From Business Week Online, July 29th, 2002:
Commentary: No Excuses for Enron's Board
On Feb. 7, 1999, the audit committee of Enron Corp.'s board of directors gathered in London to hear some rather startling news. The company's auditors described Enron's accounting practices as "high-risk." David B. Duncan, who headed up the Arthur Andersen LLP team at the company, informed the committee that Enron's accounting was "pushing limits" and was "at the edge" of acceptable practice.
None of the directors, including Robert K. Jaedicke, a one-time Stanford University accounting professor who had been chairman of the audit committee for more than 10 years, objected to the procedures described by the auditors, requested a second opinion, or demanded a more prudent approach, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations after a six-month probe of the Enron board's oversight duties.
In fact, the subcommittee found that similar briefings by Andersen officials occurred once or twice each year from 1999 through 2001 with the same result: The auditors told board members that Enron was following high-risk accounting and no one drilled deep enough to learn the details or object. And despite his long tenure as chairman of the audit committee, Jaedicke rarely if ever had any contact with Andersen outside of official committee or board meetings, as governance experts recommend.
Even worse, Enron's board members knew about and could have prevented many of the risky accounting practices, conflicts of interest, and hiding of debt that led to the company's implosion simply by asking some obvious questions....
[Excerpt; the rest here].
----------
Some may think I'm now going mealy-mouthed, but accusations of fraud are serious. There's a valid analogy between peer review and board-of-directors oversight, particularly if the directors are fellow CEOs. [An all-CEO board is, clearly, CEO peer review.] However, it's only an analogy. Legally, at least as of now, peer reviewers do not have any fiduciary duties attached to their role. They can't be hauled into court, in the same way a director can, if they're delinquent with regard to a duty of independence. The law won't reach on this point.
From what little I know of the law, and from the damning E-mails posted, there's no smoking gun in the legal sense. There is, however, enough indirect evidence to merit an outside audit.
Starting with the asking of some obvious questions...
From the few emails I've read, it looks like the climate journals peer review process has been controlled. As typical in science, the editors of the journal pick the reviewer(s). If you only pick pro-AGW reviewers, any paper or letter that is critical will never get published. Then you can run around saying, "He hasn't published in a peer reviewed journal, therefore his work isn't any good." Mostly, likely the reviewer who spiked the paper was on your team.
Another thing that seems odd about these is how emotional and secretive they are about the data. There Jones & Mann seem to have lost objectivity and are more focused on finding any sign of warming instead of looking at the data objectively. This kind of reminds me of the stories about Watson and Crick and the Nobel for DNA. I was going to say that this line of research couldn't lead to a Nobel Prize, but they have given them out for less in the past.
When I worked at a research lab in England, we always shared everything. When others reproduced our work, we knew we were doing it right. Sometimes it takes time, but science in the end is decided based on the facts, not opinions or consensus. Science certainly doesn't follow Robert's Rules of Order and you can't "call the question."