Skeptic Author Chris Horner Exposes New York Times and AAAS: FOIA = Death Threats?! ‘Do we condone death threats (really?) and, if not, why would we then also issue a FOIA?’

Guest Post By Chris Horner, Director of litigation at American Tradition Institute and author of Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

So the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), thoroughly rattled by the American Tradition Institute’s FOIA requests of UVa and NASA — and even more so by the litigation forced by the institutions’ respective stonewalling — issued a board statement comparing FOIA requests of climate scientists with death threats. Really.

Naturally this caught the eye of the New York Times, which had a young lady contact us for comment. Right off the bat it was clear she, too, had been rattled by the horrors of our outrageous efforts to …see certain records the taxpayer has paid for and which are expressly covered by transparency laws.

Her stance was sympathetic to AAAS’s to the point of temper. She first reaffirmed a fancy for the apparently absolute truth that a FOIA request for climate scientists’ records is indeed no different than death threats allegedly made in Australia against scientists — sadly, if that’s true, they are now treated to what ‘skeptics’ have experienced for years, as I have detailed.

Well, actually, her disinterest in Greenpeace having created this little cottage practice indicated that this is true only for certain climate scientists’ records. Not the ones whose records Greenpeace is asking her for…that’s just transparency, good-government type stuff.

She continued by wondering, as such, do we condone death threats (really?) and, if not, why would we then also issue a FOIA?

Why that is particularly amusing, as opposed to sad, is that she was shocked by my assertion that Big Science/Big Academia’s objection to having laws that obviously cover their own actually applied to their own was of a part with Hollywood objecting to laws being applied to Roman Polanski. Apparently, by saying this, I was accusing Michael Mann of rape. Or something.

So see the below as I sent to her and, given the above, I expect you will not see in the story. Surely because it will be too busy explaining the tyranny of Greenpeace broadly filing similar requests. ATI’s statement is here:

—–Original Message—–
From:
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Wed, Jun 29, 2011 1:14 pm
Subject: AAAS release citing ATI transparency efforts

Dear Joanna,

I’m told you called ATI for comment. Below is my