Climategate 2.0 emails – They're real and they're spectacular!

A link to where to download the new FOIA2011.zip file is posted below the fold – This will be a top post for a few days -NEW STORIES APPEAR BELOW THIS ONE -I’ve also reversed the order of the updates to be newest at top for better visibility – Anthony

UPDATE50: 1:15 PM PST 11/30 The genesis of RealClimate.org seems to have been found. Surprisingly, the BBC’s Roger Harrabin seems to have been involved in the genesis meeting.

UPDATE49: 10:00 AM PST 11/30 While not email related, just as Climategate breaks David Suzuki commits an egregious propaganda error second only to the 10:10 video where kids are blown up for not going along with carbon reduction schemes at school. He’s targeting kids and Santa Claus at Christmas – Santa’s home is melting.

UPDATE48: 9:20 AM PST 11/30 Dr. Phil Jones on the  “lack of warming” -he may need a backup plan.

UPDATE47: 9AM PST 11/30 Fudge factor collection in the emails, or is climate modeling a social issue?

UPDATE46: A look at UEA/CRU’s email infrastructure and email systems in general suggests that the “deleted” emails to/from Phil Jones and others at CRU probably still exist and can be subject to FOIA.

UPDATE45: 1:30PM PST 11/29 If there was award for clueless timing, this would win it no contest: Penn State to lecture on “climate ethics”

UPDATE44: 9AM PST 11/29 Mike Mann reprises the role of Captain Queeg in The Cain Mutiny when seeing de Freitas being vindicated by the publisher of Climate Research (see the update in the article).

UPDATE43: 8AM PST 11/29 An Excel Spreadsheet with Climategate 1 and 2 emails ordered chronologically should be helpful in determining that supposedly missing”context”

UPDATE42:  7AM PST 11/29 The CRU crew says:  “what we really meant was…”

UPDATE41: 4AM PST 11/29 James Padget schools Steve Zwick – Guide to Defending the Indefensible. Some people just can’t handle Climategate.

UPDATE40: 12AM PST 11/29 Penn State has the same “look the other way” problem with Climategate as they did with the Jerry Sandusky scandal.

UPDATE39: It seems “vexatious” is Dr. Phil Jones favorite new feeling word after summer 2009.

UPDATE38: Severinghaus says Mike Mann didn’t give a straight answer regarding why trees don’t work as thermometers after 1950

UPDATE37: Climate sensitivity can’t be quantified with the current data according to NCAR’s Wigley, with paleo data – even less so.

UPDATE36: Dr. Chris de Freitas responds to the ugly attempt by The Team at getting him fired.

UPDATE 35: “Stroppy” Dr Roger Pielke Sr. shows just how much a “old boys network” the peer review process is.

UPDATE34: More internal dissent of the hockey stick. Mann tries to beat down the concern over “hide the decline” while not letting the dissenting scientist know there was a decline.

UPDATE33: Gobsmacking! Rob Wilson proves McIntyre and McKittrick correct in an email to colleagues at CRU, showing that when random noise time series are fed into Mike Mann’s procedure, it makes “hockey sticks”. The confirmation that M&M is right never leaves the walls of CRU.

UPDATE32: 9:30PM PST  11/27 BREAKINGCanada to pull out of Kyoto protocol. Another Climategate fallout ?

UPDATE31: 4:30PM PST 11/27 BOMBSHELL An absolutely disgusting string of communications that shows the tribal attempt at getting an editor of a journal fired on made up issues – all because he allowed a publication that didn’t agree with “the Team”. This is ugly, disturbing, and wrong on every level.

UPDATE30: 9:45 AM PST 11/27 Newsbytes. Major crack in the warming wall at the UK prime minister’s office. BBC in collusion with Climategate scientists.

UPDATE29: 9AM PST 11/27 The saga of the missing station data at CRU and the “pants on fire” defense of it as told by Willis Eschenbach. Dr. Phil Jones is between a rock and a hard place, quite.

UPDATE 28: 1:30PM PST 11/26 An email shows the UNFCCC considers activists an essential tool saying “…organized and deeply committed environmental activism has long been an important part of the UNFCCC process…”

UPDATE27: 7AM PST 11/26 Climategate 2 features prominently in WUWT’s newest feature “Hits and Misses

UPDATE26: 2:50 PM 11/25 Two separate examples show obstruction and collusion by members of “The Team” to prevent any dissenting science from being properly considered by the NRC in 2007.

UPDATE25: 2PM 11/25 Keith Briffa asks another colleague to delete email to avoid FOIA

UPDATE24: 1:30PM 11/25 New Climategate 1/2 combined search engine here

UPDATE23: 9AM PST 11/25 via bishop-hill, strange infighting:

#4101 – Edward Cook tells Phil Jones that Mike Mann is “serious enemy” and “vindictive”. Mike Mann had criticized his work.

Apparently Mann went “a little crazy” over a paper showing the MWP exists.

Details here

UPDATE22: 11AM PST 11/24 Am unsurprising admission from a BBC environmental reporter to Dr. Phil Jones that they really have no impartiality at all (ho ho) when it comes to climate issues.

UPDATE21: 9:50AM PST 11/24 “FOIA2011″ and Climategate – A Chinese-POTUS connection?

UPDATE20: 9:30AM PST 11/24 World renowned climatologist Phil Jones can’t even plot a temperature trend line in Excel. I’ve offered a solution that WUWT readers can help with.

UPDATE19: 9AM PST 11/24 Gail Combs finds some disturbing connections between the Team and The World Bank

UPDATE18: 1:45PM Scott Mandia, aka “Supermandia” wins the award for the silliest climategate rebuttal, ever. It’s like stupid on steroids.

UPDATE17: 12:55PM PST 11/23 Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. has an excellent piece on “Gatekeeping” related to Trenberth and the Pielke-Landsea hurricane paper and the IPCC. You may recall Landsea resigned from the IPCC over this. Pielke says: “The gatekeeping of the IPCC process is abundantly clear, and the shadowy suggestion that they can find out who the reviewers are from another colleague is a bit unsettling as well.” Trenberth looks particularly bad here.

UPDATE16: 11:30AM PST 11/23 Insider scientist at CRU says our “reaction to Mike Mann’s errors was not particularly honest” – story here

UPDATE15: 7:50AM 11/23 Ric Werme found an email from the late John L. Daly to Mike Mann and the team – it is well worth a read here

UPDATE14: 2:45 AM PST 11/23 Willis Eschenbach offers a guest post here explaining how his FOIA requests went astray. Mr. David Palmer was the Freedom of Information Officer for the CRU at the time. In the newly released emails, he expresses his frustration with the whole procedure.

UPDATE13: 12:05AM 11/23 Craig Stone writes:

I have published a searchable database of the emails at http://foia2011.org

All email addresses and phone numbers are automatically redacted. It’s extremely rudimentary right now, but I’ll be refining the functionality and improving the search capabilities and navigation over the course of the next week.

UPDATE 12: 9:30 PM PST We’ve known for some time that Al Gore made up a bunch of claims in his AIT movie that simply weren’t true. Now this revelation in the new email batch shows that in the case of Kilimanjaro’s disappearing snows, even Phil Jones and Dr. Lonnie Thompson don’t believe global warming is the cause, even though Thompson put out a press release nearly a year ago saying just that. Told ya so. Pants on fire and all that. Anything for “the cause” right?

UPDATE11: 4:45PM PST Kevin Trenberth gets all misty eyed and sing-songy at Christmas here

UPDATE10: 4:30PM PST Some thoughts on cracking the big remaining all.7z file here

UPDATE9: 2:25PM PST Josh weighs in with the first satirical cartoon here

UPDATE8: 140PM PST Mike Mann shows his true colors:

email 1680.txt

date: Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:03:05 -0400

from: “Michael E. Mann”..

subject: Re: Something not to pass on

to: Phil Jones

Phil,

I would not respond to this. They will misrepresent and take out of context anything you give them. This is a set up. They will certainly publish this, and will ignore any evidence to the contrary that you provide. s They are going after Wei-Chyung because he’s U.S. and there is a higher threshold for establishing libel. Nonetheless, he should

consider filing a defamation lawsuit, perhaps you too.

I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thusfar unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests.Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.

I believe that the only way to stop these people is by exposing them and discrediting them….

UPDATE7: 1:20 PM PST Phil Jones and Tom Wigley calls another scientist (The former state climatologist of California) a “jerk” for publishing his UHI results.

UPDATE6: 12:08PM PST Here’s an email that collaborates a radio interview I did in Seattle with Thomas Peterson in summer 2007, yes these are 100% real emails, no doubt whatsoever now. More here: Climategate 2.0 – NCDC: “Mr. Watts gave a well reasoned position”

UPDATE 5: 11:00AM PST In a statement, UEA doesn’t deny these emails, but posts about the whitewash investigations of the past, like they matter now.

UPDATE4: 9:45 AM PST I’ve changed the headline from Climategate 2.0 to Climategate 2.0  emails – They’re real and they’re spectacular!  with a hat tip to Jerry Seinfeld. The relevance of that headline is particularly interesting in the context of where Dr. James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has his office in NYC.

UPDATE3: 9:25 AM PST – Having read a number of emails, and seeing this quote from Mike Mann in the Guardian:

When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”

I’m going to conclude they are the real deal. I’ve posted a BitTorrent link to the file below. One big difference between Climategate 1 and 2 is that in 1, it took days for the MSM to catch on, now they are on top of it.

UPDATE2: 8:45AM PST The Guardian has a story up by Leo Hickman, and this excerpt suggests they may be the real deal:

Norfolk police have said the new set of emails is “of interest” to their investigation to find the perpetrator of the initial email release who has not yet been identified.

The emails appear to be genuine, but this has yet to be confirmed by the University of East Anglia. One of the emailers, the climate scientist Prof Michael Mann, has confirmed that he believes they are his messages.

UPDATE1: 8:20 AM PST These emails have not been verified yet, and this story was posted by one of my moderating staff while I was asleep. Until such time they are verified, tread lightly because without knowing what is behind the rest of the zip file, for all we know it’s a bunch of recipes and collection of  lorem ipsum text files. I’m working to authenticate these now and will report when I know more – Anthony Watts

===============================================================

Early this morning, history repeated itself. FOIA.org has produced an enormous zip file of 5,000 additional emails similar to those released two years ago in November 2009 and coined Climategate. There are almost 1/4 million additional emails locked behind a password, which the organization does not plan on releasing at this time.

The original link was dropped off in the Hurricane Kenneth thread at about 4 AM Eastern. It is still there.

Some initial snippets floating around the blogosphere:

<3373> Bradley: I’m sure you agree–the Mann/Jones GRL paper was truly pathetic and should never have been published. I don’t want to be associated with that 2000 year

“reconstruction”.

<3115> Mann:  By the way, when is Tom C going to formally publish his roughly 1500 year

reconstruction??? It would help the cause to be able to refer to that

reconstruction as confirming Mann and Jones, etc.

<3940> Mann:  They will (see below) allow us to provide some discussion of the synthetic

example, referring to the J. Cimate paper (which should be finally accepted

upon submission of the revised final draft), so that should help the cause a

bit.

<0810> Mann: I gave up on Judith Curry a while ago. I don’t know what she think’s she’s

doing, but its not helping the cause

<2440> Jones: I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the

process

<2094> Briffa: UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC

task.

JeffId has some initial reaction

From the ReadMe file:

/// FOIA 2011 — Background and Context ///

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day.”

“Every day nearly 16.000 children die from hunger and related causes.”

“One dollar can save a life” — the opposite must also be true.

“Poverty is a death sentence.”

“Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize

greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels.”

Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on

hiding the decline.

This archive contains some 5.000 emails picked from keyword searches. A few

remarks and redactions are marked with triple brackets.

The rest, some 220.000, are encrypted for various reasons. We are not planning

to publicly release the passphrase.

We could not read every one, but tried to cover the most relevant topics such

as…

==============================================================

Here’s one about UHI that is convincing:

cc: liqx@cma.xxx

date: Tue, 25 Sep 2007 11:16:37 +0800

from: =?gb2312?B?JUQ1JUM1JUMwJUYyJUMzJUY0IA==?= <limmy@xxx>

subject: Re:Re: thank you

to: p.jones@xxx

Dear Phil,

Again I find that the emails from my CMA mail boxes can not get to you.

From attaches please find the data of 42 urban stations and 42 rural stations (by your

list) and a reference of homogenization of the data. we have tested and adjusted the abrupt

discontinuities of the data during 1951-2001, but the following years (2002-2004) has only

been quality controled and added to the end of the series, but we found the relocation

during these 3 years have minor effects on the whole series in most of the stations.

I  partly agree with what Prof. Ren said. and we have done some analysis on the urban heat

island effect in China during past years. The results are differnt with Ren’s. But I think

different methods, data, and selection of the urban and rural stations would be the most

important causes of this. So I think it is high time to give some new studies and graw some

conclusion in this topic.  I hope we can make some new achives on this both on global scale

and in China.

Best

Qingxiang

—– Original Message —–

From: “Phil Jones” < p.jones@xxxx >

To: “Rean Guoyoo” < guoyoo@xxxx >

Cc: “%D5%C5%C0%F2%C3%F4” < limmy@xxx>, < liqx@cma.xxx >

Sent: 2007-09-24 16:25:59 +0800

Subject: Re: thank you

Dear Guoyu,

I think I emailed you from America last week. I am away again next week,

but here this week.

I do think that understanding urban influences are important.  I will

wait for Dr Li Qingxiang to send some data, but there is no rush, as I am

quite busy the next few weeks.

Best Regards

Phil

At 00:59 20/09/2007, you wrote:

The following message was returned back when I sent via cma site. I send it again via

this site. I also forwarded this message to Dr, Li Qingxiang.

Regards,

Guoyu

Dear Phil,

Thank you for your message of Sept 11, 2007. I have just been back from the US. Sorry

for the delayed response.

I noted the discussion on blog sites. This is indeed a big issue in the studies of

climate change.

In the past years, we did some analyses of the urban warming effect on surface air

temperature trends in China, and we found the effect is pretty big in the areas we

analyzed. This is a little different from the result you obtained in 1990. I think there

might be at least three reasons for the difference: (1) the areas chosen in the analyses

are different; (2) the time periods analyzed are obviously varied, and the aft-1990

period is seeing a more rapid warming in most areas of China; (3) the rural stations

used for the analyses are different, and we used some stations which we think could be

more representative for the baseline change.

We have published a few of papers on this topic in Chinese. Unfortunately, when we sent

our comments to the IPCC AR4, they were mostly rejected.

It is my opinion that we need to re-assess the urbanization effect on surface air

temperature records for at least some regions of the continents. I am glad that you are

going to redo it using the updated dataset. I expect you to obtain the new outcome.

As for the dataset, I believe that Dr. Li Qingxiang could give you a hand. He and his

group conducted a lot work of detection and adjustment of the inhomogeneities in the

past years, and the adjusted and the raw datasets are all stored and managed in his

center. The datasets we used are also from his center.

I’d be happy to discuss some issues with you late, but I would not necessarily be as a

co-author because my contribution would be rather minor.

Best regards,

Guoyu

NCC, Beijing

Shape Yahoo! in your own image. [1]Join our Network Research Panel today!

Prof. Phil Jones

Climatic Research Unit        Telephone +44 (0) 1603 xxxx

School of Environmental Sciences    Fax +44 (0) 1603 xxxxx

University of East Anglia

Norwich                          Email    p.jones@xxxxx

NR4 7TJ

UK

—————————————————————————-

=======================263ÌìÏÂÓÊ£ÐÅÀµÓÊ×Ôרҵ=======================

Attachment Converted: “c:\eudora\attach\Detecting and Adjusting Temporal Inhomogeneity in

Chinese Mean Surface Air Temperature Data.pdf” Attachment Converted: “c:\eudora\attach\To

Jones.rar”

====================================================================

Here’s a bit torrent link to the FOIA2011.zip file

You’ll need a bit torrent client

BETTER LINK:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37

Documentation Of A Cozy Interaction Between An AMS BAMS Editor And Phil Jones

The climate data they don't want you to find — free, to your inbox.
Join readers who get 5–8 new articles daily — no algorithms, no shadow bans.
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1.3K Comments
November 22, 2011 8:19 am

A physicist says:
November 22, 2011 at 7:51 am
is there is anything left of Watts Up With That? but hollowed-out blank pages?

Ironically, it is your comment which is quite hollowed out.
Watts Up With That is chocked full of science and scientific discussions. Your claims to the contrary are strange.

Ken Hall
November 22, 2011 8:20 am

“A physicist says: ….”
What you posted was such a classical example of projection that psychology students could use it as a case study.
Most of the people here at WUWT are interested in truth. The alarmists are the ones who indulge in cherry picking and slogan shouting and avoiding the real science and attacking the messenger. Just as you are doing, hiding behind the name “A physicist”….

November 22, 2011 8:20 am

A climatologist, and his view of the scientific method…
4693> Crowley:
I am not convinced that the “truth” is always worth reaching if it is at the
cost of damaged personal relationships

November 22, 2011 8:23 am

Andrew says:
November 22, 2011 at 7:03 am
Penn [State] would do well to fire Mann immediately (re new emails) considering their extremely fragile position at this time.

Concur. The president that protected Mann is gone after a “cover-up” scandal of sorts was exposed. It’s quite possible that the university will now steer clear of new cover-up out of fear of being branded by cover-ups.
It’s time to hit Penn State about Michael Mann again and hit them hard.
Any PA State senators reading?

November 22, 2011 8:24 am

Just wow,
2095> Steig:
He’s skeptical that the warming is as great as we show in East Antarctica — he
thinks the “right” answer is more like our detrended results in the
supplementary text. I cannot argue he is wrong.”
I wonder who “he} is, but thes clowns do not wish their “dirty laundry”, code for scientific doubts, to be in the open…
2733> Crowley:
Phil, thanks for your thoughts – guarantee there will be no dirty laundry in
the open.

Ryan
November 22, 2011 8:26 am

@A physicist: Nice straw man you’ve created there! I guess Entergy is hoping to get a slice of that $37trillion that would need to be spent on “renewables” to meet Team AGW targets. Where do physicists get a job these days? Wouldn’t be in carbon-free electricity generation in your case would it?

November 22, 2011 8:26 am

Well Gates, do you still wish to join hands with this man and claim the cooling 1940 to 1970 was manmade.
0953> Jones:
This will reduce the 1940-1970 cooling in NH temps. Explaining the cooling with
sulphates won’t be quite as necessary

Steve Oregon
November 22, 2011 8:27 am

I want to read “cause for prosecution”

November 22, 2011 8:27 am

a physicist says:
Everyone understands that slogan-shouting, cherry-picking, and witch-hunting is going to continue unceasingly here on Watts Up With That and other ideology-first sites (both far-left and far-right)
Henry says
We have to get rid of this idea that we “have” to vote for people (who vote for us on issues)
We have to vote in the idea that people have the right to vote for issues
especially in the modern world where people can vote with a click.
( I bank on-line, so why cannot we all vote on-line?, for issues I mean)
Now if we were all to ask our parliaments that we want to be able to vote like they do,
why would we still need parliamentarians?
The money saved can be used for elderly coming to schools to be able to vote on issues, rather than vote for people
Anyway, for those interested in my earlier comment, see here
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/22/climategate-2-0/#comment-804548

Ken Hall
November 22, 2011 8:29 am

Mann Should be toast after this, as should Jones, Briffa et all, and all the other usual suspects involved in perverting peer review and locking real science out of the IPCC.
We need a bunch of real scientists to replace them at the IPCC and then the next IPCC report might actually be honest, for once.

john
November 22, 2011 8:29 am

I hope that the good folks at http://cryptome.org/ take a good hard look at this new development.

ferd berple
November 22, 2011 8:31 am

Wow, it didn’t take long for the link to disappear! Both these look good.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37
torrent url
http://tinyurl.com/d7jxlt7

November 22, 2011 8:32 am

“UPDATE: 8:20 AM PST These emails have not been verified yet, […] Until such time they are verified, tread lightly because without knowing what is behind the rest of the zip file, for all we know it’s a bunch of recipes and collection of ipsem lorem text files. I’m working to authenticate these now and will report when I know more – Anthony Watts”
That is why I love this blog. Because you guys always strive to stick with the truth. There is enough ugly in the truth without having to revert to any bogus publication. I am waiting too see how all this goes and I am certain that also this time Antony and his team will confirm their trustworthiness.

Steeptown
November 22, 2011 8:32 am

“A physicist” is clearly not a physicist. It takes one to know one.

Kaboom
November 22, 2011 8:33 am

Briffa (2967) “To what extent is this issue now generally considered urgent, or even
real?”
A fabulous insight into AGW-think. Urgency of an issue trumps its reality.

F. Ross
November 22, 2011 8:33 am

Does this mean that all the investigations that “cleared” the various actors in this whole travesty were NOT really cleared? /sarc.
“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is.”
Now if we just had some model DDT to spray on all the model cockroaches …

November 22, 2011 8:33 am

More support for Tidale, Mosher, stop helping these people.
5131> Shukla/IGES:
[“Future of the IPCC”, 2008] It is inconceivable that policymakers will be
willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the
projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and
simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.

David Falkner
November 22, 2011 8:34 am

The celebrations are a bit premature, I think. Are they actual emails? How will we know for sure? If they are, I am personally beginning to wonder if the leaks aren’t coming from a foreign governmental entity. China and Russia have been doing quite a bit of hacking recently.

Latitude
November 22, 2011 8:35 am

Wondering how long until the media tries to frame it……
Stolen, criminals, thieves, crime……..etc

G. Karst
November 22, 2011 8:36 am

Now we know why climatologists are picking up musical instruments and forming bands. It may soon be their only way to finally earn a living. GK

Jean Parisot
November 22, 2011 8:36 am

“the cause” will make a nice synonym for “conspiracy to commit …”

stephan
November 22, 2011 8:39 am

AW I dont think this stuff could be made up ie there genuine

November 22, 2011 8:39 am

The encrypted file has very big files inside (several MBs).
That was not observed in ClimateGate 1.0

Gary
November 22, 2011 8:40 am

From the UK Guardian, this quote:

Prof Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Centre at Penn State University, who is quoted in the batch of released emails described the release as “truly pathetic”.
When asked if they were genuine, he said: “Well, they look like mine but I hardly see anything that appears damning at all, despite them having been taken out of context. I guess they had very little left to work with, having culled in the first round the emails that could most easily be taken out of context to try to make me look bad.”
He said, the people behind the release were “agents doing the dirty bidding of the fossil fuel industry know they can’t contest the fundamental science of human-caused climate change. So they have instead turned to smear, innuendo, criminal hacking of websites, and leaking out-of-context snippets of personal emails in their effort to try to confuse the public about the science and thereby forestall any action to combat this critical threat. Its right out of the tried-and-true playbook of climate change denial.”

Sticking to his story…

November 22, 2011 8:42 am

At 8:23 AM on 22 November, wobble writes:

The president that protected Mann is gone after a “cover-up” scandal of sorts was exposed. It’s quite possible that the university will now steer clear of new cover-up out of fear of being branded by cover-ups.
It’s time to hit Penn State about Michael Mann again and hit them hard.
Any PA State senators reading?

Gawd. You’ve never been either to State College or to Harrisburg, have you, wobble?
As in most state governments, there is in the Commonwealth a culture of corruption and thoroughly “bipartisan” concealment of corruption that dates back to Colonial times, thoroughly understood by those of us who have perforce had to waste our time and effort in dealings with these meatgrinders of political chicanery but utterly unappreciated by the average citizen, whose interface with “the Malevolent Jobholder” doesn’t rise beyond the quiet desperation of the bewildered passive victim.
The recent appointment of Louis Freeh (former Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation) to figurehead “the university board of trustees’ internal investigation into the abuse allegations that ultimately led to the ouster of longtime football coach Joe Paterno and university president Graham Spanier” (i.e., yet another whitewash, this time with a putative paragon of probity to make it menthol) is nothing more than gaudy stonewalling perpetrated at honkin’ humongous cost to the pitiful sweating Pennsylvania taxpayer.
And I guaran-goddam-tee you that all the “PA State senators reading” about this are breathing sighs of relief at the fact that they can now respond to their angry constituents’ inquiries with: “Hey, we’ve got the former boss of the FBI handling this!”
Confident, of course, that absolutely nothing of real substance (or hazardous to things-as-they-are) will ever see the light of day.

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