US District Judge Slams Commerce Dept, Overturns Tuna Ruling

[hatrack]

"A federal judge has issued a stinging rebuke to the Bush
administration by ruling that the Commerce Department allowed
politics, not science, to determine whether to relax the
"dolphin safe" label for tuna sold in the U.S. In a harshly worded opinion, San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Thelton Henderson last month overturned an earlier Commerce Department finding that dolphins were not harmed by Mexican tuna boats when they encircled schools of tuna with purse seine nets.

The Commerce finding would have opened the way for the Mexican tuna industry to sell its catch in the U.S. and label it 'dolphin safe', despite the killing of thousands of dolphins annually by the fishery. At the same time, Judge Henderson commended the government's own scientists, who had argued that purse seine fishing was depleting dolphin populations.

"It appears that while the scientists at undertook their research mission extremely seriously, at the end of the day, intense pressures ... led to a policy driven more by politics than science," Henderson wrote. "Indeed the record reflects an agency that gave short shrift to the conclusions of its own scientists, dragged its feet on crucial research, and ...ignored the explicit warning of the appellate court not to invoke 'insufficient evidence' as a justification for its finding."

In fact, Henderson wrote, "...this court has never, in its 24
years, reviewed a record of agency action that contained such a
compelling portrait of political meddling."

EDIT

http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/