- A federal judge has issued a stinging rebuke to the Bush
administration by ruling that the Commerce Department allowed politics,
not science, to determine whether to relax the "dolphin safe"
label for tuna sold in the U.S.
-
- In a harshly worded opinion, San Francisco-based U.S.
District Judge Thelton Henderson last month overturned an earlier Commerce
Department finding that dolphins were not harmed by Mexican tuna boats
when they encircled schools of tuna with purse seine nets.
-
- The Commerce finding would have opened the way for the
Mexican tuna industry to sell its catch in the U.S. and label it 'dolphin
safe', despite the killing of thousands of dolphins annually by the
fishery.
At the same time, Judge Henderson commended the government's own
scientists,
who had argued that purse seine fishing was depleting dolphin
populations.
-
- "It appears that while the scientists at [National
Marine Fisheries Service] undertook their research mission extremely
seriously,
at the end of the day, intense pressures ... led to a policy driven more
by politics than science," Henderson wrote. "Indeed the record
reflects an agency that gave short shrift to the conclusions of its own
scientists, dragged its feet on crucial research, and ...ignored the
explicit
warning of the appellate court not to invoke 'insufficient evidence' as
a justification for its finding."
-
- In fact, Henderson wrote, "...this court has never,
in its 24 years, reviewed a record of agency action that contained such
a compelling portrait of political meddling."
-
- "Judge Henderson's ruling exposes the Bush
administration's
deceit in ignoring its own scientists...to allow dolphin-deadly tuna back
into the U.S. with a phony label," said David Phillips, director of
the Earth Island Institute, which brought the lawsuit along with eight
other ogranizations. "Secret court documents proved that the
government
knew all along that netting dolphins was jeopardizing their survival."
[1]
-
- The purse seine fishing method is widely used by tuna
boats from Mexico, Venezuela, and Ecuador, which have been lobbying for
years to gain entry to the lucrative U.S. tuna market. In December 2002,
Commerce Department Secretary Donald Evans ruled that conclusive scientific
evidence showing that dolphins were being killed in purse seine nets was
lacking, despite the findings of the Department's own scientists.
-
- Commerce Secretary Evans' claim of insufficient
scientific
evidence was undermined by Earth Island's discovery that some 300
government
memos had been withheld from the court record.
-
- The memos revealed that U.S. agencies' biologists knew
that dolphin populations were not recovering, due to tuna fishing
practices.
The documents also revealed intense pressure from the U.S. Department of
State, Mexico, and other tuna fishing nations to ignore the scientific
evidence. [2]
-
- "The Bush administration went to amazing lengths
to prevent Earth Island and the court from obtaining these damaging
revelations,"
said Phillips.
-
- SOURCES:
- [1] Earth Island press release, Aug. 9, 2004.
- [2] Ibid.
-
- Copyright © 2003 Environmental Media Services
-
- http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/mt_archives/000184.php
|
