Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Sunday, June 8, 2008
You’ll need rubber hip boots to wade through the odoriferous methods the White House is using to keep you in the dark.
Steven Johnson, EPA Administrator refused again to answer pointed questions and requests to disclose information about his contacts with the White House to the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. With people like Johnson and Libby who needs Controlled Unclassified Information?
Johnson, tossing himself under the bus in Scooter Libby’esque fashion, claims any decisions to reverse various air pollution rules were purely his own. White House intervention on behalf of industry had nothing to do with his decisions. He may find his refusals culminating in subpoenas and contempt of Congress findings. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to discuss the conversations” Johnson said, of conversations he was loath to admit did or did not take place between himself and the White House.
Are you on a ‘need to know’ basis? Apparently not.
The Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS) has been ‘refashioned’. Refashioned as in buying a suit and having it tailored for a custom fit. To fit whom? The new tailored IRIS has been ‘refashioned’ to exclude from the public, comments from federal agencies now known as ‘deliberative’. These comments are not allowed to be part of the public record, and they are in fact exempt from Freedom of Information Act requests.
John Stephenson, director of natural resources and environment at the General Accounting Office, testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee saying the OMB, Office of Management and Budget, ordered EPA to terminate 5 IRIS assessments without giving any reason.
The revised process, besides giving an added cloak of secrecy for the government to hide behind, also holds up risk assessment time for years. Now it takes an average of 7 years to conduct an IRIS assessment. EPA could do a risk assessment in only 1 year.
This affords the government a ‘plausible deniability’ out, as when in 2005 the government provided 120,000 trailers having toxic levels of formaldehyde leching from fiberboard. Formaldehyde was declared a known human carcinogen in 2006. The EPA still has not completed the formaldehyde assessment. EPA had nearly finished an assessment of formaldehyde it had started in 2004 when at the ‘behest of the formaldehyde industry was postponed.
One might think that with plausible deniability, deliberative protection and people in the administration willing to toss themselves under the wheels of the bus for their leaders the government wouldn’t need Controlled Unclassified Information.
The CUI policy puts the people on the short list of those who ‘need to know.’ We the people don’t need to know about the lack of inspections, chemical plants located near populated cities that don’t pass inspections, dams, bridges and other infrastructure that isn’t passing inspections, toxins released into the oceans, the air and into our food…
It’s so much easier to spend our economic stimulus checks when we don’t have all that pesky environment poisoning and risk assessment stuff on our minds!
If you’re spending that rebate on food, as so many people are finding necessary to get by, keep this in mind. Private labs aren’t required to inform the FDA when tests indicate imported food is contaminated.
Labels: Controlled Unclassified Information, EPA, FDA, IRIS, Integrated Risk Information System, Speak no Evil, deliberative
© 2009, Pacific Spirit Marine Institute.
CUI, Controlled Unclassified Information! You don’t need to know.
