UC is in deep trouble for alleged coverups of fiscal mismanagement of the major Labs it runs. After 4 million in materials went missing, the University declared an investigation to find all the missing stuff. And now they say it's all accounted for. Bullshit, say the fired investigators.

But the two investigators said the university still is engaged in a coordinated coverup of theft and abysmal accounting that involves far more money and goes far deeper than UC has acknowledged.

Even some UC supporters said that if evidence of a coverup emerges, the university could lose its historic contract for managing the nuclear weapons lab at Los Alamos, in New Mexico, a facility that ushered in the atomic age six decades ago.

"It is incomprehensible that you could (account for) as much as they say, with everything that I know is out there," said Glenn Walp, a former Pennsylvania State Police commissioner and the leader of the Los Alamos lab's Office of Security Inquiries until he was fired in November.

The Federal government is threatening to take out UC's lucrative and prestigeous contract to run the Labs if improprieties continue, and Congress is beginning several investigations into both the Livermore and Berkeley labs.

The most immediate question is: why did you fire the two investigators charging coverups? These are not random crackpots with some sort of axe to grind about UC. They're serious, intelligent people. And UC's official explanation is pathetic.

A lab official said at the time that Walp and Doran were dismissed because they had lost the confidence of other officials at Los Alamos they had to work with.

Walp said that within a month of having been hired last January -- a hiring that was part of the effort to toughen internal controls after the last scandal -- he began to hear about rampant theft and quickly collected evidence of problems. But once senior officials began to sense that the information might become public, threatening the university's contract, roadblocks were put up, he said. ...Walp said he and Doran were fired when he demanded that the investigation be turned over to the FBI.

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