MORE LOS ALAMOS SHENANIGANS

There’s only one reporter in the national main­stream press who’s had the atten­tion span to stay focused on the ongo­ing scan­dals at Los Alamos National Lab. On Friday, CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson had another remark­able story about the almost laugh­ably cor­rupt busi­ness prac­tices at the world’s most impor­tant nuclear cen­ter.
The story cen­ters around Chuck Montano, one of a group of Los Alamos audi­tors who were sup­posed to look over the lab’s accounts with out­side ven­dors. What he found: “Vendors could charge what­ever they wanted.” 10,000 pur­chases out of 56,000 shouldn’t have been allowed. Another 38,000 were ques­tion­able. “Vendors rou­tinely over­billed and double-​​billed — and yet were paid, no ques­tions asked,” Attkisson notes. (And you won­der why lab employee tried to buy camp­ing gear and a Mustang with gov­ern­ment credit cards.)
But when Montano and his fel­low audi­tors wrote up an account of the fishy deals, the report was buried. Montano was kept idle with­out work for nine months, he claims.
Obviously, this bury­ing of whistle­blow­ers has become a habit over at Los Alamos. And Congressman Joe Barton (R-​​TX), who heads the House Energy and Commerce Committee, seems to be get­ting pretty tired of it. Attkisson asked Barton how could Los Alamos finally be cleaned up. And Barton answered, “One thing we could do is just shut the entire com­plex down.”

March 20th, 2005 | Los Alamos and Labs | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.