Stop me if you’ve heard this one … the Bush administration hires independent experts to conduct objective research, the researchers rely on facts and evidence to prepare a report, and because the reality-based information conflicts with the White House political agenda, the research is suppressed.
Yep, it’s happened again.
The Labor Department worked for more than a year to maintain secrecy for studies that were critical of working conditions in Central America, the region the Bush administration wants in a new trade pact.
The contractor hired by the department in 2002 to conduct the studies has become a major opponent of the administration’s proposed Central American Free Trade Agreement, or CAFTA.
The government-paid studies concluded that countries proposed for free-trade status have poor working environments and fail to protect workers’ rights. The department dismissed the conclusions as inaccurate and biased, according to government and contractor documents reviewed by the Associated Press. […]
[T]he Labor Department began as early as spring 2004 to block public release of the country-by-country reports. The department told its contractor to remove the reports from its Web site, ordered it to retrieve paper copies before they became public, banned release of new information from the reports, and told the contractor it could not discuss the studies with outsiders.
I can appreciate the fact that reasonable people can disagree about the efficacy of the Central American Free Trade Agreement, but suppressing publicly-funded research — again — is a trend that needs to stop. I’ve lost count of how many times the Bush gang has been caught burying, hiding, and/or editing government data, but David Sirota seems to have a helpful list.
A Senate floor vote on CAFTA could come as soon as today, after passing the Senate Finance Committee yesterday. One wonders what kind of impact these suppressed reports might have had on the process.