Seesdifferent’s important diary describes one of the Bush administration’s latest attacks on information and the public’s right to know, once again sacrificing the public’s welfare in favor of their own political power, and that of their favored special interests, or just simply hiding their incompetence or dishonesty. This time they are gutting EPA’s libraries housing a vast amount of, as one commenter to the diary who uses the information regularly in his Ohio EPA work put it, "decades of institutional knowledge." When demanded to cease this activity by the incoming House Democratic committee chairs, the EPA de-linked thousands of documents from its website containing information on pollution and toxic substances the next day. The consequences of their actions to human health and the environment once again are not a concern to the Bush administration.
This is just the latest example of an administration that sees itself as the Johnny Appleseed of democracy for the world doing everything they can to suppress or otherwise manipulate information - democracy’s lifeblood - in their own homeland. It is difficult to comprehend the truly staggering magnitude of their anti-information, anti-democratic power grab.
This diary is not about finding smoking guns on the Bush administration and the Republicans, such as FISA or the Iraq war run-up, although it would not be a bit surprising if impeachable offenses were found with more digging into some of the items discussed here. It is instead an attempt to capture the unprecedented magnitude of this control of information through intimidation, manipulation, suppression and/or deceit, such as the recent EPA travesty, that the Bush administration has undertaken during the last five-plus years that would seem to resemble more a government bent on totalitarian control than one practicing the democracy they have been extolling as a shining example to the world. As James Madison said,
There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by the gradual and silent encroachment of those in power, than by violent a sudden usurpation.
The following is by no means a complete list of the Republicans’ incursions, but hopefully gives some idea of the right-wing authoritarians’ Orwellian attack on information, our right to know, and our democracy. Please feel free to add your own in comments.
Government Employees
Nick Turse’s fallen legion trilogy, consisting of three separate articles, counts 243 casualties of the Bush administration as of early 2006, who are described as follows in Mr. Turse words introducing his first list late in 2005:
the seemingly endless and ever-growing list of beleaguered administrators, managers, and career civil servants who quit their posts in protest or were defamed, threatened, fired, forced out, demoted, or driven to retire by Bush administration strong-arming. Often, this has been due to revulsion at the President's policies - from the invasion of Iraq and negotiations with North Korea to the flattening of FEMA and the slashing of environmental standards - which these women and men found to be beyond the pale.
In April, the CIA fired an intelligence analyst nearing retirement for allegedly leaking information to Dana Priest for her article on network of secret CIA prisons, which the analyst has categorically denied.
Stuart Bowen Jr.’s office - originally eliminated by an obscure provision secretively tacked on to a congressional military authorization bill that terminated his fraud-prevention agency by Duncan Hunter, chairman of the Armed Services committee, because Bowen’s office was finding too much fraud and mismanagement in Iraq - was apparently saved by the Democratic victory in last month’s elections.
Classified Documents
Number of government documents classified each year has doubled since Bush took office. 14.2 million classification decisions in 2004 (at a cost of $7.7 billion) vs. 8.6 million in 2001. Number declassified has dropped to 29.5 million pages in 2005 vs. 100 million in 2001 and from record high of 204 million in 1997. 15.6 million classification decisions in 2004 at cost of $7.2 billion.
In 2005, $134 was spent (and in 2004, $148 was spent) classifying for every $1 declassifying; in the late 1990’s, the ratio was $15-$17 to $1.
These figures do not include classification activities of Vice President Dick Cheney, WHO HAS REFUSED to report on his office's classification activities since 2003. Also, there are serious questions whether he even has constitutional authority to classify.
The CIA and other federal agencies have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
And THIS!
Presidential Press Conferences
Bush had the fewest presidential press conferences by half (17 to Nixon’s 30) during first term of modern presidents, and those few have been heavily scripted, even to the point of using shills for reporters, although the pace has picked up slightly in his second term thus far to approximately that of next lowest, Reagan and Nixon.
Economy
The Bush administration has repeatedly suppressed, manipulated, and withheld evidence to serve their economic policy purposes.
A controversial congressionally-mandated report providing what critics claim is the most exhaustive look yet at the outsourcing of U.S. high-tech jobs written in July 2004 was withheld due to the upcoming presidential election and not released until two years later.
Iraq War
Iraq war news has been strictly controlled from the outset (disregarding the monumental deceits from the run-up, as well as the ongoing green zone problems, both well-documented) – beginning with the embedding of media to better control the message. Visual depictions of violence from war and insurgency have been almost nonexistent in most newspapers and newscasts in many parts of the country, including my part. I was quite surprised (and from an openness standpoint only, somewhat relieved) when I saw such pictures regularly in NYT and a few other papers while traveling.
The Pentagon has clamped down on allowing flag-draped coffins to be shown by the media. In April 2004 an American employee for a cargo contractor in Kuwait was fired for her compelling photo of soldiers tending to caskets of American war dead lined up symmetrically in the fuselage of an aircraft that would carry these casualties home.
The military has been instructed by the Bush administration to not count Iraqi casualties and the administration typically disputes any attempts at counts – a recent study estimated 655,000 Iraqi deaths since start of war, approximately 20 times greater than the most recent Bush administration estimates. The portion of the ISG study devoted to counting attacks may be confirming this. Attacks on Iraqis, greater by multiples than on Americans, are not counted. One day showed actual attacks were 11 times that officially reported by the military.
A GAO report of attacks in Iraq released Friday shows the monthly counts through August, but withholds the attack information for September through November, even though that data is available according to Justin Rood of TPM Muckraker. The GAO official contacted by Mr. Rood indicated the September-November data was stamped "classified" by the military.
Journalists and the Media
The Justice Department, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in particular, has repeatedly threatened journalists and government officials (see Government Officials above) with arrest under the guise of national security.
The government is now tracking calls of journalists and government officials because of leaks that have been politically damaging to Bush administration.
The administration has regularly blamed and/or implicated press for uncovering or somehow manipulating disclosures of administration abuses and lapses: NSA, Foley, Katrina, Iraq, you name it.
According to a March 2005 New York Times Article by David Barstow and Robin Stein, at least 20 federal agencies, including the Defense Department and the Census Bureau, have made and distributed hundreds of television news segments in the past four years, many of which were subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government's role in their production.
Some reports were produced to support the administration's most cherished policy objectives, like regime change in Iraq or Medicare reform. Others focused on less prominent matters, like the administration's efforts to offer free after-school tutoring, its campaign to curb childhood obesity, its initiatives to preserve forests and wetlands, its plans to fight computer viruses, even its attempts to fight holiday drunken driving. They often feature "interviews" with senior administration officials in which questions are scripted and answers rehearsed. Critics, though, are excluded, as are any hints of mismanagement, waste or controversy...
Yet in three separate opinions in the year leading up to the discovery of the sources of the television segment, the Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress that studies the federal government and its expenditures, has held that government-made news segments may constitute improper "covert propaganda" even if their origin is made clear to the television stations. The point, the office said, is whether viewers know the origin. Last month, in its most recent finding, the G.A.O. said federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports "that conceal or do not clearly identify for the television viewing audience that the agency was the source of those materials."
One of these GAO reports that concluded that the Bush administration violated the "covert propaganda" law described how the administration used taxpayer money to produce television news segments that portrayed the new Medicare law as a boon to the elderly.
The U.S. military command in Baghdad has acknowledged paying Iraqi newspapers to carry positive news about U.S. efforts in Iraq, and, to show how deception often leads to more deception, military officials have attempted to characterize the payments as part of a legitimate campaign to counter insurgents' misinformation.
Science, Environment and Research
One could fill several encyclopedic volumes with the Bush administration’s systematic interference with science, environmental issues and research. For an administration that repeatedly argues "lack of information" in their dismissals of global warming concerns, they clearly have something against acquiring and disseminating it. Besides the EPA fiasco cited above, here are a couple more examples (encountered, not searched for) just in the last few days:
BBC: Approximately 10,000 researchers have signed a statement protesting government interference in the scientific process.
AP: The Bush administration is clamping down on scientists at the U.S. Geological survey.
This article that appeared in the Denver Post earlier in the year, exemplifies the breadth of the administration’s interference, from www.ecoearth.info:
A particularly egregious example burst into public view recently at NASA, involving James Hansen, director of the Goddard Institute who is among the world's most credible climate researchers. Last month, Hansen said that administration officials warned him of "dire consequences" for speaking his mind about global warming. One appointee, George Deutsch, was a 24-year-old political operative who tried to tell experienced scientists what they could say publicly. Deutsch resigned earlier this month when it became public that he falsified his résumé - apparently he doesn't even have a college degree. NASA chief Mike Griffin (whose own credentials are impressive) later promised his agency won't censor scientists.
Yet the Hansen flap isn't isolated, as Bush appointees have tried to stifle climate research at NOAA and NCAR, too. In 2005, former oil industry lobbyist Philip A. Cooney severely edited a Council of Environmental Quality report to downplay the risks of climate change.
At the EPA, scientists complain Bush appointees rewrote reports on health damage caused by mercury and soot.
Unlike NASA, things aren't improving at the EPA: Two weeks ago, top officials directed employees to clear their public statements with politically appointed higher- ups.
Oregon State University experts say their federal grants were threatened when their research found damage from logging national forests after wildfires, a finding at odds with Bush administration goals.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management routinely restricts the ability of its biologists to monitor the harm done to wildlife by energy drilling, according to The Washington Post.
A survey of researchers in the U.S. Commerce Department's fisheries unit found that most respondents knew cases where commercial interests "inappropriately induced reversal or withdrawal of scientific conclusions," said the Union of Concerned Scientists. The UCS collected signatures from 8,000 scientists, including 49 Nobel laureates, who claim that "there is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented."
All of this is truly chilling. At least the Bush administration could argue (even if they did so dishonestly, insincerely and illogically) on FISA, NSA and the like is that dealing with increased terrorism threats forced them to do so secretly and illegally. However, it becomes quite clear from the examples cited above, most of which have more to do with control of information to protect special interests and little or nothing to do with terrorism, that this is an executive branch not putting the welfare of its citizens first; it is one bent on authoritarian, if not totalitarian control in order to strengthen and perpetuate their own power and that of sympathetic special interests.
It is almost beyond comprehension that Congress, even one controlled by the same Republican Party, could let all this happen almost literally without question, and attacking or stiff-arming those who did raise questions. Rather than just trying to find a legal smoking gun, the Democrats need to address and expose for all to see the ever-tightening muzzle on information that Bush and the Republicans have placed over our government and its operations. That is truly the gun pointed at our country and our democracy.
(Do visit Seesdifferent’s diary and write LTE’s and/or call the number listed to help stop this travesty being done to the EPA libraries.)