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2004-02-19 - 3:53 p.m.

Bush Administration Systematically Distorts Scientific Facts

In this New York Times article by James Glanz, he reports on a statement by more than 60 influential scientists including 20 Nobel prize winners "asserting that the Bush administration had systematically distorted scientific fact in the service of policy goals on the environment, health, biomedical research and nuclear weaponry at home and abroad."

Some excerpts follow:

The sweeping accusations were later discussed in a conference call organized by the Union of Concerned Scientists, an independent organization that focuses on technical issues and has often taken stands at odds with administration policy. On Wednesday, the organization also issued a 38-page report detailing its accusations.

The two documents accuse the administration of repeatedly censoring and suppressing reports by its own scientists, stacking advisory committees with unqualified political appointees, disbanding government panels that provide unwanted advice and refusing to seek any independent scientific expertise in some cases.

"Other administrations have, on occasion, engaged in such practices, but not so systemically nor on so wide a front," the statement from the scientists said, adding that they believed the administration had "misrepresented scientific knowledge and misled the public about the implications of its policies."

Dr. Kurt Gottfried, an emeritus professor of physics at Cornell University who signed the statement and spoke during the conference call, said the administration had "engaged in practices that are in conflict with spirit of science and the scientific method."

Dr. Gottfried, who is also chairman of the board of directors at the Union of Concerned Scientists, said the administration had a "cavalier attitude towards science" that could place at risk the basis for the nation's long-term prosperity, health and military prowess.

...

According to the report, the Bush administration has misrepresented scientific consensus on global warming, censored at least one report on climate change, manipulated scientific findings on the emissions of mercury from power plants and suppressed information on condom use.

The report asserts that the administration also allowed industries with conflicts of interest to influence technical advisory committees, disbanded for political reasons one panel on arms control and subjected other prospective members of scientific panels to political litmus tests.

To read the whole article, go here or here.

2004-02-17 - 6:56 p.m.

Best Blog Post: 'What a Tangled Web We Weave'

The Koufax Awards were just announced on this site, and the Best Post of 2003 was Billmon's brilliant post entitled 'What a Tangled Web We Weave' which lists and sources the lies about WMD by the Bush Adminstration.

If you haven't seen it, you should go read it now. Even though you probably heard most of them live, it's eye opening to see them all in one place.

And to read more of the Awards, for best Blog, Best Writing, Best Series, etc, go here for the links.

2004-02-13 - 1:42 p.m.

'Too easily persuaded into an unnecessary war'

Here's an editorial from the Seattle Times by Bruce Ramsey / Times editorial columnist, who even admits to having voted for Bush in 2000, but who now is very critical of his administration for the unnecessary and costly invasion of Iraq.

Some excerpts:

Apologists now say Bush was "misled" by bad intelligence. He says in his defense that others in the U.S. and British governments saw the same intelligence, and reached the same conclusions. The French and Germans didn't. The intelligence people, including Tenet, now say they never asserted such certainty.

...

Bush had run as a candidate opposed to hegemonic war and the follow-on "nation-building." But he made the mistake of recruiting his father's men, who thought differently. By all appearances, he was sold on the war by the people around him.

In turn, he sold the Congress by asserting that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons. Its soldiers did not. We know that for a fact. For months, it has been suggested Saddam Hussein hid his best weapons, which is a very odd thing to do before the great battle of one's life. We have spent months looking, and have found Saddam in his spider hole, but not the "weapons of mass destruction."

It has been nearly a year. It's time for Bush's supporters to admit that there weren't any such weapons. Essentially, the president did this in the "Meet the Press" interview with Tim Russert this past weekend.

That is a serious admission. It means America was led to war under false pretenses. It means that in the first instance of the new American doctrine of preemptive war, we preempted something that wasn't real.

From the Bush camp comes much blowing of smoke over this. Bush says Saddam could have developed a nuclear weapon and given it to a private group to set off in the United States. A lot of things can be imagined, but the world's mightiest power cannot go to war over an imagination. The justification for killing people has to be stronger than that. There need to be facts — facts that stand in your path, shout in your face and block all paths other than that of mechanized violence.

The president didn't have the facts. Some people said in his defense that he probably knew more than he was saying. They overestimated him.

Bruce Ramsey's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is bramsey@seattletimes.com

You can read the entire editorial here.

2004-02-12 - 8:15 p.m.

Search for truth as elusive as those WMD

Here is an opinion piece by Jim Mullins, who is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a resident of Delray Beach, Florida. This was originally published in the South Florida Sun-Sentinal on January 29th, but is no longer accessible at that website.

Since it is so cogent and well written, and shouldn't be lost, I have retrieved it from the Google cache, and am reposting it here in it's entirety. I've also added some links to some of the important original sources he referenced:

President Bush has latched on to two hot-button issues, illegal immigration and a manned mission to Mars, in an obvious attempt to divert America's attention from an emerging cascade of information exposing the lies and deception that led us into pre-emptive war on Iraq.

Reports from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the U.S. Army War College, arms hunter David Kay, revelations from former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and Karen Kwiatkowski, an official in the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, all paint a damning portrait of an administration "out to lunch" on terrorist threats and hellbent for war on Iraq.

The Carnegie Endowment did an exhaustive study of pre-war information about Iraq emanating from the Bush administration. A consistent pattern emerged, a gradual change of tone from possibility to probability to absolute certainty in the administration's assessments of Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction and nuclear capability. Official pronouncements, from the president on down, increasingly exaggerated the threat -- although supporting evidence was scant or missing entirely.

President Bush has reversed this process since last year's State of the Union address. Then he spoke of hundreds of tons of anthrax, nerve gas, botulism for biological weapons and of nuclear capability. In this year's address, he downgraded the threat to the meaningless "dozens of weapons-of-mass-destruction-related-program activities." Secretary of State Colin Powell admitted this weekend that his charge at the U.N. last February ("our conservative estimate that Iraq today has a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical weapons agent") had no factual basis.

This deception was exposed by Professor Jeffery Record at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College (PDF) (or HTML). He reported this month that his research showed that: "The Iraq invasion was an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault from al-Qaida."

David Kay was called in by the Bush administration to find the elusive weapons of mass destruction that neither U.N. inspectors before the invasion nor U.S. Army inspectors after could find over a period of several months. He was given a $900 million budget with hundreds of inspectors. He threw in the towel on Jan. 23, telling Reuters: "I don't think they existed."

Paul O'Neill refused to resign, forcing his firing, and has written that President Bush was committed to an Iraqi invasion from the time of his first Cabinet meeting and went full-speed ahead immediately after 9-11. The program was kept under wraps until after President Bush's 2002 summer vacation, whereupon the American public and Congress, traumatized by 9-11, were inundated with scare propaganda leading up to the invasion without U.N. sanction, earning worldwide condemnation.

When our official intelligence agencies, the CIA, DIA, NSA were unable to provide credible enough information to substantiate Bush administration claims, the Pentagon set up its own intelligence apparatus, the Office of Special Plans. Lt. Col. Karen Kwaitkowski was a staff member who requested and got early retirement. As a self-styled conservative, she became appalled at OSP's blatant ideological purpose that colored intelligence obtained not by rigorous investigation but by cherrypicking unsubstantiated information to arrive at a predetermined position; not a search for the truth but pure propaganda designed to sway Congress and the American people.

Daniel Ellsberg, whose public revelation of the Pentagon Papers exposed the lies and deception that fueled the Vietnam War and 58,000 American deaths, sees "history repeating itself."

What we can now expect is that someone or some agency will be made the scapegoat for this tragic turn of events. But the blame must be put squarely where it belongs.

If President Bush sticks with his refusal to face reality, as was abundantly shown in his recent State of the Union address and later remarks, the American people must demand that Congress institute a full and complete investigation of the circumstances leading up to the Iraqi invasion.

It is critical that we avoid another Vietnam-like trauma and get back to addressing the causes of terrorism and seeking remedies through cooperative effort with the rest of humanity.

Jim Mullins is a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C., and a resident of Delray Beach.

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