E-Mail This Article to a Friend How big media shortchange the public (continued)

3) Bush administration manipulates science and censors scientists

Tampering with data that threatens corporate profits is much more widespread under Bush than we’ve been led to believe. And the Environmental Protection Agency has emerged as one of the administration’s primary targets.

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 Jr. 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 former 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 World Trade Center attack, 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 one percent safety benchmark. The agency opened up the area to the public a mere week after the attacks, allowing Wall Street to reopen and clean-up 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 weed killer in the United States. This occurred despite evidence that high concentrations of Atrazine in groundwater may be responsible for semen counts 50 percent below normal in men in US 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.

4) High uranium levels found in troops and civilians

Last year, Project Censored included among its top-10 underreported stories the US and UK’s continued use of depleted uranium weapons, despite ample evidence of their acutely detrimental health effects. Almost 10,000 US troops had died within 10 years of serving in the first Gulf War, researchers had found. And more than a third of those still alive had filed claims related to Gulf War syndrome.

In study after study, research pointed to the use of depleted uranium (DU) in American and British weaponry as the culprit. But authorities concentrated their efforts on obfuscating the problem — downplaying its reach, discrediting scientists and ailing military personnel, and erecting a smoke screen around the "syndrome’s" root causes.

More recently, the Uranium Medical Research Center, an independent group of US and Canadian scientists that has conducted studies of Afghan civilians, found overwhelming evidence that the US is also using non-depleted uranium (NDU) in its weapons, which is far more radioactive than DU. "If the use of NDU indicates experimental application of new nuclear weapons, as the UMRC suggests, then it should alert the public that proliferation of small nuclear weaponry, proposed for some future use, has in fact already begun," wrote Stephanie Hiller in Awakened Woman.

At the International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan, in Tokyo, last December, a team of attorneys from Japan, the US, and Germany indicted President Bush on a number of war-crimes charges — among them the use of DU weapons. Leuren Moret, president of Scientists for Indigenous People, testified that a US-government study conducted on the babies of Gulf War I veterans conceived after the soldiers returned home found that a full two-thirds suffered from serious birth defects or illnesses, including being born without eyes or ears, or with missing or malformed organs or limbs. In Iraq, Moret said, the defects are even worse. But those are just some of the images of war that we never see on the evening news.