The Obama administration is now blocking a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by an environmental group, Public Employees for Environment Responsibility (PEER), which is attempting to uncover Obama’s connections to Monsanto-linked lobbyists.
Keep in mind, Monsanto’s products have been linked to some horrific effects on biological systems like the human body, not the least of which is creating necrosis and significant mutations in critical cell types.
Also quite noteworthy is the fact that Monsanto was actually recently found guilty of chemical poisoning in the case of a French farmer.
The group suspects the Obama White House of working with these lobbyists to defend genetically engineered (GE) crops and the attempts to get these GE crops planted in wildlife refuges across the United States.
Part of the information which is currently being withheld by the Obama administration is part of an email from January 2011 from a lobbyist to a top White House policy analyst.
This lobbyist was with the Biotechnology Industry Organization, or BIO, which regularly represents the interests of companies specializing in GE seeds like Syngenta and the infamous multinational giant Monsanto.
The White House claims that they had to block portions of the email because it contained information on BIO’s lobbying strategy.
They claimed that if this strategy was released, it could cause damage to the group’s competitiveness and those of the companies it represents.
“We suspect the reason an industry lobbyist so cavalierly shared strategy is that the White House is part of that strategy,” said Kathryn Douglass, the staff counsel for PEER.
Douglass is arguing that the email should be public record, adding, “The White House’s legal posture is as credible as claiming Coca Cola’s secret formula was ‘inadvertently’ left in a duffel bag at the bus station.”
PEER has been doing phenomenal work exposing the connections between our government and BIO lobbyists, including the release of internal emails last July.
The email release revealed that Peter Schmeissner, a senior science policy analyst and member of the biotechnology working group at the White House, actually had been corresponding with a BIO lobbyist about one of PEER’s legal challenges.
The lawsuit, filed by PEER and their allied groups, was quite successful in that it halted the planting of GE crops within the wildlife refuges across northeastern states.
PEER has obviously not given up and they continue to fight the planned plantings of GE crops across the nation.
In some of the emails obtained by PEER from 2010, it was found that Adrianne Massey, a biotechnology lobbyist for quite a while, asked Schmeissner if the “interagency working group” is addressing the legal challenges put forth by PEER.
In addition, Massey forwarded some of the environmental assessments of the proposed GE crop plots at other wildlife refuges across the United States. These assessments could supposedly protect GE crop plots in wildlife refuges from further legal challenges in the future.
The emails obtained by PEER spurred them to seek out information on the “interagency working group” referred to by Massey which is known as the White House Agricultural and Biotechnology Working Group via FOIA request.
The group boasts high-level officials from most of the Obama administration’s agencies that deal with agriculture and trade, even the State Department, United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), according to PEER.
These discoveries have led PEER to file a lawsuit against the White House in an attempt to get the information which was withheld from their FOIA requests.
This would include not only the Massey email in question but the White House Agricultural and Biotechnology Working Group’s schedule, the items on their agenda and their work related to GE crops in general.
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