Breaking: Mann and Wahl have responded. See updates below.
3/9 12:45 PM Pacific Time. This story is now updated to be consistent with Mann and Wahl’s response:
By Steven Mosher
and charles the moderator
Sources confirm that a federal inspector has questioned Eugene Wahl and Wahl has confirmed that Mann asked [forwarded] him [a request] to delete emails. Wahl has also informed the inspector that he did delete emails as the result of this request.
There are times during the course of Climategate when you feel like you are in a twilight zone episode, especially the kind where the ambiguous meaning of terms plays a critical role, like “To Serve Man”.
That episode is apt because of the central role trust plays and because of the role puzzle solvers play in uncovering that the do-gooder aliens cannot be trusted. “Serving”, of course, has now taken on new meanings, as in “you got served” or pwned. With the release of the news that Mann successfully [forwarded instructions] instructed [to] Wahl to delete emails, it’s clear that Mann got served or pwned by Wahl; but more importantly, he got served or assisted by Dr. Pell, Dr. Scaroni, Dr Brune, and Dr. Foley. Who are they? They are the Penn State team who served Dr. Mann by purporting to exonerate him in the Penn State inquiry, despite Mann’s own non-responsive response to a key question being on its face evasive, and begging followup questions. Regardless, Mann’s non-answer did not even purport to support their conclusion about his actions. In short, they covered for him.
The puzzle begins back in 2006. Keith Briffa the author of chapter 6 in the 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC (AR4) is struggling under the directive of review editor Johnathan Overpeck, who has encouraged him to come up with something “more compelling than the Hockey Stick”, that iconic symbol of Global warming created by Michael Mann in the third assessment report.
Briffa is struggling with the comments and suggestions of a particular reviewer who we now know was Steve McIntyre, the citizen scientist who has been dogging Mann for several years. In what appears to be violation of IPCC rules Briffa writes to Eugene Wahl asking for assistance in answering McIntyre’s comments. More important than this communication being apparently at odds with IPCC directives, is that Briffa is asking Wahl to comment on McIntyre’s work, a process that is clearly supposed to take place in peer reviewed literature. Wahl and McIntyre had both been critical of each other’s work and such disputes are most fairly handled by independent third parties and not by the disputants themselves.
In mid 2006 the following exchange occurs between Briffa and Eugene Wahl:
From: Keith Briffa [mailto:k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx]
Sent: Tue 7/18/2006 10:20 AM
To: Wahl, Eugene R
Subject: confidential
Gene
I am taking the liberty (confidentially) to send you a copy of the reviewers[McIntyre’s] comments (please keep these to yourself) of the last IPCC draft chapter. I am concerned that I am not as objective as perhaps I should be and would appreciate your take on the comments from number 6-737 onwards , that relate to your reassessment of the Mann et al work. I have to consider whether the current text is fair or whether I should change things in the light of the sceptic comments. In practise this brief version has evolved and there is little scope for additional text , but I must put on record responses to these comments – any confidential help , opinions are appreciated . I have only days now to complete this revision and response
Wahl responds
Thoughts and perspective concerning the reviewer’s comments per se. These are coded in blue and are in the “Notes” column between pages 103 and 122 inclusive. It got to the point that I could not be exhaustive, given the very lengthy set of review thoughts, so I am also attaching a review article Caspar [Ammann] and I plan to submit to Climatic Change in the next few days….Please note that this Ammann-Wahl text is sent strictly confidentially — it should not be cited or mentioned in any form, and MUST not be transmitted without permission. However, I am more than happy to send it for your use, because it succinctly summarizes what we have found on all the issues that have come up re: MBH. As you can see, we agree at some level with some of the criticisms raised by MM [McIntyre] and others, but we do not find that they invalidate MBH in any substantial way.
Briffa responds
Gene
here is where I am up to now with my responses (still a load to do) you can see that I have “borrowed (stolen)” from 2 of your responses in a significant degree – please assure me that this OK (and will not later be obvious) hopefully.You will get the whole text(confidentially again ) soon. You could also see that I hope to be fair to Mike[Mann] – but he can be a little unbalanced in his remarks sometime – and I have had to disagree with his interpretations of some issues also. Please do not pass these on to anyone at all.
Keith
Wahl responds, jumping into the “divergence” problem which has come to be known as the “hide the decline” problem.
Hi Keith:
Here is the text with my comments. I will go over the “stolen” parts (highlighted in blue outline) for a final time tomorrow morning, but I wanted to get this to you ASAP. The main new point I have to make is added in bold/blue font on pp. 101-103. I question the way the response to the comment there is currently worded, as it seems to imply that the divergence issue really does invalidate any dendro-based reconstructions before about 1850–which I imagine is not what you would like to say. I give a series of arguments against this as a general conclusion. Maybe I got over-bold in doing so, as in my point (1) I’m examining issues that are at the very core of your expertise! Excuse me that one, but I decided to jump in anyway. Let me know if I got it wrong in any way!
Briffa responds
First Gene – let me say that I never intended that you should spend so much time on this – though I really appreciate your take on these points. The one you highlight here – correctly warns me that in succumbing to the temptation to be lazy in the sense of the brief answer that I have provided – I do give an implied endorsement of the sense of the whole comment. This is not, of course what I intended. I simply meant to agree that some reference to the “divergence” issue was necessitated . I will revise the reply to say briefly that I do not agree with the interpretation of the reviewer. I am attaching what I have done (see blue highlighting) to the section in response to comments (including the addition of the needed extra section on the “tree-ring issues” called for by several people). I have had no feedback yet on this as it has not been generally circulated , but thought you might like to see it. PLEASE REMEMBER that this is “for your eyes only ” . Please do NOT feel that I am asking /expecting you to go through this in any detail – but given the trouble you have taken,I thought it reasonable to give you a private look. Cheers
Keith
So, Briffa writes confidentially to Wahl for help and Wahl assists him by passing a copy of a paper that has yet to be published. The aim is to answer concerns that McIntyre as reviewer has raised. Wahl and Amman’s words are incorporated in the response to McIntyre with the hope that no one will ever notice.
Two years later, someone does notice. It’s May 24th 2008, Steve McIntyre, climate science puzzle solver, is reading the reviewer comments to chapter 6 of AR4 written in 2006. In the course of reviewing Briffa’s replies to him, McIntyre notes something peculiar. Briffa’s replies, written in 2006, seemed to plagiarize an unpublished paper by Casper Amman and Eugene Wahl published in 2007. That is, in 2006 Briffa was repeating the argument of a paper that was not published until 2007. How could Briffa plagiarize an article that hadn’t been published? Why would he repeat the arguments almost word for word? Who was feeding Briffa his arguments? How was Briffa doing this if all communication with the authors had to be part of the official record?
At the time, in May of 2008, McIntyre assumed that Briffa was getting information from Casper Ammann since Ammann was listed as a contributing author to chapter 6. It did not occur to McIntyre that Wahl was the source of the text. Thanks to the individual who liberated the Climategate emails, we now know that Wahl was the source of that text. The Climategate emails, quoted above, show Briffa and Wahl exchanging emails about the way McIntyre’s arguments should be handled. Confidentially, outside the process of the IPCC which is designed to capture reviewer objections and authors’ responses to those objections. Wahl is brought in by Briffa to defend his own work. And defend it with literature that has not been published yet.
At the same time in 2008, across the ocean, David Holland had been reading McIntyre’s work and he had issued an FOIA request to the Climatic Research Unit–CRU. That FOIA request covered all correspondence coming in and out of CRU relative to chapter 6 of AR4. The hunt for the source that was feeding Briffa was on, with Holland leading the charge. At CRU, FOIA officer Palmer instructs the team that they must do everything “by the book” because Holland will most certainly appeal a rejection letter.
In that context, Jones writes the famous email to Mann. Jones requests that Mann delete his emails and he requests that Mann contact Wahl and have Wahl delete his emails. Is Jones covering his bases in case of an appeal? Is he covering his bases against an FOIA request that might be served on Mann and Wahl in the US? In any case, he appears to be conspiring with others to deny Holland his FOIA rights.
Mike,
Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address.We will be getting Caspar to do likewise. I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper
Mann responds that he will contact Wahl ASAP, which he does.
Hi Phil,
laughable that CA would claim to have discovered the problem. They would have run off to the Wall Street Journal for an exclusive were that to have been true. I’ll contact Gene about this ASAP. His new email is: generwahl@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
talk to you later,
mike
As Wahl told the investigators in 2011, Mann contacted [forwarded the email from Jones requesting deletion to] him and Wahl deleted his mails.
In 2010, in an effort to clear Mann of any wrong doing, a committee of inquiry was set up at Penn State. We now know that committee failed miserably. They failed for many reasons, but the Wahl admission is the starkest example.
Here is one allegation the committee investigated:
Allegation 2: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data, related to AR4, as suggested by Phil Jones?
Finding 2. After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with intent to delete, conceal or otherwise destroy emails, information and/or data related to AR4, as suggested by Dr. Phil Jones. Dr. Mann has stated that he did not delete emails in response to Dr. Jones’ request. Further, Dr. Mann produced upon request a full archive of his emails in and around the time of the preparation of AR4. The archive contained e-mails related to AR4.
The committee found this because they apparently failed to understand Mann’s reply. As they reported:
He [Mann] explained that he never deleted emails at the behest of any other scientist, specifically including Dr. Phil Jones, and that he never withheld data with the intention of obstructing science; …
What can we make of this? Mann was apparently asked the question: “Did you engage in or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to delete emails.”
And it seems clear he only answered half of the question, leaving the unanswered second part dangling: did you contact anyone or otherwise ‘indirectly’ participate in deleting records? This either did not strike, or did not interest, the Penn State ‘investigators’. This despite that Mann, it appears, answered “carefully” and incompletely. He only answered that he hadn’t deleted emails. He never directly denies partaking, indirectly, in the deletion of Wahl’s emails. He apparently withheld the information that he had asked [forwarded the request to] Wahl to delete emails.
Is this a lie? Not directly. It’s more what Wikipedia would describe as “Careful Speaking”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie
Careful speaking is distinct from the above in that the speaker wishes to avoid imparting certain information or admitting certain facts and, additionally, does not want to ‘lie’ when doing so. Careful speaking involves using carefully-phrased statements to give a ‘half-answer’: one that does not actually ‘answer’ the question, but still provides an appropriate (and accurate) answer based on that question. As with ‘misleading’, below, ‘careful speaking’ is not outright lying.
So why did the inquiry, stocked with Mann’s fellow professors, fail to ask good follow up questions? We really do not know because we don’t have access to the transcript of their interview with Mann. Did he intend to deceive? Or did he just speak “carefully?” It would seem that the actual transcript of the questions and answers should be published. Perhaps Congress should serve the members of the inquiry with a subpoena. That would allow people to decide if Mann lied or if he just spoke carefully.
And there are a few more questions we need to ask. Mann claims that he never deleted the emails. But he asked [forwarded Jones’s request to] Wahl to delete the emails. This makes no sense. It makes no sense that Mann would participate in a cover up by passing along a message to another participant of that cover-up downstream and not delete emails himself. It defies any logical reconstruction of events. Why would Mann ask [forward a request to] Wahl to do something that he himself would not do? We also know from the inquiry that Mann delivered emails to the inquiry. From that evidence and his testimony they concluded that he deleted no emails. This does not compute. [S.M: See update below for a possible explanation ]
Jones requested of Mann: Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
The inquiry stated: The archive contained e-mails related to AR4. (Hmm…more “Careful Speaking”?)
Did the inquiry find any emails of Mann communicating with Briffa re AR4 or just some emails related to AR4?
Did Mann turn over all the emails he wrote/received or only those he didn’t delete?
Was the email from Phil Jones requesting deletion among the emails Mann delivered to the inquiry?
Did the IT staff serve Mann, by letting him know that what he initially attempted to delete were in fact retained on the University mail server?
Did Mann turn over emails to the inquiry that he had previously deleted, deleted and then recovered with the help of some sympathetic University IT staff?
These questions need to be asked.
Perhaps Congress should serve Mann a subpoena.
Perhaps, the IG, the NSF, or some other suitable independent third party can investigate this with people who know how to watch for the pea under the thimble, and not be mislead by “Careful Speaking”.
=================================================================
UPDATES:
Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit has the goods in this: Wahl Transcript Excerpt
Chris Horner at DailyCaller also has a review: Penn State whitewashed ClimateGate
In fact, Chris Horner and the Competitive Enterprise Institute were instrumental in efforts over a year to get this and other forthcoming FOIA info into the public domain. – Anthony
UPDATE 3/9 12PM Mann and Wahl have responded see here.
Excerpt:
Mann, reached on vacation in Hawaii, said the stories yesterday were “libelous” and false. “They’re spreading a lie about me,” he said of the Web sites. “This has been known for a year and a half that all I did was forward Phil’s e-mail to Eugene.” Asked why he sent the e-mail to his colleague, Mann said, “I felt Eugene Wahl had to be aware of this e-mail … it could be used against him. I didn’t delete any e-mails and nor did I tell Wahl to delete any e-mails.” Why didn’t Mann call Wahl to discuss the odd request? “I was so busy. It’s much easier to e-mail somebody. No where did I approve of the instruction to destroy e-mails.”
Also at the above link, Wahl has now publicly stated that he did in fact delete emails in response to the request forwarded to him by Mann, rendering moot our need to wait for our original sources to confirm this story.
UPDATE: 3/9 6PM Chris Horner, whose story at the Daily Caller prompted a fair amount of outrage from AGW proponents, has responded to Wahl and Mann here
==========================================================
h/t SF Grand Master, Damon Knight, who was the author of the original short story this Twilight Zone episode was based upon.
Jones specifically asked Mann to delete emails with Briffa with regard to AR4. Mann claims that he deleted no mails. This is entirely possible, especially if there were no mails fitting the description. Canvasing the Climategate mails, we can only find a few mails between Briffa and Mann related to Ar4. If there were few or no mails to delete, then it does make sense that Mann could have passed the instruct to delete onto Wahl, without deleting mails himself. S. Mosher.
Try this
And have a look at this for a idea of how hard some people try to please – and why.
Reply: Good one David, I would add the question, Did the files delivered to the inquiry by Mann include 1148577381.txt? ~ ctm
Excellent deductive work by Mosher, Mcintyre, and Charles. They easily lay out the facts and have gotten to the bottom of yet another white-wash. The defense of those involved does not match up.
As someone who is in the field of law enforcement, and has numerous experience in interviewing and conducting investigations of wrongdoing, I can tell you the fault also lies on Penn. States ” investigators,” who were really there to not ” find” anything, and in fact, were probably part of the cover up themselves. By completely missing the erroneous response and the lies given to them by Mann and co. it does not make sense to claim incompetence, rather the more likely answer is collusion.
The reason is simple. If Mann were to be found of wrong doing, not only would all his work be suspect, by default, this would mean the work of Penn. State as well.
If an employee has been found to have committed a error or outright fraudulent work, people ask how the bosses at the top allowed it to happen, and why they were not aware of it.
Penn. State is undoubtedly a receiver of massive grants from organizations that have an interest in the AGW theory, and a lot of this is probably because of the work Mann and his cronies do for the IPCC, and so on. There is no way the “investigators” would invite bad press or possibly even jeopardize funding due to the corrupt actions of one of their star employees. Rather, their ‘ damage-control” scenario would be to give the appearance that they are looking at the problem, when in practice they are actually there to look out for themselves.
In this case, the money trail is a thousand miles long.
but if we just reach across the isle, re-frame our message, engage the disbelievers in conversation…..
….and communicate out message better
everything will be just fine
(sorry, I’ve been reading Judith’s blog again)
richard vereny says:
Nice list of questions. I think in the end there is a definite possibility that Mann did not delete mails because there were no mails with keith to delete. And its unclear if Wahl was even doing anything wrong by deleting mails, legally wrong.
So its far better, for the science, just to get to the bottom of all this.
As it stands they present mysterys and puzzles. That’s fun for guys like me, but hell on the guys caught in the middle.
Steve and charles the moderator,
Thank you for all your considerable efforts to bring us this.
There are some great comments.
I wish we could know more about the soucre and the federal investigators now.
John
Mods,
I think my post may have been filtered.
Thanks 🙂
Scott Ramsdell;
It actually depends on the configuration of the email system. If the email server is configured for the POP3 protocol, then there are no copies on the server.>>
Certainly, no university or corporation stores all of the emails the system has processed. It would be cost prohibitive to do so.>>
Nyet.
I retrieve my email every day via POP3 and the originals are all on the server. The protocol simply defines the manner in which the client (Outlook, Netscape, Firefox, what ever) gets the mail from the server. The functions allowed for deleting mail from the server are under the control of the email system on the server. End users could only delete from the server IF the server was set up to allow that.
Best practices in North America are that ALL email is retained, EVEN if the end user deletes it, they are only deleting it from their own account, the server still has a copy, and if backup systems are run properly, there should be additional copies on backup. Email may ONLY be destroyed if the organization has a data retention policy that sets out guidelines which must be followed in all cases. The fine potential under compliance law is enormous.
However, there is a nuance to British law that may come into play. In North America, an email written and sent from the workplace is the property of the employer. In Britain, my understanding is that the email is in fact the property of the employee. If so, that provides some justification for an email system so shodily run that an employee could delete email such that it disappeared from the entire system including server and backups. If not, then either the emails exist on server backups, or someone should be asking some pretty tough questions of the university’s IT staff as to why not.
Anything is possible says:
March 8, 2011 at 11:51 am
Through all this, Keith Briffa gives every impression of being a man completely out of his depth.
Having had the dubious pleasure of sitting through one of his lectures way back when I was an undergraduate, this does not surprise me at all. At the end of the talk, I seized the opportunity of asking him the $64,000 question : “How can you be certain that tree-ring growth is solely dependant on temperature?”
He shot me a very dark look, and his mumbled reply of “it just does” did not convince me one bit. I have given zero credence to temperature re-constructions from tree-ring proxies ever since.
————————————————–
Good point, and very scary. It is always the simple questions that go to the heart of the matter that uncover the truth.
Thanks for this post, guys. As others have said, this story has been like following a long-running crime/mystery novel, except that in this case the consequences are very real and very expensive for people all over the world.
Those interested in how scientific fraud happens, and is dealt with, in academic environments might enjoy C P Snow’s novel “The Affair”. Based on a real case, it tracks how accusations of scientific fraud simply cannot be properly dealt with by insiders in the groves of academe, however well intentioned. Two internal inquiries failed to quell the unease, and finally they brought in two lawyers who knew how to ask the right questions and insist on clear answers to settle the matter. I won’t spoil the story by saying what the outcome was, but as an insight into the processes and mindsets that define these kinds of inquiries, it is a masterpiece.
As PPs have said, getting to the truth in an inquiry requires skills which no random bunch of academics is likely to have. They may be utterly honest and well intentioned, but it is like asking a plumber to perform surgery, or indeed a surgeon to plumb a building (assuming no prior expertise in either case).
You all are missing the obvious point. Mann deleted the emails to FURTHER science not obstruct it. He could not let inconvenient data that disagreed with his ‘science’ be allowed into the hands of those who only wanted to discredit ‘science’.
When will they learn from Watergate?
The cover-up, or “DINIAL”, always hurts more than the original crime.
Let me try again — if Mann lied to the Penn State investigators, then he might face suspension from the faculty club for a few days. This is an inconsequential issue. I also suspect that Mann could use a variant of the Roman Polanski defense (of course I did it, but did you see Chinatown!) to persuade Penn State not to do anything about it: ‘of course I lied to you, but did you see how much grant money I’ve pulled in.’
The real issue is did Mann participate in a conspiracy to evade FOIA by forwarding on Phil Jones’ email? Does the act of forwarding an email, where a scheme to delete information subject to FOIA is discussed, represent conspiracy to commit fraud? Since it happened via email, does it represent conspiracy to commit wire fraud? In my mind, these are not simple questions, but they certainly need to be examined.
Unfortunately for Mann, there are some pretty powerful people who will be demanding a full investigation of this. It was ill advised for Mann to go so far out of his way to alienate powerful politicians.
There seems to be a lot of Mann-centred comments. While Mann was no doubt trying to present himself in the best light possible during the enquiry, and therefore using some sophistry – duplicitous or otherwise – in answering the deletion question, as Steve and Charles have pointed out the criticism should be leveled at the inquiry members for not following up on Mann’s response.
Maybe they just didn’t know what the issue was or its significance.
As I consider the cartoon that adorns this topic and as we head into the NHL playoffs, I believe Mann is say with his careful obfuscations, “Puck you!”
One of the exculpatory arguments I have read is that Mann did not ask Wahl to delete any e-mails, but merely forwarded Jones’ e-mail to him. Is this e-mail in Wahl’s collection, or Mann’s for that matter?
We have a cabal who were raking it in, even if they themselves occasionally saw, or at least doubted, the errors of their ways. But they were sucked into their own con and couldn’t, or weren’t allowed to, offer Mea Culpa as the bigger guys, their Universities and many larger organs, could not admit their errors, and had no commercial reason to do so.
Maybe he was just 95% certain he hadn’t delete anything!
Thank you for all your work dogging this horrendous manipulation of science. Hopefully the outcome is not too far off.
davidmhoffer says:
March 8, 2011 at 4:11 pm
Scott Ramsdell;
It actually depends on the configuration of the email system. If the email server is configured for the POP3 protocol, then there are no copies on the server.>>
Certainly, no university or corporation stores all of the emails the system has processed. It would be cost prohibitive to do so.>>
Nyet.
I retrieve my email every day via POP3 and the originals are all on the server. The protocol simply defines the manner in which the client (Outlook, Netscape, Firefox, what ever) gets the mail from the server.
====================================================
David, sorry I’m late to the party. I agree with what you’re saying, but to the uninitiated, you may be lacking clarity. In that I’m familiar with your postings, rather than me attempting to speak for you and possibly getting your meanings wrong, I just thought I’d point it out and let you clarify if you thought necessary.
What people need to understand, is that e-mail today is such an analogous term it could mean almost anything.
Protocols are simply guidelines and 100% compliance with the various laws and protocols and entity rules and “best practices” is almost impossible. Further, backups……..anyone that has had to retrieve data from backups created several years in the past, knows that this, too, is a very difficult task. It simply doesn’t work like popping the tape in and telling the server to “make it so #1.”
What I’m saying, is that knowing all the details to this saga may not be possible.
davidmhoffer says: March 8, 2011 at 4:11 pm
“…However, there is a nuance to British law that may come into play…. In Britain, my understanding is that the email is in fact the property of the employee.,,,”
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I would be very surprised if that statement is correct. The general rule (and starting point) is that anything done in the empoyer’s time belongs to the employer. Accordingly, there would be arguments that even a private e-mail written in the employer’s time (and not forgetting using the employer’s equipment) belongs to the employer. Irrespective of that, a business email is almost certainly the property of the employer. After all, the employee is only an agent or servant of the employer.
In some limited circumstances, the employee may have some property/interlectual rights in the contents of what he writes but that would depend upon the terms of the contract of employment.
Scott Ramsdell & davidmhoffer RE: email systems
Well, I suspect that when such systems were just getting started there may have been many different and not so secure operations. Naming conventions have evolved such that one cannot just ask for the name they would like. Each country, maybe each state in the US, could have special rules. I suppose one would have to query each of the universities or agencies involved in the “Climategate” emails and go back to the start to seek policy and changes. Only then would it be known. That might require a court order and investigation, by country. [Ten years or so ago a university tech person told me their system would have stored emails from a situation that happened in a prior week, even if the person having sent it had tried to delete it. We just made a big fuss about it and let it go hoping that would be sufficient to get folks to exercise more restraint. I didn’t really learn more about backup times and such.]
Thanks, though, for clarification, John
Not entirely OT: “To Serve Man” is best appreciated as the original 1950 Sci Fi short story by Damon Knight:
http://prime.peta.org/2011/03/serve
The Twilight Zone TV version was good, but Damon Knight’s written story was even more enjoyable. It can be downloaded from
http://www.4shared.com/document/X4gIth_Y/1951_-_Damon_Knight_-_To_Serve.html
EFS_Junior,
I unable to find the words to express the degree to which I am concerned about what you are most interested in, but the prefixes pico and femto come to mind.
Mann might be lying, or he might be obfuscating to cover up for someone who did lie.
A simple question to Mann would be ” Were you alarmed upon receiving a request from Jones to delete emails?”
And “Did you question Jones about his request?”
and go from there.
So many questions.
For those arguing about “lying by omission”…
I recently wrestled with this question on my own, and this was my take on the subject (not that my take has any more validity than anyone elses, but it makes sense to me. :))
Lying is saying something that you know to be untrue. As the Heinlein quote above suggests, its the simplest and stupidest of the methods used to deceive.
I think everyone in this part of the discussion an agree that Mann’s answer was designed to deceive, and IMO deceive is the operative word.
There are lots of ways to deceive; obfuscation, misdirection, half-truths, semantic-splitting (“depends on what the definition of ‘is’ is…) all of which can help a person avoid being held legally liable for lying under oath…because lying has a very specific legal meaning…saying something untrue. (I will admit that I don’t then understand what a “whole truth” is, but all I can say is that part of the oath doesn’t seem to really be enforced in law; strictly speaking, if “whole truth” were enforced, all a lawyer would have to say is “Tell me everything you know on this subject”, and the defendent would be liable for everything they forgot to say or left out).
So there are three things to note:
1) Mann was intending to be deceitful. He did not fully answer the question asked, and he added verbiage to confuse the issue.
2) This is an advanced form of deceit, used by those who are foxy. Mann is unlikely to be taken down by an actual “lie”, and no committee that undertakes to investigate his behavior will ever succeed unless they have a LAWYER who is intending to PROSECUTE. In any other circumstances, Mann will deceive successfully.
3) Mann has shown himself to be such an able deceiver that under no circumstances should he ever be trusted on any issue.
“So why did the inquiry, stocked with Mann’s fellow professors, fail to ask good follow up questions? We really do not know because we don’t have access to the transcript of their interview with Mann.”
Can any of us peons request the transcript with a FOIA request?
One other comment: I understand that UVA won’t release Mann’s emails per a FOIA request. I hope that VA. AG is successful in getting them released.
richard vereny says:
March 8, 2011 at 4:47 pm
davidmhoffer says: March 8, 2011 at 4:11 pm
“…However, there is a nuance to British law that may come into play…. In Britain, my understanding is that the email is in fact the property of the employee.,,,”
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
I would be very surprised if that statement is correct. The general rule (and starting point) is that anything done in the empoyer’s time belongs to the employer.
=================================================
I think David may be referring to some legal actions that viewed the private e-mails of the employee as just that……private e-mails. While the similarities of British and U.S. customs and laws are strikingly similar, there are times when the differences are so much that it isn’t easy to conceptualize what’s occurring. Being a U.S. citizen, that’s probably all I can say without misinterpreting what occurred, other than IT types are made aware of IT considerations not only in the U.S. but also worldwide, especially European.