Energy Secretary denounces racial profiling

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham issued a memo to employees Monday denouncing discrimination at the department. An Energy official confirmed the memo had been issued, but said the department would not publicly release the document because it was an internal memo for employees only. In the memo, Abraham said discrimination would not be tolerated at Energy and that any racial profiling would be eliminated, according to an Associated Press report. Gregory Friedman, Energy's inspector general, did not find any evidence to support racial profiling concerns in four cases involving Asian-Americans working for the agency, according to a report released earlier this month. Friedman reviewed four cases of possible discrimination based on national origin involving the department's security clearance process. According to the report, none of the cases reviewed was the subject of a formal complaint of discrimination. In an April 3 memo to Abraham, Friedman acknowledged that his finding did not rule out the existence of racial profiling in the department. "Despite our efforts to obtain all relevant information, there is no assurance that the four cases cited above were the only instances at the Department of Energy in which a federal or contractor employee believes he or she has been the victim of profiling," the memo said. In November, then-Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson asked the IG to investigate the extent of racial profiling in the department's security process. The case of former nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee, a Chinese-American accused of stealing nuclear secrets from Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory in 1999, sparked the investigation. Since the Lee case, fellow Chinese workers at Los Alamos have reported being singled out for security investigations because of their ethnic background. According to Friedman's memo, Energy's ombudsman, Jeremy Wu, said there are "strong and continuing allegations about bias and profiling." Wu, citing confidentiality, declined to identify to the IG those individuals who had expressed their concerns to him about unfair treatment within the department. In addition to the IG's investigation, Energy has created an agency task force against racial profiling and will conduct a department-wide survey this year to measure the workplace environment and develop ways to address racial profiling.