Blog for a Better World

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency’s public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers’ findings about climate change for at least two years. The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.  From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said that NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public. News releases suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency and scientific dilution.”

The Bush administration is proposing changes that would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether subdivisions, dams, highways and other projects have the potential to harm endangered animals and plants. Agencies also could not consider a project’s contribution to global warming in their analysis. Environmentalists complained the proposals would gut protections for endangered animals and plants. John Kostyack, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation, said that if adopted, these changes would seriously weaken the safety net of habitat protections that we have relied upon to protect and recover endangered fish, wildlife and plants for the past 35 years.

Government and industry sources are saying that the Treasury Department is dramatically expanding the scope of its bailout of the financial system with a plan to take ownership stakes in the nation’s insurance companies, signaling new concerns about a sector of the economy whose troubles until now have been overshadowed by the banking industry.  Insurers including The Hartford, Prudential and MetLife, have pushed the Bush administration to include them in the plan. Many firms have taken losses from mortgage-related securities and other investments and are struggling to replenish their coffers.  The new initiative underscores the growing range of problems that Treasury is scrambling to address with the $700 billion allocated by Congress last month.

Nearly 60 House Democrats last June urged the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to examine whether top Bush administration officials may have committed crimes in authorizing the use of harsh interrogation tactics against suspected terrorists.  In a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, the lawmakers cited what they said is mounting evidence that senior officials personally sanctioned the use of waterboarding and other aggressive tactics against detainees in U.S.-run prisons overseas. An independent investigation is needed to determine whether such actions violated U.S. or international law, the letter stated.

According to a government report, the United States this year will have spent at least $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war. The report, by the Congressional Budget Office says that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies.  The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops.

Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the CIA’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes.  The International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the CIA last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were categorically torture, which is illegal under both American and international law. It was reported that Abu Zubaydah was confined in a box so small he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position and was one of several prisoners to be slammed against the walls, according to the Red Cross report. The CIA has admitted that Abu Zubaydah and two other prisoners were waterboarded.

In former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s book, What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception, he said the national news media neglected their watchdog role in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, calling reporters “complicit enablers” of the Bush administration’s push for war. Surprisingly, some prominent journalists have agreed. Katie Couric, the anchor of “CBS Evening News,” said that she had felt pressure from government officials and corporate executives to cast the war in a positive light. She also said that she thought the lack of skepticism shown by journalists about the Bush administration’s case for war amounted to one of the most embarrassing chapters in American journalism.  For five years, antiwar activists and media critics have claimed that the national news media failed to keep the White House accountable before the invasion.

According to two former State Department employees, the Bush administration repeatedly ignored corruption at the highest levels within the Iraqi government and kept secret potentially embarrassing information so as not to undermine its relationship with Baghdad.  Arthur Brennan, who briefly served in Baghdad as head of the department’s Office of Accountability and Transparency last year, and James Mattil, who worked as the chief of staff, told Senate Democrats that the State Department’s policies not only contradicted the anti-corruption mission but indirectly contributed to and has allowed corruption to fester at the highest levels of the Iraqi government.  The U.S. embassy effort against corruption was little more than window dressing and that the U.S. remained silent in the face of an unrelenting campaign by senior Iraqi officials to subvert Baghdad’s Commission on Public Integrity.

It was recently learned that the Bush administration officials from Vice President Dick Cheney on down signed off on using harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, against captives after asking the Justice Department to endorse their legality.  Between 2002 and 2003, the Justice Department issued several memos from its Office of Legal Counsel that justified using the interrogation tactics, including ones that critics call torture.  The meetings were held in the White House Situation Room in the years immediately following the Sept. 11 attacks. Attending the sessions were Cheney, then-Bush aides Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice.  Cheney and the top national security officials were deeply immersed in developing the CIA’s interrogation program during months of discussions over which methods should be used and when.

In a 4/2008 NY Times piece, they revealed how the Bush administration orchestrated a public relations scheme to counter negative reports and mounting criticism over Guantanamo Bay, which was being branded as a torture center in the national media in 2005. The administration’s communications experts responded swiftly to the charges. They put a group of retired military officers on one of the jets normally used by Vice President Dick Cheney and flew them to Cuba for a carefully orchestrated tour of Guantánamo. To the public, these men were presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as objective military analysts. Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance. These analysts have also a powerful financial dynamic: Most of them have ties to military contractors vested in the very war policies they are asked to assess on air.

Did the CIA manufacture phony documents linking al-Qaeda to Saddam Hussein in an effort to assist the Bush Administration in its lead up to war in Iraq?  According to a new book, “The Way of the World”, the CIA has although the agency adamantly denies the allegation.  The author contends that once the Bush Administration learned in 2003 that the Iraqi President no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction, they ordered the CIA to concoct a fake document that purported to show that Iraq helped trained Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.  The purpose behind this forgery was to influence public opinion about the war.