is that they do so as individuals, not as laboratory representatives," she said. Tytler explained that means corresponding on their own time with their own resources.
    The anonymous letter accused Walp and Doran of several improprieties and suggested evidence to support that claim might have been destroyed.
    "We expected it a lot sooner than now," Doran said about the anonymous accusations against Walp and himself. "If they can prove it, go for it."
    Both Walp and Doran said they were willing to take lie-detector tests.
    Doran said if the University of California or Congress "could substantiate that we did something wrong, we'd be out on our ear and they wouldn't even be talking to us."
    Instead, he said he and Walp have been rehired by UC as consultants to help fix the problems identified in several independent reviews.
    "If they had all this information about us why didn't they provide this stuff during the initial termination review by UC" in November, Doran said.
    Walp thought he knew "what probably set (the OSI employees) off."
    Early in his testimony Feb. 26, Walp told lawmakers he was hired because OSI employees were incompetent and didn't do adequate or professional work.
    "That probably ticked them off because it made them very clear without naming names," he said.