Reporting for Denver’s Rocky Mountain News, Laura Frank tells a harrowing tale of workers made sick in the nuclear industry and now stonewalled by their government: “The Rocky Mountain News sent Hallmark details of its investigation of the “no pay” list last month. Less than two weeks ago, on July 10, the DOL suddenly rescinded the two-year-old list, saying that improvements to its own database of diseases linked to toxic substances — which also has existed for two years — made it obsolete.

But while the “no pay” list was publicly available, DOL’s database is not. Claimants such as the Dailys cannot have all the data DOL says it will now use. Claimants can go to a DOL Web site and see a list of hundreds of toxic substances confirmed to be at certain weapons sites. And they can see a list of diseases on another Web page. But they can’t know whether the government has evidence they were exposed to the substances that are linked to specific diseases, or exactly where those substances were found.

That, government officials say, would be a risk of national security.

The workers and the families of those who labored under top-secret conditions to defend the national security find that an ironic excuse.

“See the game?” Pat Daily said. “They got caught with a bogus list. This does nothing but get the pressure off them. We still can’t get the information that can help us.”

Poison Pen