Aug. 22, 2003

CBS news article

I hope the Laboratory intends to publicly correct the CBS news article appearing at http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/08/20/eveningnews/main569353.shtml online linked to by the Lab's home page. The Laboratory has a long history of sitting silently by while it gets kicked in the teeth, which negatively affects all of us who work here.

Some problems I see with this article:

Walp, the lab's former head of the Office of Security Inquiries, was fired in retaliation for documenting the national security breaches.

It's a manipulative mischaracterization to call the poor creditcard and procurement controls, and inventory management failures "national security breaches."

While Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Lab was fighting its own public security and fraud disasters . . .

In the final analysis, it's going a bit far to call the property and procurement situation "security and fraud disasters," with the exception of the viewpoint of those responsible or caught in the crossfire. The article, of course, doesn't imply this viewpoint at all.

At Sandia, like Los Alamos, internal investigators say every time they've exposed lax security over the past three years, management has lurched into cover-up mode.

"Every time." Really? One-hundred-percent-inclusive statements like "every time" should be vigorously disputed, particularly when it states that it is standard operating procedure for Los Alamos to cover up fraud, waste and abuse. The time scale of the statement is inclusive of the present, with the phase "over the last three years," implying recklessly that to this day we cover up waste, fraud and abuse as a standard practice.

I'd expect this kind of biased, factually incorrect and unprofessional reporting from Fox News, but it is disappointing to see it from CBS, which used to have a reputation of at least trying to be professional.

For the sake of its employees and its reputation, the Laboratory should not sit idly by and continue to take black eyes from yellow journalism, now or in the future.

--Carl Gilbert