From ... in Alternative News — May 25, 2015

Government Scientists Gather To Protest Something Everybody Thought Was A “Conspiracy”

Scientists working for the Canadian government are starting to raise their voices, accusing the federal government of “muzzling” them and their findings on various issues, particularly when it comes to climate change. Apparently, the union representing this group of researchers will be taking “the unusual step of demanding Ottawa enshrine scientific independence in their collective agreement.” (source) The union represents 15,000 government scientists and is proposing multiple revisions within the collective agreement, one of which states that scientists should have the right to talk about their work at conferences and to the media and their families – as long as they make it clear that they are “speaking in their personal capacity and not on behalf of the Government of Canada.” (source) Michael Rennie, a scientist with the Experimental Lakes Area – an organization that was run by by the federal government and is now a non-profit group – said that when the organization was a government-run facility, requests from the media vanished “99.999 percent of the time.” He went on to tell the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) that the “communications policy was part of a toxic work environment and that it was disheartening for researchers not to be able to share their work.”(source) The Canada Research Chair in freshwater ecology and fisheries in the department of biology at Lakehead University also went on to state that: “It’s critically important for people to understand the science that’s being conducted, particularly within government labs, and how that information is being used to guide the decisions made for policy and government.” (source) This type of thing seems to be getting really out of hand. Not only do we have muzzled government scientists, we also have manipulation of scientific data, all of which leads to a misinformed public.

The most recent scientist to express this was Dr. Richard Horton, who is the current editor-in-chief of the Lancet – considered to be one of the most well respected peer-reviewed medical journals in the world. He stated: “The case against science is straightforward, much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Science has taken a turn towards darkness.” (source) You can read more about that story here, which includes statements from several other prominent people in the field. We have seen a definite rise in the number of people coming forward about this issue in recent months, with many people making some pretty eye-opening remarks regarding the fraudulence of a lot of cancer research coming out of respected organizations.

The use of pesticides is another issue (out of many within the realms of science) which is not presented truthfully, and this problem has been making major headlines recently, specifically when it comes to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide. Billions of pounds of it are still sprayed every year, despite the fact that it has been banned in multiple countries. Sri Lanka is one of the most recent countries to make the change, after they discovered a deadly link to kidney disease. You can read more about that and view the published research here. Here is an article I wrote on a study conducted that showed how Roundup herbicide is more than 100 percent toxic then regulators have claimed.

There are also several comments floating around the public domain alluding to similar happenings: “It is commonly believed that Roundup is among the safest pesticides... Despite its reputation, Roundup was by far the most toxic among the herbicides and insecticides tested. This inconsistency between scientific fact and industrial claim may be attributed to huge economic interests, which have been found to falsify health risk assessments and delay health policy decisions.” – R. Mesnage et al., Biomed Research International, Volume 2014 (2014) article ID 179691 You can read more about that phenomenon here.

The information below deals with a secrecy that is probably a “secrecy of a different kind” from what the scientists in this article are speaking about. Based on my research, government (or corporate) secrecy is very compartmentalized and has several different levels of “weirdness.” Not many people have investigated the world of secrecy. In 2013, NSA intelligence contractor Edward Snowden leaked the first documentation that proved the existence of a clandestine black budget. In 2010, Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and William Arkin did a two year investigation and determined that America’s classified world has “become so large, so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work.” (source) Black budget programs are commonly referred to as Special Access Programs (SAP), and their existence, if not their subject matter, is public knowledge.

There are, however, certain SAPs which are waived and unacknowledged.

These programs do not exist publicly, instead operating entirely under the radar, and a 1997 US Senate report described them as “so sensitive that they are exempt from standard reporting requirements to the congress.” (source) On July 16, 2001, in front of the house appropriations committee, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld stated that “the financial systems of the department of defence are so snarled up that we can’t account for some $2.6 trillion in transactions that exist, if that’s believable.” (source) Another person who investigated these programs was aviation journalist Bill Sweetman, who pointed to the fact even the highest members of government and the highest ranking officials in the military are unaware of their existence. He determined that most of these programs were actually dominated by private contractors like Lockheed Martin (to name one of many). (1) Here is a statement from one of the highest ever ranking members of the Canadian government: “It is ironic that the U.S. would begin a devastating war, allegedly in search of weapons of mass destruction, when the most worrisome developments in this field are occurring in your own backyard. It is ironic that the U.S. should be fighting monstrously expensive wars, allegedly to bring democracy to those countries, when it itself can no longer claim to be called a democracy, when trillions, and I mean thousands of billions of dollars have been spent on projects which both congress and the commander in chief know nothing about.” (source) – Paul Hellyer, Former Canadian Defence Minister According to historian Richard Dolan, the U.S government alone classifies more than 500 million pages of documents every single year. If a scholar wanted to research political, historical, scientific, or any other type of archival work, it would prove difficult and limiting to say the least, seeing that most of their government’s activities are kept a secret. You can read more about what he refers to as the “Breakaway Civilization” here. It’s also noteworthy to add here that invention secrecy is at an all time high. New documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) have revealed how the Patent Office has been using a secret system to withhold the approval of some applications. You can read more about that story here. So, as you can see, this just scratches the surface of the world of secrecy in which we live. This reality is not easy to accept, but it’s something that more people are becoming aware of every day. Secrecy is not secret, and in a world where we all worked together and co-existed in peace, we would have nothing but transparency. Sources: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/GPO-CDOC-105sdoc2/content-detail.html http://www.defense.gov/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=408 http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/ex-government-scientist-in-northwestern-ontario-says-muzzling-was-part-of-toxic-work-environment-1.3083325 http://globalnews.ca/news/2004265/government-scientists-push-for-right-to-speak-freely-about-research/ Invention Secrecy Document (1) Sweetman, Bill. “In Search of the Pentagon’s Billion Dollar Hidden Budgets: How the US Keeps Its RD Spending Under Wraps.” Janes International Defence Reporter, Janurary 5, 2000 .

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Government Scientists Gather To Protest Something Everybody Thought Was A “Conspiracy”

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