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Weapons of Mass Disinformation
(October 7, 2004) -
The 4th World Conference of Science Journalists in a new opportunity
for Kevin Knobloch, President of the Union of Concerned Scientists
(UCS), to denounce the Bush administration’s questionable
practices in how it uses and interprets the scientific data available
to establish public policies.
The charges levied against the White House by the
American nonprofit organization are far from trivial. They include
manipulating findings, censoring scientific research and even
partisan appointments to the advisory bodies responsible for counselling
the government on its decisions.
In all some 30 instances of abuse were cited in
two UCS reports published in March and July 2004. At the same
time, the Restoring Scientific Integrity in Policymaking
manifesto published on its website collected 4,000 signatures,
including 48 Nobel Prize winners and 135 members of the National
Academy of Sciences.
Air pollution, global warming, health, sexuality
and even toxic emissions of heavy metals are all issues that were
not assessed impartially according to Knobloch. "While
previous governments have been able to ignore some of the advice
from scientific experts when making a decision," said
Knobloch, the attitude adopted by the Bush administration is completely
unheard-of in preventing decisionmakers from drafting legislation
and regulations in light of complete scientific information when
the latter runs counter to its political interests.
For instance, he cites the finding by the federal
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that 8% of American women
of childbearing age have sufficiently high rates of mercury in
their blood to give birth to offspring with neurological and motor
disorders. What’s the Bush administration doing with the
study? Keeping it under wraps and proposing that Congress ease
the curbs on mercury emissions by coal-burning powerplants.
"It was only when an EPA employee, frustrated
that the study had been censored, leaked the research findings
to the Wall Street Journal that the White House released
the information," fumes M. Knobloch.
In his view, there’s no doubt that the various
examples collected by the UCS reveal the very special attention
the Bush administration gives to industrialists with few scruples
about the environmental impact of their activities, especially
in the energy sector, and to social and moral conservatives.
Yet these accusations, widely published in the mainstream
and scientific media, don’t appear to be arousing much interest
in the administration, which simply denies them. Robert Hopkins,
spokesperson for the Office of Science and Technology Policy,
which reports to the White House and is responsible for informing
the federal government on scientific matters, calls the UCS a
"partisan" organization and the information in its two
reports "incomplete" and untrustworthy.
Listening to him, you even end up wondering what
the fuss is all about because Hopkins claims that "the
current administration has always tried to maintain a very high
degree of integrity in the process by which scientific information
reaches decisionmakers."
People are such backbiters...
Erwan Le Fur
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