In March, Los Alamos National Laboratory Security Chief Stanley Busboom was forced to resign for his role in ousting two whistle-blowers from the world's best-known nuclear weapons facility. Now, a little more than six months later, Busboom is back -- as a consultant to the same Los Alamos division he was once compelled to leave, lab officials confirm.

"It looks to me like the rats are returning to the ship," said Peter Stockton, an investigator with the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight. He charged Busboom with helping maintain a "culture of retaliation" at Los Alamos, and with neglecting the lab's famously porous defenses.

Busboom became a focus of a Congressional investigation earlier this year, after he helped fire Glenn Walp and Steven Doran, two ex-police chiefs brought in to examine allegations of fraud and corruption at Los Alamos. The pair were terminated almost immediately after telling Energy Department officials about what they had discovered.

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