Your Pentagon at work.

For all the media punditry filled with accusations about politicians and our government (no matter who is currently in office), it's still amazing when someone gets caught red-handed. One of those moments happened for me over the weekend when, while packing glassware for our move, I watched the April 23rd edition of NOW with Bill Moyers I had TiVo'd.

The subject was the current administration's rather embarrassing record on the environment -- admittedly an easy and frequent target, and one of those many issues where both sides can battle back and forth with their own version of the facts. But this time, Carl Pope, the executive director of the Sierra Club, caught the Pentagon in a bald-faced lie.

It's so deliciously evil that I just had to share it with you. Enjoy.

(I've edited the relevant portion of the original transcript for brevity but did not change any of the original context, and added my own emphasis in italics at the end.)

DAVID BRANCACCIO: ... I was just seeing a press release on Earth Day from the military, the Department of Defense, calling itself a good steward of America's environmental heritage. I was surprised that the department said they've dedicated nearly $4 billion a year to environmental programs. They talk about their work on the Red-cockaded Woodpecker preservation....

CARL POPE: ... The Red-cockaded Woodpecker is a very interesting story. Oh, in March, a month before we went into Iraq, the Defense Department, the Pentagon, went up on Capitol Hill and insisted that the military needed an exemption from the Endangered Species Act. And they got one. And the explanation they gave was they handed a fact sheet to Congress which said that at Fort Stewart, Georgia, where five percent of the world's remaining Red-cockaded Woodpeckers nest, protecting those nesting sites had interfered with training realism. Shortly after they got this exemption, the Third Army, which trains at Fort Stewart, went into Najaf and Karbala and was given instructions to not damage the Tomb of Ali, not damage the Tomb of Hussein, not damage any of the oil fields, not damage any of the villages. The Third Army fought superbly. It looked like training that way in Fort Stewart had helped them. And I went online and I found a peer-reviewed Army study which talked about the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and training realism at Fort Stewart, Georgia. It was the study on which the fact sheet was based, except the crucial paragraph in the study said protecting the Red-cockaded Woodpecker had enhanced training realism. And the Pentagon Congressional Relations Office just took the word "enhanced," substituted the word "impaired" and gave it to members of Congress as an argument for getting an exemption. The fact is, the Pentagon knows how to live like a good environmental steward. This administration doesn't want to let the Pentagon do that.

Beautiful, eh? And of course, here's one little TV show -- already dismissed by any conservative wing as being insanely liberal ... and God knows that the Sierra Club is no friend to the Bush administration ... and of course, absolutely nothing will be done.

It's enough to make me want to give up, but instead I decided to try to spread the word a little bit more through my small megaphone.