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Scandals of the Bush Administration |
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Once again, not liking the message, the admistration is trying to gag the messanger. Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has worked on climate modeling for NASA since 1970, who first warned about the greenhouse effect in 1988, has once more been told by a politial appointee in the public relations office to stop talking about climate change.
The public relations officer who attempted to squelch Hansen this time was George Deutsch, 24, who resigned after Texas A&M confirmed that contrary to his resume, he had not graduated from there in journalism or anything else. Deutsch qualified for his job by working on Bush's reelection campaign.
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Accountability Office Finds Itself Accused Subrata Ghoshroy, a senior investigator of the Government Accountability Office, has accused his agency of covering up a scientific fraud among builders of a $26 billion system meant to shield the nation from nuclear attack. The disputed weapon is the centerpiece of the Bush administration's antimissile plan, which is expected to cost more than $250 billion over the next two decades.
Mr. Ghoshroy says his agency ignored evidence that the two main contractors, Boeing and its subcontractor TRW, had doctored data, skewed test results and made false statements in a 2002 report that credited the contractors with revealing the warhead's failings to the government.
Nira Schwartz, a senior engineer in 1995 and 1996 at the military contractor TRW, told her superiors that the company had falsified research findings meant to help kill vehicles differentiate incoming warheads from clouds of decoys. She singled out the prototype kill vehicle's first flight test, in June 1997, arguing that the contractors falsified data from it. The flight cost $100 million. NYTimes.pdf
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Pay it again, Sam. Slow Learners (28k PDF)
Caught paying the Lincoln Group to translate, and buy news space for soldier written, "news" stories, the Pentagon says it was only trying to get the facts out.
And the State Department is said to be "...working with journalists in Iraq to help them develop develop the skills that you all have in terms of reporting and journalistic ethics and practices," the State Department's Sean McCormack, told reporters on Thursday. "That's important," the department spokesman said. "This is a country where free media didn't exist for decades, so they are learning. We think it's important to assist them in that."
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Admistration Screens Experts (23k PDF)
Private citizens who are asked to go abroad to represent the United States are screened to match their views to those of the administration. David Phillips, who wrote a book, "Losing Iraq," and is an expert on conflict resolution, was not allowed to participate in videoconference in Jerusalem.
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Risk Analysis was Refused before the War (17k PDF)
- In the months before the invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration resisted pleas from senators to assess the risks of a war, especially the prospect of Iraqi resistance former says Sen. Bob Graham who was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the run-up to the Iraq war. Also in September 2002, he asked then-CIA Director George Tenet to analyze the "readiness and willingness" of Iraqis to resist the American presence and to look beyond the removal of Saddam Hussein .
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Counting Farmed Salmon (25k PDF)
The Bush admistration proposes solving the problem of declining salmon runs by counting farmed salmon as wild. With "all those wild salmon" there would be no reason to worry about dams or low water flow killing fish.
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Changing the rules at the EPA (57k PDF)
Bush admistration has whittled, undermined, shaved, twisted and rewritten the rules to distroy decades of environmental work. New mercury rules will make mercury pollution much worse. Air will be no cleaner.
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More on Bush and Science
From Molly Ivins' column on Tuesday, March 2.
It is a source of continuing frustration to me that we have so many big problems I rarely get to report on the little things this administration is doing that are just as telling as the big ones. Here's an example: Last week, Bush dismissed two members of his own handpicked Council on Bioethics. One is a scientist, and the other a moral philosopher -- and both are advocates of stem-cell research.
According to The Washington Post, "In their place he (Bush) appointed three new members, including a doctor who has called for more religion in public life, a political scientist who has spoken out precisely against the research that the dismissed members supported and another who has written about the immorality of abortion and the ‘threats of biotechnology.'"
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The Memory Hole
Many of the things the admistration has let slide, obscured or not released.
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http://zfacts.com/p/617.html | 01/18/12 07:19 GMT
Modified: Mon, 17 Apr 2006 18:32:58 GMT
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