U.S. State Department Is Playing Concealing Games with Relevant Keystone Pipeline Information — Like Keeping Public Comments Secret and Covering up the Fact that its Consultants Had a Financial Interest in the Proposed Outcome

29 March 2013

That’s President Obama’s Administration for you

He promised transparency and, instead, cavorts in secrecy and plutocrat-inspired double dealing. Our Commander in Chief would be more comprehensively called the Liar in Chief.

Here is the latest tidbit of ethics-defying filth from the Magnificent Manipulator’s Administration:

Late on a Friday afternoon in early March, the State Department released a 2,000-page draft report downplaying the environmental risks of the northern portion of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would ferry oil from Canada's tar sands to refineries in Texas, passing through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma.

But when it released the report, State hid an important fact from the public: Experts who helped draft the report had previously worked for TransCanada, the company looking to build the Keystone pipeline, and other energy companies poised to benefit from Keystone's construction.

State released documents in conjunction with the Keystone report in which these experts' work histories were redacted so that anyone reading the documents wouldn't know who'd previously hired them.

Yet unredacted versions of these documents obtained by Mother Jones confirm that three experts working for an outside contractor had done consulting work for TransCanada and other oil companies with a stake in the Keystone's approval.

But the Department of State was not content with just that bit of duplicity

It also decided — contrary to prevailing government policy — that the general public should not know what ordinary people and interest groups had individually said about the State Department’s Keystone Pipeline review, during the review process’s public comment period.

Thus, despite having recorded incoming public comments with a “Web-based electronic docket”:

The State Department is refusing to provide routine and timely public access to comments filed on its controversial Keystone environmental review.

That includes comments from other federal agencies, like the EPA, which has criticized the State Department's previous environmental reviews.

The EPA routinely makes public its own comments without need for any FOIA request. The agency's office of enforcement and compliance, which has the important role of issuing report cards grading other agencies' environmental impact statements, publishes such documents on its own website during public comment periods.

The State Department also seeks the comments of other agencies, like the Energy Department, the Interior Department, the Transportation Department and the Commerce Department, and these, too, are supposed to be made public.

Journalist John Cushman added:

Federal electronic dockets are routinely opened to the public in other circumstances. For instance, people who want to comment on the Environmental Protection Agency's proposed rules to control pollution under the Clean Air Act can go to Regulations.gov—a site that handles public comments for federal agencies.

Not only can they file their own comments, but they can also read any other comment that has been filed.

Why this matters — King Obama’s anti-democratic connivings

I object to the Administration’s characteristically secretive handling of the pipeline controversy. It is not that I am vehemently (and futilely) opposed to Keystone XL, despite the fact that I think it is a bad idea.

As with drones, electronic surveillance, and whistleblower-quashing — the President hides his immoralities and illegalities behind a wall of intentional and well-constructed concealment. All the while trading on:

(a) his uplifting image as the first African-American president

and

(b) all that one would intuitively think would come with such a great “Democrat.”

The moral? — Historically, I suspect that President Obama will only be remembered as (i) the first black president and (ii) one among many contributors to the decline of American democratic republicanism

President Obama is unquestionably a capable Machiavellian, but he has proven himself to be neither professionally admirable nor benevolently productive. A waste of political talent.

A plutocrat’s shill.

PeteFree.com

U.S. State Department Is Playing Concealing Games with Relevant Keystone Pipeline Information — Like Keeping Public Comments Secret and Covering up the Fact that its Consultants Had a Financial Interest in the Proposed Outcome