Two reports from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with vastly different conclusions raise questions both about the connection between Navy sonar and whale beachings and about consistency within, and the scientific integrity of, the agency. In an Apr. 27 report, the agency drew strong connections between Navy sonar and a 2004 mass whale beaching in Hawaii. The NOAA report concludes that, after ruling out any biological or weather related cause, the most likely cause was naval sonar used in the immediate vicinity and at the time of the Hawaii beaching incident. Specifically, the agency stated "While causation of this stranding event may never be unequivocally determined, we consider the active sonar transmissions of July 2-3, 2004, a plausible, if not likely, contributing factor in what may have been a confluence of events." A NOAA report on last January's beaching event off the coast of North Carolina, however, all but ruled out the involvement of sonar. The agency, as it did for the Hawaii incident, ruled out any biological or weather related cause. Also, similar to the Hawaii incident, significant naval sonar exercises were occurring in the location of the beaching and immediately preceding the event. In this report, however, NOAA concluded that "given the occurrence of the event simultaneously in time and space with a naval exercise using active sonar, the association between the naval sonar activity and the location and timing of the event could be a causal rather than a coincidental relationship. However, evidence supporting a definitive association is lacking." This has led many to wonder what allowed NOAA to nearly rule out sonar in its recent report. One major difference between the two events is that the Navy has proposed building an underwater sonar training range at the exact location of the North Carolina beaching. The proposed facility is currently undergoing an environmental review. Given the contention by many in the scientific community that the Bush administration continues to manipulate scientific reports, as well as the complaints of censorship by individual, skepticism about the findings of the NOAA report on the North Carolina beaching seems reasonable. Was the report a complete and unedited reflection of the agency's understanding of the event, or did political pressure to establish the naval sonar training facility result in a more limited conclusion? That active sonar is harmful to whales is neither a new or hotly contested issue.. In fact, the Navy has agreed to comply with a NOAA request to reduce the power of its sonar for future exercises in Hawaiian waters, a safeguard NOAA does not request in North Carolina waters. As previously reported, more than three dozen whales beached themselves within a few hours of one another on North Carolina's Outer Banks on Jan. 15, 2005. At the time, the Navy was testing offshore sonar at the site of a proposed 600-square-mile Undersea Warfare Training Range on the continental shelf off North Carolina, less than 200 miles from the Charleston jetties. According to documents released to the Natural Resources Defense Council, all references to the possibility that naval sonar may have caused the whales to swim ashore and die in North Carolina last year were deleted from a NOAA draft report on the incident. The final report, which was released in March, finds the cause of the beaching to be "unclear." In the currently sad state of affairs, the veracity of federal findings are increasingly called into question. Regardless of the soundness of data or how scientifically rigorous conclusions appear, increasingly politics are allowed to supersede science in the Bush administration. Greater transparency would be enormously beneficial to reversing this trend, allowing the public to verify the integrity of government reports.