Posted on 02/16/2012 11:24:27 AM PST by Ernest_at_the_Beach
Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.
The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.
Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.
One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.
We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.
How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.
Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.
Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.
But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.
Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.
fyi
“Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds”
I feel properly castigated.....Sorry. Now, time for lunch.
This is a story about the Global Warming Alarmists using illegal means to obtain proprietary and private documents from an organization that is skeptical about the global warming “science”, in order to discredit them.
The pro-AGW political movement has launched an all-out attack on anybody who disagrees with them, including doing opposition research into the private lives of anybody who speaks out against them. That’s why the donor lists are problematic — those donors, who wanted to try to fund good science to counter the fake science, will now be targeted for a smear campaign.
If you have posted to the anti-global-warming web sites, and these people think you might have sounded credible enough to be a threat, they could well be coming after you and your family. They will allow nothing to get in the way of their political agenda.
Sue all the journalists and bloggers that published it for libel.
“Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.”
Oh, yes, “shame” is an attribute espoused by so many nowadays.
One should expect such actions from adherents of the global warming scam. Some of them most likely since childhood days being brainwashed on all the now proven false claims to support such a view now see their world crumble before their face. Desperation now sinks into their souls.
LA Times report:
Thanks Ernest.
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