That’s what University of Virginia continues to do, as my
colleague at American
Tradition Institute Chris Horner
explains today in
Washington Examiner. Earlier this week UVA — as required
by
a court order — delivered records relating to Climategate “Hockey
Stick” chart creator Michael Mann that
ATI
asked for in January under a
Freedom of Information Act request. Except the records
provided — less than half of the 9,000 or so records that UVA
says are responsive to our request — were of minimal relevance to
Mann’s research.
UVA has said it will claim exemptions to protect records of a
“proprietary nature,” which is irrelevant here under Virginia’s
FOIA law because all the research Mann did has been published, and
therefore public. Obviously missing from the fluffy document dump
this week were the already-publicized Climategate emails between
Mann, East Anglia pals, and other alarmists. As Chris explains:
ClimateGate emails sent or received by Mann’s UVa email address
include certain now-notorious, often nasty missives, many highly
questionable from a legal or ethics perspective and most reflecting
wagon-circling by alarmists discussing how to defeat substantive
challenge and even requests for transparency involving an already
published paper.
It is reasonable to surmise that these are among the 9,000 pages
UVa finally identified as responsive to ATI. If so, each of them is
being withheld on the remarkable claim that they are “Data, records
or information of a proprietary nature produced or collected by or
for faculty … in the conduct of or as a result of study or
research on medical, scientific, technical or scholarly issues.”
Really.
Excerpts of apparently scholarly research of commercial intent
and value presumably include the ClimateGate gems “I can’t see
either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I
will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the
peer-review literature is!”, and one gleefully noting the death of
a skeptic who had dared correspond with them.
This is the sort of Top Secret “proprietary” emails UVa will
risk fortune, reputation and sanction to keep from producing. A UVa
official informed us on no less than three occasions that the
school was, in effect, ignoring the law’s mandate to interpret
exemptions narrowly.
Mann
told Science magazine this week that UVA wasn’t
providing anything to ATI other than “boilerplate:”
“U.Va has not turned over emails related to discussions of
research, unpublished manuscripts, private discussions between
scientists about science, etc.,—i.e., any of the materials that
are exempt from release by state law,” Mann wrote in an e-mail
message. “U.Va has simply turned over the non-exempt emails, and
many of these were turned over to ATI months ago.”
Obviously Mann is not a lawyer, as there is no exemption in
Virginia’s FOIA for “private discussions between scientists about
science” under taxpayer-funded research and institutions.
As we expected, we will have to wait another month until UVA
shows the records that they claim are exempt to Horner and to our
Law Center director David Schnare, under
a protective order, and then they will hash out their dispute
over the remaining documents in front of a judge, who will make the
final call as to their public release. As UVA conspirator Michael
Halpern of Union of Concerned Scientists
told the Washington Post, “The real test will be the
second phase.”
