UPDATE: (9:20 PST 10-17) the FOI request has been released, a copy of which is now linked below. This story will remain at the top of WUWT for a day or two. New stories will appear below this one.
CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.
By Christopher Horner, CEI.org for WUWT
Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the ‘bad timing’ file. Or it’s good timing, depending on one’s perspective.
Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)(which scam I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a ‘science czar’ John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to to develop his ‘environmental’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, run domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.
With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to user name and password — for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA.
The IPCC, you will recall, is Al Gore’s co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And the host over the years of numerous scandals involving fudged and twisted data, cut-and-pastes from student theses, popular magazine articles and green-group press releases and of course the infamous “hide the decline” in temperatures. This is not just one more scandal, however.
Until the FOI request is posted at CEI.org (later today), here is a snapshot:
CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.
As our FOIA request details, the UN informed participants that it was motivated by embarrassing releases of earlier discussions (“ClimateGate” key among them), and to circumvent the problem that national government transparency laws were posing the group.
CEI reminds OSTP that this practice was described as “creat[ing] non-governmental accounts for official business”, “using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications”, in a recent analogous situation involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. CEI expects similar congressional and media outrage at this similar practice to evade the applicable record-keeping laws.
This effort has apparently been conducted with participation — thereby direct assistance and enabling — by the Obama White House which, shortly after taking office, seized for Holdren’s office the lead role on IPCC work from the Department of Commerce. The plan to secretly create a FOIA-free zone was then implemented.
This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU and U.S. bureaucrats and political appointees avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.
CEI also reminds OSTP of a similar, ongoing effort by the administration to claim that records on U.S. government computers belong to the UN IPCC, refusing to produce them under FOIA. This practice was affirmed in a report by the Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General earlier this year.
As talks resume next month to forge a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, CEI looks forward to OSTP ceasing this unlawful activity, and providing prompt access to the requested records so the taxpayer can know what they, and the IPCC, are up to.
So this morning we requested all relevant records under FOIA, including all records sitting on that server, as they all were provided to U.S. government employees for official purposes. This was filed with OSTP run by controversial ‘science czar” and, we now know, former Mitt Romney ‘climate’ advisor John Holdren. The taxpayer deserves to know about this coordinated effort between OSTP and the IPCC to subvert U.S. law.
Possibly one Republican candidate will call in the next debate for ending US funding of the IPCC, now shown to be actively working (with the Obama White House) to subvert US law. Enough is enough is enough. Possibly Gov. Romney could defend Holdren and the IPCC.
In the meantime, we look for Rep. Henry Waxman’s outrage over Abramoff to prove it was also not political, and come down hard on the practice he so aggressively condemned and pursued, demanding preservation of records, threatening subpoenas, the whole works. With our request, that’s essentially what we’ve done, and we’d appreciate the company. You too, NPR.
Of course, it may not be of interest to the media because it only uncovers unlawful dealings to hide an effort impacting our entire economy, the premise for that “fundamental transformation” of America, with the sleazy lobbying operation being the UN. We’ll wait on OSTP’s response and hope for the best from the Hill and Republican candidates.
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UPDATE: The FOI request document: OSTP_IPCC_Elec_Comm_FOIA1 (PDF 112k)
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Me’s a gonna re-read it when in English it been written has.
p gosselin says:
October 17, 2011 at 2:31 am
Actually the latest list is 129 scandals long, last updated about 10 months ago. That was my last list.
The scandals are so numerous that I have given up trying to keep track of them all””
Please keep adding to the list as it is very good to have. With Thanks.
And yet we are constantly being told by the leaders of AGW movement that the “deniers” are the ones who are well-funded are well-organized whereas they are poor and have to fight. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. How can they get away with such hypocrisy? In part because most of the media is in bed with them.
Steeptown says:
“You can always rely on Nick Stokes to defend the indefensible. Has he not heard that two wrongs don’t make a right?”
For the same reasons I gave above, this is not to the point – is it not incomparably more important to know what officials of the UN are doing to subvert the national law of a member state? It is an integral part of the concept and purpose of the UN that it promotes trust and the rule of law in international affairs.
But here, an official organ of the UN can be seen to be engaged in activities which are the very antithesis of that.
I put it to all reading this blog: this is not a minor incident, it is something that goes to the raison d’etre of the UN and it is about as serious as it can get in the ordinary conduct of public international affairs. This MUST be dealt with in the most uncompromising way.
Obama promised “an unprecedented level of openness.” What we are getting are unprecedented levels of phoniness, not to mention unprecedented levels of abuse of the word unprecedented by both government and climate scientists, who overuse the word unprecedented in the same way that the shyster Vizzini overused the word inconceivable in Princess Bride.
Transparency and Open Government
Memorandum for the Heads of Executive Departments and Agencies
SUBJECT: Transparency and Open Government
My Administration is committed to creating an unprecedented level of openness in Government. We will work together to ensure the public trust and establish a system of transparency, public participation, and collaboration. Openness will strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness in Government.
Government should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides information for citizens about what their Government is doing. Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset. My Administration will take appropriate action, consistent with law and policy, to disclose information rapidly in forms that the public can readily find and use. Executive departments and agencies should harness new technologies to put information about their operations and decisions online and readily available to the public. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public feedback to identify information of greatest use to the public.
Government should be participatory. Public engagement enhances the Government’s effectiveness and improves the quality of its decisions. Knowledge is widely dispersed in society, and public officials benefit from having access to that dispersed knowledge. Executive departments and agencies should offer Americans increased opportunities to participate in policymaking and to provide their Government with the benefits of their collective expertise and information. Executive departments and agencies should also solicit public input on how we can increase and improve opportunities for public participation in Government.
Government should be collaborative. Collaboration actively engages Americans in the work of their Government. Executive departments and agencies should use innovative tools, methods, and systems to cooperateamong themselves, across all levels of Government, and with nonprofit organizations, businesses, and individuals in the private sector. Executive departments and agencies should solicit public feedback to assess and improve their level of collaboration and to identify new opportunities for cooperation.
I direct the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with the Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Administrator of General Services, to coordinate the development by appropriate executive departments and agencies, within 120 days, of recommendations for an Open Government Directive, to be issued by the Director of OMB, that instructs executive departments and agencies to take specific actions implementing the principles set forth in this memorandum. The independent agencies should comply with the Open Government Directive.
This memorandum is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by a party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
This memorandum shall be published in the Federal Register.
BARACK OBAMA
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/TransparencyandOpenGovernment/
Nick, you must have brothers and sisters that whenever you did something wrong, you pointed your crawly finger and insisted that they did the same thing–or worse!!!
The scorge of your family and a clueless wit here.
The Open Government Directive
http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/open-government-directive
It’s all there in black and white, including a goal for reducing FOIA backlogs by 10%. There is no mention of exceptions for climate scientists.
Here is a link to the Open Goverment dashboard for the various executive agencies:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/around
According to the dashboard, OSTP meets expectations for all benchmarks, including transparency. Oh my, such low standards!
Backchannel Cloud Directive has a nice ring and it even has a climate term in it.
Sounds like Chris Horner is trying to channel Glen Beck.
Please bring back the other America Tradition Institute guy. I may not agree with him but at least he sounds sane. Chris is spinning so fast you could use him to power an ultracentrifuge to separate uranium isotopes.
REPLY: Ditto what I said to Nick Stokes – Anthony
No point in impeachment, no point in “voting”. Impeachment just puts the VP in power. “Voting” just puts the precisely identical “Republican” in power. There are candidates who solidly disagree with the current state of affairs, but you can be 100.0000000% certain they will not be the “nominee”. Romney is the “Republican” “nominee”, and has been from the start. He will “lose” to the current president, because the current president has already shown perfect loyalty to Wall Street and Romney is a somewhat less certain hedge.
Won’t matter anyway. National suicide continues without pause.
Somebody tell me one more time that there isn’t a conspiracy.
Suggest “pinning” this thread while further information is revealed.
I must be in the same age group as Ken Harvey..
Greg Holmes says:
October 17, 2011 at 1:27 am
‘“Mafia” by another name, but the rewards are bigger.’
Actually, it’s worse than that (and than we thought). At least the mafia sells protection from the mafia. These guides don’t even do that. They use taxpayer money to concoct schemes that would open a permanent flood gate of taxpayer money into their bank accounts.
Lots and lots of unsubstantiated stuff in here, and anyone can say anything in an FOIA request. Looking forward to you finding these accounts and showing them being used in the way you purport occurred – you know, real journalism with actual facts and not just innuendo and belief.
Subverting government transparency legislation to go along with subverting the scientific peer review process. What won’t these manics manipulate to take control of the machine?
We have a trans-national president now. He was appointed President of the World at some rock concert in Berlin, I think.
Anyhoo, this is a president who ordered US military forces into action in Libya without Congressional approval, which should be a much greater offense.
It’s hard to cook the books if you cannot conspire in secret.
Nick Stokes says:
October 17, 2011 at 4:28 am
Actually, its about employees of The Untied States government working for the IPCC and being paid by the U.S. tax payers, while at the same time hiding information from those same tax payers. Discussions of former administrations are irrelevant.
“The other is the IPCC using IPCC accounts for IPCC business.”
It is a shame to hear someone so intelligent and creative make such a lame argument, and it’s so disappointing.
The IPCC is the public’s business.
It belongs to us. It is accountable to us. It lives to serve us. It has no other purpose.
Everything about the IPCC, including its own internal processes, must be made public and subject to intense and severe scrutiny and bona fide audits. The messages and communications made by all IPCC servants must be made public for review using a current technology platform. This is so easy and simple using current technology. Google would host this project in a heartbeat if given the chance.
Anything else is just cover for what has become arguably the greatest scam in human history.
It seems criminal in intent.
Seems to me taxpayers tolerate way too much, but, fortunately, they usually draw the line at blatent trickery. As will many, I eagerly await the contents of this correspondence.
CHANNELGATE 😉
polistra says:
October 17, 2011 at 5:25 am
No point in impeachment, no point in “voting”. Impeachment just puts the VP in power. “Voting” just puts the precisely identical “Republican” in power. There are candidates who solidly disagree with the current state of affairs, but you can be 100.0000000% certain they will not be the “nominee”. Romney is the “Republican” “nominee”, and has been from the start…….
==============================================================
I don’t think he’s going to make it. The conservatives of the Repub party, both fiscal and moral, dislike Romney. He’s viewed as a RINO. Currently, the field is flooded that divides the votes of the base. Cain and Perry and to a lesser extent, Paul and Bachmann. I’ve no idea why the others are still running. But, once the field begins to thin, you’ll see Cain’s and/or Perry’s numbers increase to beyond Romney’s. The exception being the 2% that supports Huntsman, those will go to Romney.
While I understand how it is easy to become cynical, I’m optimistic. Just remember to consider congressional candidates, also. Move them out.
Just wanted to thank the author for uncovering the 2005 memo. While I am still a “anyone but Obama” guy as far as the general elections goes, I am just praying Romney is not the alternative.