Jo Anne Allen writes for Reuters. Excerpt:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Some U.S. nuclear weapons scientists in New Mexico are boycotting required polygraph tests on the grounds that they contain questions unrelated to national security, a senior scientist said on Wednesday.
“The polygraphers are asking medical questions — what medication you’re taking and what medical conditions you have — after we were told there would be no such personal questions,” said Al Zelicoff, an employee at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Zelicoff is an outspoken opponent of polygraph tests at the U.S. Department of Energy’s three nuclear weapons laboratories.
The tests were ordered after former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee was targeted in an espionage scare last year at the department’s Los Alamos National Laboratory. After being held in solitary confinement for nine months, Lee pleaded guilty to one count of mishandling classified information, the government dropped 58 other charges against him, and he was sentenced to time served.
Zelicoff, one of some 15,000 workers in the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons lab system, said some of his colleagues in sensitive programs had refused to take polygraph tests and thus were barred from performing their jobs.
Zelicoff called the medical questions irrelevant, saying the taking of medication had no impact on the tests’ outcome.