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	GOOD NEWS Tired of allowing extreme rhetoric to continue to divide their faith, religious leaders from both sides of the aisle have pledged to come together and work towards the common good. DON'T MISS TALKING POINTS: Beyond Gitmo. RACE: The photos that inspired the senators behind the apology to lynching victims. DEEP THROAT: How Deep Throat fooled the FBI. CONSERVATIVES: Why President Bush has his followers on edge. ADMIN: Fear as foreign policy. DAILY GRILL "[T]hose who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantanamo probably don't agree with our policies...." -- Vice President Cheney, 6/13/05 VERSUS "It's become an icon for bad stories, and at some point you wonder [about] the cost-benefit ratio. How much do you get out of having that facility there? Is it serving all the purposes you thought it would serve when initially you began it, or can this be done some other way a little better?" -- Bush loyalist Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL), 6/12/05 DAILY OUTRAGE Pastor Fred Phelps, the Kansas preacher and gay rights foe who picketed the funeral of Matthew Shepard, has a new cause: protesting military funerals. Phelps sees the deaths as God's "retaliation against the United States for a bombing" at his church and "abandoning all moral imperatives." ARCHIVES Progress Report STUDENTS Join President Clinton at the Campus Progress National Student Conference on July 13 in Washington, DC. DON'T WAIT, register today.

by Judd Legum, Faiz Shakir, Nico Pitney,
Mipe Okunseinde and Christy Harvey

ETHICS	Exxon Announces Merger With White House
GUANTANAMO BAY	The Future of Gitmo
UNDER THE RADAR	Go Beyond The Headlines
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ETHICS
Exxon Announces Merger With White House

Yesterday, it was announced that the former chief of staff of the White House's Council on Environmental Quality, Philip Cooney, who resigned five days ago after it was disclosed that he had doctored government climate change reports in favor of the oil industry's position, has been hired by Exxon Mobil. While Cooney will now sit at the other side of the table at the White House's energy meetings, his job will remain the same -- to do the bidding of the oil industry.

COONEY'S MAGIC MARKER ALTERED SCIENTIFIC REALITY: Just last week, the Government Accountability Project, a public interest group that promotes government accountability, disclosed documents to the New York Times that showed Cooney "repeatedly edited government climate reports in ways that play down links between [greenhouse gas] emissions and global warming." One of the sentences that Cooney crossed out stated the following: "[Global] warming also will cause reductions in mountain glaciers and advance the timing of the melt of mountain snow peaks in polar regions." Cooney, who has no scientific training, wrote a note stating that the section "stray[ed] from research strategy into speculative findings," a position which goes against the findings of the scientific community that the greenhouse effect is accelerating changes in the climate.

DOES ACCRUED VACATION TIME AT THE WHITE HOUSE CARRY OVER TO EXXON?: Cooney chose to resign after the doctored reports became public. Instead of suggesting that it was ridding itself of a corporate crony, the White House went into a state of denial. White House spokesperson Dana Perino said his decision to leave was "completely unrelated" to the disclosure that he had made changes in several government climate reports, and that he had chosen to spend time with his family after having "accumulated many weeks of leave."

ONCE YOU GO OIL, YOU NEVER TURN BACK: Prior to joining the White House staff, Cooney was a former oil industry lobbyist who worked as the head of the climate program at the American Petroleum Institute (API), the chief representative of the oil and gas industry. Exxon is a major member of the American Petroleum Institute, and its CEO is a director of API's Policy Committee. Documents disclosed from Vice President Cheney's secret energy task force meetings showed that the American Petroleum Institute provided substantial input in the draft of Bush's energy plan. Exxon purchased its seat at the table by contributing nearly $100,000 to President Bush. API has been a steadfast opponent of the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to reduce the level of greenhouse gases created by industrialized nations over the next decade. While Exxon has claimed that its opposition to the Kyoto climate change pact is based on its view that the protocol is "flawed," the reality is, as the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday, that Exxon is "openly and unapologetically" opposed to "the notion that fossil fuels are the main cause of global warming."

EXXON HAS WIELDED GREAT POWER IN THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION: Prime Minister Tony Blair recently returned home to London after a meeting with President Bush to report that they were unable to reach consensus on how to address global warming and climate change. The reason Blair was unsuccessful was that he ended up butting heads with an even closer friend to Bush than himself -- Exxon. According to documents obtained and recently disclosed by The Guardian, Bush's decision not to sign the Kyoto Protocol in 2001 was due in part to pressure from Exxon. Under Secretary of State Paula Dobrianksy wrote memos to Exxon thanking them for their "active involvement" in helping to determine the administration's climate change policy. She was explicit in her praise: "Potus [President of the United States] rejected Kyoto in part based on input from you," she told Exxon. Exxon's relationship with Bush dates back to his days as governor of Texas, when he exempted big oil companies from a mandate that they clean up their emissions in favor of a voluntary program. The voluntary program was a concept pushed by Exxon at the time, and Exxon admitted that Bush had asked the company to "help develop the concepts" of the program.

REVOLVING DOOR BETWEEN BUSH ADMINISTRATION AND CORPORATE LOBBY CONTINUES TO SPIN: Cooney is only the latest example of a Bush official using his government job to leverage a position working for the industry he once regulated. Former Attorney General John Ashcroft became the first AG to open up a K Street lobbying firm. Ashcroft is now making money advising clients on law enforcement and homeland security. Former Commerce Secretary Don Evans took a job with the Financial Services Forum, where he will lobby for the country's biggest financial services firms. And former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is now helping Savi Technology, a security technology firm, obtain grants from the federal government.

  GUANTANAMO BAY
The Future of Gitmo

The right wing has launched a coordinated campaign to trivialize the documented problems at Guantanamo Bay. Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) held a press conference in which he reviewed the prisoners' daily menu and declared there was no abuse "unless you consider eating chicken three times a week real torture." At yesterday's news briefing, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld bizarrely boasted that "at Guantanamo, the military spends more per meal for detainees" than it does on rations for U.S. troops. Radical right talk show host Rush Limbaugh painted the detention center as the picture of religious freedom that "may be a great vacation spot for oppressed Christians in the United States." And in a fit of self-congratulation, Vice President Cheney summed it all up: "I think these people have been treated far better than they could expect to be treated by virtually any other government on Earth." Here's what they don't tell you: abuse at Guantanamo has been confirmed by the military and the FBI. For all the rhetoric, the reality is that Guantanamo Bay "has put our soldiers and citizens at risk, become a rallying cry for our enemies and a recruiting tool for the global terrorist network." The Center for American Progress has broken through the myths and outlined several steps that the president should take to effectively manage detainees and improve intelligence collection after Guantanamo's closure.

MYTH -- THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE GITMO: Secretary Rumsfeld stated, "as long as there remains a need to keep terrorists from striking again, a facility will continue to be needed" and that Guantanamo is the only facility with the "appropriate" infrastructure. Though the Bush administration would like to keep detainees in "the legal equivalent of outer space," the Supreme Court has asserted its jurisdiction over the Guantanamo prisoners. There is no longer any excuse, justified or not, for bypassing other U.S. military detention centers. Furthermore, Fort Leavenworth in Kansas is the most appropriate location for U.S. military detainee operations. Established as the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks in 1874, the facility's personnel are the best trained and most experienced in managing a prison population in the U.S. military.

MYTH -- LEGAL PROTECTIONS AT GITMO ARE ADEQUATE: When the Supreme Court rejected President Bush's attempt to pick and choose to whom the Geneva Conventions applied, the administration established combatant status review tribunals as a substitute for the Article 5 hearings of the Geneva Conventions. Secretary Rumsfeld maintains that every detainee at Guantanamo has been processed through these hearings, "procedures that go beyond what is required even under the Geneva Conventions." But earlier this year, declaring that detainees have been denied the "most basic fundamental rights," a federal judge ruled that "the Bush administration must allow [Guantanamo] prisoners ... to contest their detention in U.S. courts, concluding that special military reviews established by the Pentagon as an alternative are illegal." The legal tango needs to end. To provide clarity in the status of the detainees and to forestall any similar rulings from the courts, all detainees should be given Article 5 hearings.

MYTH -- GITMO HAS SIGNIFICANT INTELLIGENCE VALUE: Vice President Cheney claims that it is "vital for us" to maintain Guantanamo because "we derive significant intelligence out of it." The Pentagon itself admits that only about a fourth of detainees are still of any intelligence value. The detainees that no longer have intelligence value should be publicly identified and transferred directly to their home countries, with assurances that they will not be subjected to the human rights abuses that have occurred under the administration's extraordinary rendition policies. Further interrogations should be governed by Army Field Manual 34-52, which would return our military to using proven and humane practices that have been developed through decades of experience.

MYTH -- CRITICISM ON GITMO IS PARTISAN: Vice President Cheney has shrugged off criticism of the administration's handling of Guantanamo Bay by saying, "those who are most urgently advocating that we shut down Guantanamo probably don't agree with our policies anyway." In fact, concern about Guantanamo has become bipartisan. Over the weekend, a former Cabinet member of the Bush administration, Senator Mel Martinez (R-FL), urged the president to close down Guantanamo. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has warned that Guantanamo is "going to end in disaster ... if we don't wake up and smell the coffee." A senior Pentagon official involved in the administration's debate over Guantanamo admitted, "From a public diplomacy standpoint, most people want to [close] it." And President Bush has "raised the possibility of closing the facility."