Final Word from Monday, July 14, 2008
One of Martin Bursík's main complaints about the Pačes energy commission was the way its members "pre-interpreted" its results in public appearances before the document was ever made public. Bursík was right to complain, because the degree of nuclear spin in these appearances was dizzying. But whatever points Bursík might have won there for objectivity he lost yesterday, when he used the same kind of pre-spin to affect the public's reading of the Kroll report. Perhaps the agency truly did fail to find any of the obvious holes in Jiří Čunek's story (remember Kroll's whitewash of the Kuchma murder allegation?), but it's very odd that Karel Schwarzenberg himself refuses to comment on the Kroll report. It makes us wonder whether the Czech translation posted on the internet will be an honest rendition of the English original. Let's hope that the Topolánek government doesn't try to pull a Dick Cheney and sanitize the translation for public consumption.[Czech Republic Václav power Green Party Temelín ČEZ United States of America Richard White House]
Glossary of difficult words
whitewash - a deliberate concealment of someone's mistakes or faults in order to clear the person's name;
spin - a particular bias or interpretation intended to create a favorable impression (toward nuclear power, in this case) when presented to the public;
dizzying - causing a sensation of confusion or amazement;
rendition - a translation or transliteration;
to pull something - to carry out or achieve;
to sanitize - to alter something in order to make it more acceptable or palatable.