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.”

Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, accused the Bush administration of a cover-up aimed at stopping the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from tackling greenhouse emissions.  She claims that the cover-up is being directed from the White House and the office of the vice president.  At issue is a preliminary finding by the EPA last December that greenhouse gases may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public welfare.  Such a finding would be an early step toward government regulation aimed at protecting public health.  Jason Burnett, the EPA’s former associate deputy administrator, who resigned on June 9, told Boxer’s committee the White House tried pressuring him to retract an e-mail in which he detailed the finding. Burnett said he refused.

White House officials for more than a year have blocked a rule aimed at protecting endangered North Atlantic right whales by challenging the findings of government scientists, according to documents obtained by the Union of Concerned Scientists. The documents, which were mailed to the environmental group by an unidentified National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration official, illuminate a struggle that has raged between the White House and NOAA for more than a year. In February 2007, NOAA issued a final rule aimed at slowing ships traversing some East Coast waters to 10 knots or less during parts of the year to protect the right whales, but the White House has blocked the rule from taking effect. North Atlantic right whales, whose surviving population numbers fewer than 400, are one of the most endangered species on Earth, and scientists have warned that the loss of just one more pregnant female could doom the species.

Congressional Democrats, led by Senator Barbara Boxer, called for the head of the US Environmental Protection Agency, Stephen Johnson, to resign, saying they lost all confidence in his ability to follow the law.  Johnson is the agency chief who went against his scientific staff’s recommendations to allow California to regulate greenhouse-gas emissions in advance of any potential federal regulations. An agency deputy head has in recent weeks claimed that Johnson was actually leaning toward granting California its waiver until the White House pressured him otherwise.  Other emails that the White House didn’t like - notably the one saying that greenhouse gases endanger the public - it simply refused to open.

The two-star general who led an Army investigation into the detainee abuse at Abu Ghraib has accused the Bush administration of war crimes and is calling for accountability. In his 2004 report on Abu Ghraib, then-Major General Anthony Taguba concluded that numerous incidents of sadistic and blatant criminal abuses were inflicted on several detainees. He called the abuse “systemic and illegal.” For that, Taguba was forced into retirement.  Now, in a preface to a Physicians for Human Rights report based on medical examinations of eleven former detainees, Taguba adds an epilogue to his own investigation.  He adds that the profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. He continues that in order for these individuals to suffer the cruelty to which they were subjected, the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded; and the UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored.

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.