In Congress, a Whole Lot of Half-Truths By Richard Morin.
Gary Mucciaroni of Temple University and Paul J. Quirk of the University of British Columbia sought to see how truthful America's lawmakers were in debating three major bills: welfare overhaul in 1995-1996, the fate of the estate tax in 1999-2000 and telecommunication deregulation in 1996......
In all, they examined the accuracy of 18 claims in 43 separate House and Senate debates.......
Researchers judged the claims made in only 11 of the 43 debates to have been largely substantiated by the facts. An additional 16 were deemed to be "unsubstantiated"-- a polite way of saying they were misleading, mostly false or flatly wrong -- while 16 were an artful mix of fact and fiction, they report in their new book, "Deliberative Choices: Debating Public Policy in Congress.".....
They stopped short of asserting that members of the House and Senate lied to advance their positions. "We don't pretend to know whether they are lying, are ignorant, or misperceive the facts and informed opinion on an issue," Mucciaroni said. "Instead of using 'flatly lying,' we prefer 'flatly incorrect' or 'flatly inaccurate.' "
In Iran, Searching for Common Ground By David Ignatius
Shahriar Khateri, as a boy of 14,...enlisted in the Iranian militia known as the basij and was exposed to chemical weapons attacks by Iraqi forces three times. He escaped serious injury, but after he graduated from medical school, he took a passionate interest in other Iranians who hadn't been so fortunate. Working with Mostafa Ghanei and other Iranian doctors, he supervised a systematic study of the roughly 34,000 Iranians who had been injured by mustard gas. His office here is lined with gut-wrenching pictures of Iranians who were gassed by Saddam Hussein's troops.
Here's where the Iranian-American link to weapons of mass destruction gets interesting. Khateri found a surprise ally in an American researcher named David Haines, who had been studying the effects of Iraqi chemical weapons ever since he served as an Army officer in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. By 2000 Haines was traveling to conferences in Iran and preparing joint research projects with Iranian scientists. He won a $300,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to bring a young Iranian scientist named Ali Reza Hosseini Khalili to his lab at the University of Connecticut. (When I first reported on Haines's efforts in a June column, gremlins in the U.S. government were blocking Khalili's visa; happily, the visa problems were resolved the day the column appeared.)
This month Haines will present a paper on his joint efforts with Khateri's Iranian researchers to the U.S. Army's chemical defense research facility at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland. The working title: "Chemical-Agent-Exposed Iranian Populations: A Tool for Understanding Disease." The subtitle pretty much sums up the rationale for these Iranian-American exchanges: A tool for understanding . In the escalating crisis between the two countries, we are either going to do more talking or we may end up fighting.
Conclusion: Politicians don't tell the truth, even on the floor of the Congress, when debating with opposition politicians. Scientists work together, even when their countries haven't had diplomatic relations for decades, trying to get at the facts.
Conclusion 2: Exposing visa tactics of the U.S. government is conducive to open and useful exchanges among scientists, and we ought to continue doing it.
Comment: I don't think politicians become scientists, and I fear that when (on rare occasions) scientists become politicians they behave more like lifelong pols.
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