In what Democracy Now!¹ refers to as an “explosive report” by The Guardian,² documents obtained during the discovery process of lawsuits against Monsanto reveal the company has been engaged in a coordinated campaign to discredit critics of the company.

Among them are journalist Carey Gillam, the nonprofit U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) and singer-songwriter Neil Young, whose 2015 album, “The Monsanto Years,” was an artistic critique of the company.

“The records … show Monsanto adopted a multi-pronged strategy to target Carey Gillam, a Reuters journalist who investigated the company’s weedkiller and its links to cancer,” The Guardian writes.³

“Monsanto, now owned by the German pharmaceutical corporation Bayer, also monitored a not-for-profit food research organization through its ‘intelligence fusion center,’ a term that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies use for operations focused on surveillance and terrorism.

The documents, mostly from 2015 to 2017, were disclosed as part of an ongoing court battle on the health hazards of the company’s Roundup weedkiller.”

Monsanto records show organized plan to silence journalist

According to The Guardian,⁴ the records obtained reveal how Monsanto planned to discredit Gillam’s book, “White Wash: The Story of a Weed Killer, Cancer, and the Corruption of Science,”⁵ ahead of its release in 2017 by instructing “industry and farmer customers” to post negative reviews and paying Google to promote search results critical of Gillam and her work.

In all, the attack on Gillam’s book, dubbed “Project Spruce,”⁶ (an internal code name for Monsanto’s defense directive to protect the company against all perceived threats to its business⁷) had more than 20 activity points, including the engagement of regulatory authorities and providing “pro-science third parties” with talking points…

USRTK targeted by Monsanto’s surveillance center

Monsanto’s surveillance center also produced written reports on Young’s anti-Monsanto advocacy efforts and USRTK’s activities, along with a detailed plan⁹ for how to deal with USRTK’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.

“Monsanto officials were repeatedly worried about the release of documents on their financial relationships with scientists that could support the allegations they were ‘covering up unflattering research,'” The Guardian writes. ¹⁰

Indeed, among the many action steps listed in Monsanto’s USRTK response plan¹¹ are “Edit existing copy” to “Bolster language on transparency and collaboration,” and “Write post that tells the story about the impact of a project (one that resonates well with a societal audience) that was made possible through the collaboration of Monsanto and Academia … ” The Guardian adds:¹²

“Government fusion centers have increasingly raised privacy concerns surrounding the way law enforcement agencies collect data, surveil citizens and share information.

Private companies might have intelligence centers that monitor legitimate criminal threats, such as cyberattacks, but ‘it becomes troubling when you see corporations leveraging their money to investigate people who are engaging in their first amendment rights,’ said Dave Maass, the senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation …

Michael Baum, one of the attorneys involved in the Roundup trials that uncovered the records, said the records were further ‘evidence of the reprehensible and conscious disregard of the rights and safety of others’ … ‘It shows an abuse of their power that they have gained by having achieved such large sales,’ he added.”

In an August 9, 2019, press release, USRTK comments on the documented campaign against the organization:¹³

“USRTK has made public records requests to taxpayer-funded universities since 2015, leading to multiple revelations about secretive industry collaborations with academics …

The documents, which were made available through discovery in the Roundup cancer litigation, show that Monsanto was worried that the public records requests had the “potential to be extremely damaging” and so crafted a plan to counter the USRTK investigation …

‘The story of the Monsanto Papers is that the company acts like it has an awful lot to hide,’ said Gary Ruskin, co-director of U.S. Right to Know, who led the investigation. ‘Whenever scientists, journalists and others raise questions about their business, they attack. We are just the latest example. This has been going on for years.'”

The press release goes on to list several key findings from the documents, detailing how Monsanto intended to safeguard its “freedom to operate.” One way of doing that was to “position” USRTK’s investigation into its dealings as “an attack on scientific integrity and academic freedom.”…

Who are Monsanto’s emissaries?

As Thacker points out, Monsanto has perfected several of the strategies initiated by the tobacco industry decades ago to hide the dangers of smoking. One key strategy is to undermine the public’s confidence in science showing there are problems.

This is done in two parts: First, create your own science that contradicts findings showing a problem. Next, influence and shape public discussion by maligning the critics and emphasizing the lack of scientific consensus. This engineered doubt is what keeps the public from turning their back on the products and prevents regulatory interventions.

Another tobacco tactic employed by Monsanto is the development of relationships with scientists and nonprofit organizations who, while maintaining an aura of independence, act as “corporate emissaries to the press,” to use Thacker’s term. Who are some of Monsanto’s most well-known emissaries? Aside from Haskel, Thacker’s article names:

• Nina Federoff, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of biology at Penn state²⁷
• Jon Entine, founding director of the Genetic Literacy Project²⁸ — another front group that, despite having been repeatedly exposed as such, continues to be promoted to the top of internet search results for GMO topics
• Bruce Chassy, Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois^29,30
• Kevin Folta, University of Florida professor
• The American Council on Science and Health

What’s particularly disturbing is the idea that academics working for publicly funded universities have been captured by industry and are promoting an industry agenda on the taxpayers’ dime, while simultaneously benefiting financially from their corporate masters…