A trio of stories which ye old scribe found of particular interest today and which are recommended with little beyond introductory comment.

Drip, drip, drip.

A military contractor has provided federal investigators with a first-person account of a shooting in Baghdad last year that resulted in the death of 14 unarmed Iraqi civilians, according to a court filing just unsealed. […] According to the proffer, one Iraqi “was shot in his chest, while standing in the street with his hands up.” Additionally, none of the victims “was an insurgent, and many were shot while inside of civilian vehicles that were attempting to flee…. Source

Mucking out the stalls of the woebegone G. Walker administration: Having someone head an agency tasked with protecting the environment who does not possess (or, worse, who has rejected) even the most rudimentary concepts (for example: rejection, refutation, revision or alteration resultant from reproducible experiment and test, inclusive of any foundational core) of the differences between a science and an ideology — an unmitigated retrograde disaster for the agency, for the public, for the planet.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Stephen Johnson willingly endorsed the Bush administration’s push to put business interests ahead of his agency’s mission to “to protect human health and the environment” An extended profile of Johnson published Sunday by the Philadelphia Inquirer reveals that the evangelical Johnson is unwilling – or unable – to separate religion from science.

[snip]

Johnson will leave office having tarnished the reputation of the agency, decimated staff morale, and degraded the health and safety of the American public. Condemnation of his tenure is near-universal. Four former Republican administrators — Russell Train (Nixon and Ford), William K. Reilly (George H.W. Bush), Christine Todd Whitman (George W. Bush), and William Ruckelshaus (Nixon and Reagan) all criticized Johnson to the Inquirer for deferring to the president and polluters instead of obeying his sworn oath to enforce the law. Source

Knowledge is power, and power is not exclusive: Empowering the general public via access.

President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team is giving another hint of how its approach to open government would be different from the Bush administration’s: It is posting the suggestions it is receiving from interest groups on its Web site.

[snip]

The new disclosure policy is certainly a way of making good on Obama’s campaign promises of open government, but it’s also a way of putting the greatest possible distance between the new administration and Vice President Dick Cheney, who famously refused to release the names of the people and groups who had advised his energy task force. Obama specifically cited the Cheney example in his campaign proposal to increase transparency in government.

“It signals to the public that this is going to be an open administration, not just in the White House, but throughout the executive branch” said Ellen Miller, co-founder of the Sunlight Foundation, a group that advocates greater openness in government. Source

Little mentioned, but yet another demonstration of how the Hawaiian tradition of pono is seemingly a bedrock principle being dutifully and deliberately thrust into practice under President-elect Obama.