According to documents released to the Natural Resources Defense Council, all references to the possibility that naval sonar may have caused 37 whales to swim ashore and die in North Carolina last year were deleted from a government report on the incident. The revelation came as the Department of the Navy nears the close of its public comment period on its plans to build an underwater sonar training range in the same North Carolina location.

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.

The government was asked to investigate the incident and issued a preliminary report with no mention of sonar blasts as possibly contributing to the mass beaching. However, in an earlier draft, Teri Rowles, coordinator of the National Marine Fisheries Service's stranding response program, concluded that the whales' injuries may have been indicative of damage from sonar sound blasts. Rowles noted that the injuries were similar to other mass whale strandings, in which sonar was the suspected cause.

Yet, the official draft report released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration contained no mention of sonar anywhere. Rowles told the Washington Post that all references to sonar were removed because it was only one of several possible causes and had not been proven. NRDC attorney Andrew Wetzler characterized the public draft as "more like spin than science."

Oddly, that active sonar is harmful to whales is neither a new or hotly contested issue. Environmentalists have long worked to bring to light the damage sonar inflicts on marine life. The Navy has even acknowledged sonar's harmful effects in a report on the stranding of 17 whales in the Bahamas in 2000 that concluded that sonar from Navy ships was the most likely cause.

So why no mention even of the possibility that sonar played a role in this early report? The answer may lie in the timing of the Pentagon's plans to build a controversial sonar training facility nearby. Public hearings are being held right now on the proposal, and the public comment period will close at the end of January. The final report on the whale beaching, according to Rowles, should be completed by this March. NRDC has argued that the hearings should not be allowed to close until all of the information on the 2005 strandings has been released to the public. The Navy's environmental impact statement on the proposal is expected to be submitted this fall.

The issue is reminiscent of the Environmental Protection Agency's Draft Report on the Environment in 2003, which received broad criticism for its total lack of information on climate change. Later, leaked drafts of the report revealed that a section on climate change was included in earlier drafts but was deleted by the agency after sweeping editing by the White House's Council on Environmental Quality made the section all but meaningless.