AP: Congress scrutinizes Los Alamos security

[Eugene]

Posted on Tue, Jan. 30, 2007

Congress scrutinizes Los Alamos security
JENNIFER TALHELM
Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Fed-up lawmakers on a House oversight committee said Tuesday they
want to strip a federal nuclear agency of its security responsibilities and threatened
to shut down Los Alamos National Laboratory to correct a decade of security lapses there.

Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich., said he has sat through nearly a decade of hearings in which
the Energy Department and the northern New Mexico nuclear weapons lab have promised
to fix security problems.

"I've been hearing these promises for a long time, and they've become somewhat tedious,"
he said.

The lawmakers blistered the lab for its most recent security breach in which a contract
worker walked out with hundreds of pages of classified documents. The documents turned
up during a drug raid last October involving a man who rented a room at the worker's home.

-snip-

Full article: http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/politics/16580827.htm