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Cheney's Staff Cut Testimony On Warming
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Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride declined to discuss Burnett's allegations, saying, "We don't comment on internal deliberations." But White House spokesman Tony Fratto noted that officials in past administrations have vetted congressional testimony from agency officials.
"There's absolutely nothing unusual here in terms of the inter-agency review process, whether it's testimony, rules or anything else," Fratto said in an interview. "The process exists so that other offices and departments have the opportunity to comment and offer their views. There's nothing unusual about that, there's nothing nefarious about that, and there's nothing different here from previous administrations."
CDC spokesman Tom Skinner said that any changes to Gerberding's planned testimony were made "during the normal editing process" and that she "spoke openly and fully without constraint" while testifying before the Senate.
Frank O'Donnell, who heads the advocacy group Clean Air Watch, said the revelations confirmed that the vice president has been steering environmental policy during President Bush's tenure.
"For years, we've suspected that Cheney was the puppeteer for administration policy on global warming," O'Donnell said. "This kiss-and-tell account appears to confirm the worst."
Boxer was particularly harsh in assessing earlier comments made by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, who in October said that some of Gerberding's original draft "did not comport with" the 2007 report of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
"This was a lie," Boxer said, reading Perino's quote. "She said it was in contradiction with the IPCC report. It wasn't."
The IPCC report raised many of the same points that Gerberding did in her original testimony, but Bush's science adviser, John H. Marburger III, issued a statement in October saying that "there was an overall lack of precision" in Gerberding's draft concerning "the specific nature of some climate change impacts on human health."
Yesterday, Fratto said White House officials "stand 100 percent behind what Dana said."
