|
Comment on this article |
View comments |
Email this Article
|
|
More Revisionist History |
Current rating: 0 |
by Baltimore Sun via rporter
Email: rporter (nospam) newtonbigelow.com (verified) |
22 Jun 2003
|
|
|
HOWEVER JUDICIOUSLY President Bush may be trying to handle Iran, when it comes to global warming it seems as though his administration is pushing the same sort of fudged reality that it pursued with Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. According to The New York Times, an Environmental Protection Agency report due next week was cleansed by the White House of references to the many studies blaming smokestack and tail-pipe emissions for climate change. In place of that material, the White House sought to insert a study underwritten by the oil industry that questions the role of fossil fuels in global warming. But EPA officials balked, preferring to leave the topic unaddressed.
Mr. Bush is not the first president to allow political motives to color the information his government releases. But it's hard to remember one who was bolder about seeking to deceive Americans in order to serve his political backers.
All the facts on Iraq are not yet in. But the Bush administration's calculated manipulation of years of climate change research that his friends in the energy industry consider hostile to their economic interests gravely undermines his credibility in other areas.
Does he only play fast and loose with the truth where oil is involved, or is every subject fair game? If this sounds harsh, consider the pre-revised history.
Global warming, of course, was Al Gore's issue. He wrote a book about climate change long before he ran against Mr. Bush for the White House. But many later studies supported Mr. Gore's conclusion that man-made greenhouse gases trapped in the Earth's atmosphere were a major contributor to the warming trend.
The EPA and the National Academy of Sciences both issued reports last year targeting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and vehicle exhausts as primary sources of these greenhouse gases.
But Mr. Bush, who as a presidential candidate called for limiting power plant emissions, now seems determined to forestall such costly consequences for the energy industry by raising doubts about whether it is truly at fault.
Last year, he simply dismissed the EPA report as a document "put out by the bureaucracy." This year, his political aides headed off EPA at the pass.
These tactics come straight out of a playbook put out by GOP pollster Frank Luntz to help Mr. Bush deal with environmental issues - his political Achilles' heel.
On global warming, Mr. Luntz urged opponents of regulatory controls to "make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate. ... Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly."
So the debate goes on, and the air gets dirtier and hotter and nothing is done - our own weapon of mass destruction.
But its first casualty is the value of Mr. Bush's word.
Copyright © 2003, The Baltimore Sun |
|
Gen. Clark Says White House Pushed Saddam Link Without Evidence |
by FAIR
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 3
22 Jun 2003
|
Media Silent on Clark's 9/11 Comments
NEW YORK - June 20 - Sunday morning talk shows like ABC's This Week or Fox News Sunday often make news for days afterward. Since prominent government officials dominate the guest lists of the programs, it is not unusual for the Monday editions of major newspapers to report on interviews done by the Sunday chat shows.
But the June 15 edition of NBC's Meet the Press was unusual for the buzz that it didn't generate. Former General Wesley Clark told anchor Tim Russert that Bush administration officials had engaged in a campaign to implicate Saddam Hussein in the September 11 attacks-- starting that very day. Clark said that he'd been called on September 11 and urged to link Baghdad to the terror attacks, but declined to do so because of a lack of evidence.
Here is a transcript of the exchange:
CLARK: "There was a concerted effort during the fall of 2001, starting immediately after 9/11, to pin 9/11 and the terrorism problem on Saddam Hussein."
RUSSERT: "By who? Who did that?"
CLARK: "Well, it came from the White House, it came from people around the White House. It came from all over. I got a call on 9/11. I was on CNN, and I got a call at my home saying, 'You got to say this is connected. This is state-sponsored terrorism. This has to be connected to Saddam Hussein.' I said, 'But--I'm willing to say it, but what's your evidence?' And I never got any evidence."
Clark's assertion corroborates a little-noted CBS Evening News story that aired on September 4, 2002. As correspondent David Martin reported: "Barely five hours after American Airlines Flight 77 plowed into the Pentagon, the secretary of defense was telling his aides to start thinking about striking Iraq, even though there was no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the attacks." According to CBS, a Pentagon aide's notes from that day quote Rumsfeld asking for the "best info fast" to "judge whether good enough to hit SH at the same time, not only UBL." (The initials SH and UBL stand for Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.) The notes then quote Rumsfeld as demanding, ominously, that the administration's response "go massive...sweep it all up, things related and not."
Despite its implications, Martin's report was greeted largely with silence when it aired. Now, nine months later, media are covering damaging revelations about the Bush administration's intelligence on Iraq, yet still seem strangely reluctant to pursue stories suggesting that the flawed intelligence-- and therefore the war-- may have been a result of deliberate deception, rather than incompetence. The public deserves a fuller accounting of this story.
http://www.fair.org/ |
