Part 5: Propaganda, Fraud and Libel - a response (part i)
GM Watch, 28 August 2007.
[Extract: see the full article in our news section (28 August 2007):
http://www.gmfreeireland.org/news/2007/aug.php#fraud]
An article about the recent row involving the Canadian Government bureaucrat, Shane Morris, ourselves and GM-free Ireland, recently topped the daily bulletin of AgBioWorld's listserv - AgBioView - and was subsequently posted onto websites run by the Hudson Institute and Monsanto, as well as another pro-GM list, Doug Powell's Agnet. http://www.cgfi.org/cgficommentary/Anti-biotech%20wactivists%20082307
Under the title Propaganda, Fraud and Libel, the author - Andrew Apel - paints a picture of Shane Morris as a scientist beset by "Irish activists" who according to Apel, "Apparently, cannot distinguish between scientific opinion, propaganda, fraud and libel".
There is considerable irony in such an accusation from such a source. Andrew Apel was formerly editor of the biotech industry newsletter, AgBiotech Reporter, but these days he is the "guest editor" of AgBioView. This listserv was in the forefront of the notorious campaign to smear the Berkeley scientists David Quist and Ignacio Chapela over their research on Mexican maize contamination.
The AgBioWorld campaign was initiated and fuelled by "anonymous" e-mail attacks on the integrity of the researchers. The attacks were subsequently shown to have been posted out of Monsanto and its Internet PR firm, Bivings. Bivings, it turned out, were also providing AgBioWorld with undisclosed support. [See rest of article at
http://www.gmfreeireland.org/news/2007/aug.php#fraud].
Propaganda, Fraud and Libel - a response (part ii)
GM Watch, 1 September 2007.
In Propaganda, Fraud and Libel, Andrew Apel attacks GM Watch over an article on our website originally entitled Award for a Fraud. www.gmwatch.org/p1temp.asp?pid=72&page=1
The article was about an award winning scientific paper by Doug Powell, Shane Morris and two other authors, published in the British Food Journal. This paper described research carried out at a Canadian farm store that reported a marked consumer preference for GM (over non-GM) sweet corn.
Apel claims our article "implicated Shane Morris, a co-author of the paper, in committing outright fraud". This, it is implied, is why Morris asked our ISP to ensure that either the title of our article was changed or our website disabled.
We have already dealt with the extraordinarily hypocritical nature of the attack on GM Watch in part one of our response to Propaganda, Fraud and Libel. Here we're going to deal with the question of whether our article about the research was libelous and why this study remains so controversial.
The way in which Apel's article is sequenced implies that GM Watch was a relative late-comer to this controversy - a Johnny-come-lately wading in with a gratuitously libelous article that unfairly targeted Shane Morris, forcing him to take action. But nothing could be further from the truth.
We were, in fact, the first people outside Canada to draw out the significance of the reporting of the Canadian journalist Stuart Laidlaw, who visited the farm store on several occasions during the research and observed at first hand a series of interventions by the researchers that were completely at odds with the way the research was later promoted to the scientific community.
[See rest of article under 1 September in our news section at http://www.gmfreeireland.org/news/index.php#fraud1.]
Propaganda, Fraud and Libel - a response (part iii)
[The full text of this article may be found under 4 September in our news section at http://www.gmfreeireland.org/news/index.php#fraud2. The conclusion reads as follows:]
We contacted Michael Khoo and asked him if he could, as Shane Morris claimed, confirm that the wormy corn sign was not up when he visited the store. He couldn't. He told us, "I could have seen it when I was there," but he couldn't say for certain because "it's a little while ago" and he hadn't retained any of the photos he had taken at the store.
But Michael Khoo hadn't gone alone to the store that day. He had a companion - Dr Rod MacRae, an independent food policy consultant based in Toronto who had Greenpeace Canada as one of his clients. Dr MacRae told us that he had seen the wormy corn sign when he went to the store: "I can state categorically that the sign was there the day Michael and I attended." He also confirmed the date: "signage favouring the GE corn by describing the other corn as wormy was still up on Sept. 27, 2000."
The possible implications of Dr MacRae's statement are clearly serious. Not only has Shane Morris stated that the wormy corn sign had been taken down before he joined the study, and specfically that it was not there on September 27 - the day Dr MacRae visited the store, but Doug Powell in his defence of the research in the British Food Journal also stated that the controversial handwritten signs on display on August 30 "were changed the following week", suggesting they came down around three weeks before Dr MacRae visited the store. http://www.foodsafetynetwork.ca/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=9&sc=62&id=897
This particular issue could perhaps be resolved by careful analysis of images of the signs that Shane Morris says are available. But, as we have already noted, the fact that these signs were ever included in the study already raises serious questions - not least, as the claim that no data was collected while they were present does not seem to tally with the information available in the actual paper. Sales of the two types of sweet corn are shown as having been recorded from the day the sweet corn was harvested, ie August 30, when Powell and Morris do not dispute that the wormy corn sign was in place in the store.
And as noted previously, the signs are not the only instances of alleged experimenter bias. Stuart Laidlaw says there was GM promotional material in the store authored by lobby groups without any balancing literature from critics. Doug Powell denies this. So far Stuart Laidlaw, now the faith and ethics correspondent of the Toronto Star, has stood by his reporting. As with MacRae and Morris, clearly Powell and Laidlaw cannot both be right. http://www.foodsafetynetwork.ca/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=9&sc=62&id=897
The British Food Journal gave this paper an award for Excellence for Most Outstanding Paper in 2004. That award - like the paper - has not been retracted. The current editor, Prof Chris Griffiths, has instead chosen to sit on the fence, neither defending, nor criticising the research, saying the matter is closed and he will leave it to BFJ readers to make up their own minds, and suggesting they follow any developments on the internet! http://www.foodsafetynetwork.ca/en/article-details.php?a=3&c=9&sc=62&id=897
But the issues surrounding this research have now become so serious that the BFJ needs to take hold of the situation, investigate the evidence and make it clear whether it still regards this paper as exemplary science.
In part 4 of our response we will turn to another contentious issue raised in Andrew Apel's attack on GM Watch, Shane Morris's role as a Canadian public servant.
[The full text of this article may be found under 4 September in our news section at http://www.gmfreeireland.org/news/index.php#fraud2.]
Propaganda, Fraud and Libel - a response (part iv)
GM Watch, 5 September 2007.
This is the fourth part of our response to an article attacking GM Watch published on AgBioView by its "guest editor", Andrew Apel.
In Propaganda, Fraud and Libel, Andrew Apel charges GM Watch with targeting Shane Morris's "employment with the Canadian government" and of re-casting the dispute with Morris "as a conflict between Canada and Ireland". Apel also brands GM Watch as "Irish activists" out to discredit Morris because of his talent in exposing activist "misinformation" about GMOs in Ireland.
http://www.cgfi.org/cgficommentary/Anti-biotech%20wactivists%20082307
As usual with Apel, the misinformation is entirely his own. Although the GM Watch team includes people in Brazil, India, The Netherlands, Germany, and New Zealand - as well as different parts of the UK, there are (as yet!) no "Irish activists" amongst us. And the issue of Morris's employment with the Canadian government was first raised not by GM Watch but by a Canadian citizen - Professor Joe Cummins (Emeritus Professor of Genetics, University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Canada).
Shane Morris has always been anxious to present his pro-GM views as purely personal and the gmoireland blog on which he has promoted them, and attacked those who take a different viewpoint, as something that he should not be barred from doing having been born and bred in Ireland. But there is a problem. As Prof Cummins has noted, others in the Canadian bureaucracy, such as Shiv Chopra, have got into big trouble for expressing views about biotechnology that were not to the liking of senior Canadian bureaucrats.
Canada, Prof Cummins points out, also has a history of secrecy in testing and marketing GM crops that makes one less than confident about the transparency of its activities in promoting the GM agenda. And Prof Cummins is far from alone in seeing Canada as being prepared to promote its biotech agenda in an underhand fashion (see, for instance, the article below).
What is undeniable is that public servants usually tend to be very wary of getting involved in public controversy. But Shane Morris, who has worked as a biotech regulator in Canada and is currently employed as a Senior Consumer Analyst at the Consumer Analysis Section of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, has not only used his blog to ridicule Irish and EU decison makers, and those political parties who fail to follow a pro-GM line, but he has also, according to GM-free Ireland:
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Morris and Apel contest GM-free Ireland's account of these events, but if even a part of it is true, it seems hard to imagine that a public servant would have embarked on such a vigorous public campaign without the reassurance that his superiors were at ease with his actions. Or to put it another way, can one imagine that a Canadian government employee would have dared promote scepticism about GMOs as aggressively as Morris has sought to undermine those opposing them? Canada, after all, is one of the world's biggest producers of GM crops and has a reputation for gagging and even sacking public servants who step out of line.
http://www.gmwatch.org/archive2.asp?arcid=5374
Prior to working for the Government of Canada, Morris worked as a research assistant at the University of Guelph. His boss, Doug Powell, has been decribed as the "darling of the pro-biotech lobby and its chief attack dog". John Morriss, the editor of a Canadian farming paper, once described Powell as a "tenured Assistant Professor at a Canadian university" who at some point "morphed into a full-blown apologist for biotechnology, while still operating under his 'food safety' umbrella". Guelph agricultural scientist, Ann Clark, went even further in condemning Powell's behaviour, "what some are doing today under the umbrella of academic freedom is actually not far removed from the proclamations of Orwell's Ministry of Truth."
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=257
Powell also stands accused by his critics in Canada of having used his "regular appearances on the op-ed pages of the nation to denigrate anyone who criticizes the science or the regulatory framework around biotechnology". While John Morriss in his editorial condemened Powell's "aggressive if not vicious attacks on other scientists who dare to challenge his views". He gave the example of an "offensive attack on no less than the Royal Society of Canada and the members of the panel it appointed to review food biotechnology" (Rude Science, The Manitoba Cooperator 58(46):4 21 June 2001). That attack was co-authored by none other than Shane Morris, who became very well know during his time at Guelph for promoting the pro-GM agenda with just as much fervour as Doug Powell.
Shane Morris was certainly active within Powell's controversial "Food Safety Network", which enjoyed the financial support of Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Pioneer Hi-Bred, Syngenta Seeds USA, ConAgra, Ag-West Biotech, Bioniche Life Sciences Inc., Southern Crop Protection Association, and the (biotech industry funded) Council for Biotechnology Information.
http://www.gmwatch.org/profile1.asp?PrId=257
Given that track record, some might find it hard to believe that the Canadian government could be so naive as not to recognise who they were offering employment to or the kind of services they might expect in return. It is also understandable that those who see Morris's "food safety" role at Guelph as having more to do with "PR for biotech" than academia, and his sweet corn research as having more to do with "PR for biotech" than science, will be tempted to view his current behaviour as having more to do with campaigning for GMOs than public service.
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