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Cardona fears he and his unit might be targeted by insurgents because he appears in at least one al-Qaeda propaganda video depicting the abuse at Abu Ghraib, close friends told Time magazine, which first reported Cardona’s deployment at Time.com.

Cardona was convicted in May of dereliction of duty and aggravated assault for allowing his dog to bark within inches of a prisoner’s face.

Two officials with the federal agency that oversees the nation’s nuclear weapons program said there were “significant errors” in the memo but did not reject it outright. The officials, who work for the Energy Department’s National Nuclear Security Administration, spoke anonymously because of the ongoing investigation into the breach.

They said they could not confirm the briefing referred to by the author of the memo, which Nuclear Watch said it obtained through an intermediary.

“If true, this summary indicates that a very serious and compromising breach has occurred; perhaps the most serious” in the troubled lab’s history, Nuclear Watch said in a news release.

Police seized three portable computer storage drives ? called flash drives, among other names ? and the papers Oct. 17 during a drug raid at the home of Jessica Quintana, the contract worker.

Quintana has not been charged. A man who was renting a room at her home was jailed on drug and probation charges.

Her lawyer, Stephen Aarons, told The Associated Press that the material included copies of front pages of various documents from the lab. Quintana, an archivist, had planned to use them to create an index of items she had converted to an electronic format, he said.

Aarons also said that one of the three portable computer storage drives contained lab-related material, but that the information wasn’t transferred to another computer.

“It was downloaded, but it was never uploaded,” Aarons said, adding that Quintana did not show the material to anyone.

The 22-year-old archivist took the material home in August because she faced a work deadline to create the index, then forgot about the documents, he said.

“Her intent was to destroy the hard copies, and she never did it,” Aarons said.

Nuclear Watch said the memo on the security briefing at the lab said Quintana had a level of security clearance that would have given her access to documents that could have contained information on how to bypass the authorization process for using nuclear weapons.

“She doesn’t know anything about nuclear weapons,” Aarons responded. “She knows how to scan documents.”

The Energy Department and the Nuclear Security Administration declined Thursday to discuss the scope of the security breach, citing the investigation.

But an official with knowledge of the government probe acknowledged there were “several hundred” pages of classified documents discovered during the drug raid in addition to the classified material found in three computer “thumb” storage devices.

“It is a sizable amount,” said the individual, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is under way. He declined to characterize the documents and said the exact number had not been determined.