Republicans Anonymous

Why are we supposed to believe all the Pentagon's "No Korans Flushed" reports after what just came out about the "we need to lease planes from Boeing" reports? The Washington Post reports:

In the copy of the report obtained by The Washington Post, 45 sections were deleted by the White House counsel's office to obscure what several sources described as references to White House involvement in the lease negotiations and its interaction with Boeing. The Pentagon separately blacked out 64 names and many e-mails. It also omitted the names of members of Congress, including some who pressured the Pentagon to back the deal.

The report is nonetheless the most damning of the three reviews of the tanker deal completed by the inspector general since early 2004. It includes, for example, a statement from an unnamed cost analyst that "numbers were contorted a lot of different ways to sell the program."

It also suggests that the foundation of the Air Force's tanker lease -- that KC-135 planes were experiencing unexpected corrosion and needed urgent replacement -- was a house of cards. The report said the Air Force could not substantiate congressional testimony by two of the officials -- Roche and Maj. Gen. Paul W. Essex, a former head of its global reach program office -- on that subject.

"In fact, the studies that were available did not indicate an urgent or immediate requirement for the replacement of . . . KC-135 tankers," the report said. That view was confirmed last year by the Defense Science Board, which said the KC-135 airframes were usable until 2040.

The report says that Marvin R. Sambur, then the top Air Force acquisition official, knew that this urgency "did not exist" but claimed otherwise and ordered data unflattering to the deal removed from a key document. His office made what a critic of the lease elsewhere in the Pentagon interpreted as a "thinly veiled threat" to manipulate other Air Force contracts if the dissent did not cease, the report shows.
(Source: Washington Post E-Mails Detail Air Force Push for Boeing Deal June 7, 2005. [Emphasis added.])

How shocking that "unflattering" data was removed from a Pentagon report. Fortunately, we can be sure that they would not have remved any such unflattering data from their reports on Koran abuse at Guantanamo... can't we? After all, it isn't as though W's Bush League minions have ever ordered the removal of inconvenient data from a government report before...

USA: EPA Downplayed Climate Change in Environmental Challenges Report

by H. Josef Hebert, Associated Press
June 20th, 2003

The Environmental Protection Agency scrapped a detailed assessment of climate change from an upcoming report on the state of the environment after the White House directed major changes and deletions to emphasize the uncertainties surrounding global warming.

The changes prompted an EPA staff memorandum that said the revisions demanded by the White House were so extensive that they would embarrass the agency because the section "no longer accurately represents scientific consensus on climate change.
...
(Source: CorpWatch [emphasis added.])

If the EPA's reports are edited for political convenience, and Pentagon weapons procurement requests are edited to hide windfall profits for contractors, what are the odds that any evidence regarding Koran abuse at Gitmo was ordered removed by the White House?