One of the first White House moves--on the very day Bush was inaugurated--was to fire engineer Tony Oppegard, the leader of a federal team investigating a 300-million-gallon slurry spill at a coal-mining site in Kentucky. "Black lava-like toxic sludge containing 60 poisonous chemicals choked and sterilized up to 100 miles of rivers and creeks," wrote environmental lawyer Robert F. Kennedy in The Nation. The EPA dubbed it "the greatest environmental catastrophe in the history of the eastern United States." Bush then appointed industry insiders to top posts at the EPA in charge of mine safety and health.
In another case, a week after the EPA released a study to congressional staff about the toxic effects on groundwater of hydraulic fracturing--a process of injecting benzene into the ground to extract oil and gas, used by Halliburton, Vice President Dick Cheney's old company--the agency revised its findings in response to "industry feedback" to indicate that the practice posed no threat after all.
In the days and months following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the EPA released more than a dozen statements claiming that the air quality in the surrounding "control zone" was safe--despite evidence that asbestos dust was present in quantities well above the 1 percent safety benchmark. The agency opened up the area to the public a mere week after the attacks, allowing Wall Street to reopen and cleanup activities to begin. As a result, 88 percent of rescue workers suffered ear, nose and throat ailments, and 78 percent suffered lung maladies, according to a Mount Sinai School of Medicine study. Half suffered persistent respiratory problems up to a year later.
Last November, the EPA arranged for Syngenta, the Swiss manufacturer of Atrazine, to take over federal research of its product, the most widely used weedkiller in the United States. This occurred despite evidence that high concentrations of Atrazine in groundwater may be responsible for 50 percent below-normal semen counts in men in U.S. farming communities, is associated with high incidences of prostate cancer, and has resulted in grotesque deformities in frogs when present "at one-thirtieth the government's 'safe' three parts per billion level," wrote Kennedy.
The administration has also suppressed scientific findings on global warming in a dozen major government studies over the past two years, according to Kennedy.
The problem isn't limited to the EPA. In fact, government interference in scientific research has gotten so bad that 60 of the country's top scientists--including 20 Nobel laureates--issued a statement last February citing the ways the Bush administration has distorted scientific data "for partisan political ends" and calling for regulatory action.
There have been dozens of scientists willing to blow the whistle--normally, a reporter's dream come true. But news coverage hasn't come close to reflecting the gravity of the problem.
Sources: "The Junk Science of George W. Bush," Robert F. Kennedy Jr., The Nation, March 8, 2004; "Censoring scientific information," Censorship News: The National Coalition Against Censorship Newsletter, Fall 2003, No. 91; "Ranking scientists warn Bush science policy lacks integrity," Environmental News Service correspondents, www.oneworld.net, Feb. 20, 2004; "Politics and science in the Bush Administration," Committee on Government Reform, minority staff, Office of U.S. Representative Henry A. Waxman, August 2003 (updated Nov. 13, 2003).
Censored 2005 : The Top 25 Censored Stories (Censored)
by Peter Phillips
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