The Censoring NASA and Subverting Science Affair

This particular movement culminated on 07 Feb with the resignation of the Bush lackey responsible for leashing the scientists of NASA. And it doesn't at all make the Bush regime look good. The resignation is not due to a failure in performance by the government appointee, but due to an outright fraud perpetrated by him. One which ranks right up there with the Guckart/Gannon debacle.

This particular movement was part and parcel of the anti-intellectualism of this government. The Bush administration, since its installment, has opposed any acknowledgement of Global Warming. Personally, I think it's because implementing the controls needed to address the issue would be seen as government meddling by the corporate interests, and their lobbyists have made that clear to the elected parasites in their pockets. Of which George Bush is one. This is patently stupid if you take the time to think about it. Businesses adjust their prices to maintain their profit margins, so it is the consumer, not the business, who would eventually pay for such programs. Moreover, if the corporations who opposed such measures found those measures driving them into non-competitiveness, they'd just lay off a couple or few thousand American workers and shift their base of operations to a Third World country.

In any event, Bush has steadfastly refused to admit there is any such thing as global warming, framing the debate instead in terms of "climate change". This is disingenous. For one thing, it intimates that the climate does and is changing due to naturual cycles, which it is, in part, and for another, while global warming due to the ecological "footprint" of humanity can be a part of the driving forces behind climate change, Bush's frame obliquely denies the existance of the effect. The Bush frame intimates that humanity does not and cannot have any impact on the environment.

So along comes James Hansen, who, actually, has been at NASA for thirty-nine years. Dr. Hansen is not popular with George Bush, because Hansen's field of study is global warming, and he won't stop believing in it despite the Republican government's party line. Not only that, but he doesn't believe in George Bush, and has said so, publicly stating during the 2004 campaign that he would vote for Kerry. From this develops a situation best described by Christopher Brauchli in a commentary about the Bush regime's penchent for punishing those who speak factually[01]. He wrote:

Dr. Hansen is the longtime director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and has been with the agency since 1967. He is one of the world's experts on global warming. He has been warning about the dangers of global warming for 18 years. Dr. Hansen says that 2005 was the warmest year on record. He says the burning of fossil fuels has caused a buildup of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. He has not been popular with George Bush for some time.

According to the New York Times he acquired his disfavored status when he gave a speech before the last presidential election saying he was voting for John Kerry. Things got even worse for him in December, 2005. That was the month in which he gave a dangerous speech of the sort that frightens George Bush. He said there should be a prompt reduction in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Mr. Bush disapproves of global warming. It's not the warming itself of which he disapproves. It's the concept. That's why he backed the United States out of the Kyoto treaty. Not everyone opposes the concept. There are some people even smarter than George Bush who think global warming may threaten mankind's very existence. Mr. Bush does not like to hear from them because they contradict what he believes. Just as Mr. Bush thinks he can do whatever he wants because he's president even if it means breaking the law, he also thinks he can believe whatever he wants even if he's wrong. He can also silence anyone who works for him who, not sharing his ignorance, publicly says so.

Add the December speech to the mix. From what I have seen in various articles, that speech was a personal appearance rather than one in which Hansen was appearing as a NASA official. It was reported that Hansen made numerous public appearances and speeches outside of his official duties.

As a result of Hansen's public albeit personal assessment contrary to that of the government, the NASA public affairs office had to move to be more vigorous in its coordination of public appearances and speeches or lectures by its personnel. This coordination policy is not in itself a bad thing; such a policy is in place in every government agency, as was pointed out by Dean Acosta, press secretary to the Administrator:

"NASA is committed to open and full communications. Our policy, which is similar to that of any other federal agency, corporation or news organization, is that any NASA employee speaking on the record, issuing a press release, or posting information on our Web site, must coordinate such activities with the Office of Public Affairs. No exceptions."

The danger, of course is when such policies are abused to effect prior review. It is such an abuse that Hansen alleged was taking place in his statements reported on 29 Jan. NASA denies there is any such abuse. But there is one small problem, one big problem, and one complicating factor. The small factor is a hint that Deutch was effecting religious-based censorship at the agency, the big problem is that such distortion of factual material is perfectly in keeping with the "corporate environment" of the Bush regime, and the complicating factor is that Deutsch misrepresented himself.

A 09 Feb editorial in the the New York Times read[02], in part:

The administration has sought to influence the policy debate by muzzling the people who disagree with it or - as was the case with two major reports from the Environmental Protection Agency in 2002 and 2003 - editing out inconvenient truths or censoring them entirely.

In this case, the censor was George Deutsch, a functionary in NASA's public affairs office whose chief credential appears to have been his service with President Bush's re-election campaign and inaugural committee. On his resume, Mr. Deutsch claimed a 2003 bachelor's degree in journalism from Texas A&M, but the university, alerted by a blogger, said that was not true. Mr. Deutsch has now resigned.

The shocker was not NASA's failure to vet Mr. Deutsch's credentials, but that this young politico with no qualifications was able to impose his ideology on other agency employees. At one point, he told a Web designer to add the word "theory" after every mention of the Big Bang.

As Dr. Hansen observed, Mr. Deutsch was only a "bit player" in the administration's dishonest game of politicizing science on issues like warming, birth control, forest policy and clean air. This from a president who promised in his State of the Union address to improve American competitiveness by spending more on science.

Deutsch resigned -- although there was no public statement about it from NASA as a matter of policy.

The review of policies for communicating science to the public is going to go ahead, with the resignation being considered a separate matter.

In light of events, I can only conclude that Bush's State of the Union statement was just another damned lie. If the regime really had any interest in promoting science it wouldn't be continuing to be so anti-intellectual. We would be hearing that the U.S. government was now promoting sexual-health consciousness by disseminating scientific information about HIV/AIDS instead of the religious misinformation and propaganda it still offers. There would be funding to teach school children how to think critically instead of support for movements to suppress the teaching of evolution. And I have to ask: if this government is so certain of the rightness of its causes, why does it have to engage in outright fraud, propagandizing, and punishing dissenting voices to promote its ends?

I also have to ask why it is Bush is allowed to get away with embarrassing the U.S. by appointing incompetents and frauds. This is the third case that reaches right into the oval office, and Bush was directly involved in two of them: Jeff Gannon: homosexual prostitute cum republican press corp reporter; Mike Brown: horse breeder and FEMA failure; and now George Deutsch.

FOOTNOTES:

[01] Christopher Brauchli is a Boulder lawyer and a columnist for the Knight Ridder news service. On 11 Feb his column, titled Muzzled by Bush: A Distinction or Disgrace?, was reprinted at CommonDreams.org. In it, he offers a long though not comprehensive list of those who were punished for speaking factually in violation of the party line.
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[02] Censoring Truth and reprinted at CommonDreams.org.
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