A new investigation by the Center for Public Integrity highlights the allegedly improper use of “classification” to squelch materials for political reasons.

According to the story, 55-year old James E. Doyle’s supervisor stopped by his desk at Los Alamos National Laboratory one day last year and told him that senior managers wanted copies of all his publications. He asked why and was eventually told that someone at the House Armed Services Committee wanted to see them.

[quote]Later that day at the lab’s New Mexico campus, Doyle said, two members of a Security Inquiries Team abruptly arrived with a special, silver-colored briefcase for secure documents, and pulled out an article he published a few days earlier on the website of a London nonprofit group.They claimed that the article, an impassioned critique of the political theories undergirding the nuclear arms race and a defense of President Obama’s embrace of a nuclear weapons-free future, contained classified information.[/quote]

Odd, since the laboratory’s security authorities had already reviewed the article and declared it unclassified. But it was the start of a series of events in which Doyle first had his pay docked and his security clearance withdrawn, and then eventually was fired.

[ilink url=”https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/07/31/15161/nuclear-weapons-lab-employee-fired-after-publishing-scathing-critique-arms-race”]Read the CPI Investigation on Fired Nuclear Weapons Lab Employee[/ilink]