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The Daily Muck

The Daily Muck

Peter Sheehy | March 18, 2008, 10:03AM

The Justice Department's review of the nation's terrorist watch list reveals that the list is incomplete, not up to date, and inaccurate. Many of the agencies that contribute information to the list, which is managed by the Terrorist Screening Center, lacked standard rules for sharing relevant data, and FBI field agents submitted names to the list without proper vetting. (LA Times)

The House Energy and Commerce Committee is now investigating alleged conflicts of interest within the scientific panels that help shape policy at the Environmental Protection Agency. Of most immediate concern is the "case of eight scientists who were consultants or members of EPA science advisory panels assessing the human health effects of toxic chemicals while getting research support from the chemical industry on the same chemicals they were examining." Meanwhile, Deborah Rice, a prominent toxicologist, was removed from an EPA panel when the The American Chemistry Council questioned her objectivity. (AP)

The U.S. government is now in the business of censoring artwork by Guantanamo Bay detainees. Sami al-Haj, a Sudanese cameramen for the Al-Jazeera TV network, commemorated his 431st day on hunger strike by drawing a picture that reflects the "nightmares of what I must look like, with my head double-strapped down, a tube in my nose, a black mask over my mouth, with no eyes and only giant cheek bones," but the government will not release it. Lawyers for al-Haj have hired a political cartoonist to create drawings based on al-Haj's descriptions. (USA Today)

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The Daily Muck

The Daily Muck

Peter Sheehy | March 17, 2008, 10:00AM

President Bush is in no rush to make good on his 2005 promise to expedite a massive backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests. In fact, he has appointed a person to manage already low expectations and inform citizens just how long their request may take to be reviewed. The National Security Archive, a private research group at The George Washington University, says that because unanswered requests only declined from 217,000 to 212,000 over two years, "many of the same old scofflaw agencies are still shirking their responsibilities to the public." (AP)

Questions about Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson's role in his alleged efforts to punish a housing authority director for not helping a friend, remain unanswered even after a round of Senate testimony last week. Jackson refused to answer most questions about an e-mail exchange in which Jackson's assistants discussed how they could make life "less happy" for the Philadelphia Housing Authority director Carl Greene by stripping his agency of federal funds. Jackson claimed that a judge's gag order prevented him from discussing the matter but Senator Specter (R-PA) discovered that this order did not apply to congressional testimony. (Washington Post)

President Bush is the "decider," except when Stephen Johnson, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, is the "decider." Johnson has vehemently rejected allegations that the EPA weakened its new smog reduction standards because of orders from Bush. Though records show that Bush became personally involved, Johnson declared, "I made the decision." (AP)

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