David @ Tokyo

Greenpeace's Shane Rattenbury is cranking up his propaganda engine again.

1) His press release says the JARPA II team brought back "nearly 1000 dead whales". The actual figure was 863.

Why does he choose to round the true figures up by more than a whopping 15% to 1000? Why not stop at the nearest hundred and call it 900? What is Greenpeace's motive in this misleading manipulation of figures? Does he fear that numbers in the simple hundreds will not have the same psychological impact on those he appeals to for donations? Or does he believe that 137 whales one-way-or-the-other is nothing when you're talking about abundant whale stocks numbering in the hundreds of thousands?
Just imagine Greenpeace's reaction were the Institute of Cetacean Research had released a press statement saying "we took, oh you know, around 700 or so whales"!

2) Shane Rattenbury asks what the Japanese tax payers believe they are getting for their money.
Perhaps Greenpeace supporters may be asking themselves the same thing, after their donation money didn't save a single whale, but did result in increased time-to-deaths for the whales that were killed while Greenpeace was employing their obstruction tactics.
What the Japanese tax payers do get for their money is a government refusing to cave to irrational foreign NGO groups, and throw out the sound principle of sustainable use, which would otherwise set a bad precendent for environmental management for years to come.
That's pretty good value for money, and I'm certainly happy that I'm contributing my yen taxes to that rather than supporting Greenpeace's inhumane behaviour, even though I do have no choice in the matter.

3) "The international community has condemned the research as fake."
Tired old lies, are tired old lies no matter how often they are repeated.
The only community that has condemned the research as fake is the western environmental movement and their shill scientists.
On the other hand, the IWC points out on its webpage that the IWC Scientific Commitee reviewed the JARPA research at it's half-way point in 1997 and noted that the research had the potential to improve the IWC's Revised Management Procedure for setting commercial catch limits.
If Shane Rattenbury's "international community" was correct in its condemnation of the research, he might like to think about why his team has failed to convince the IWC of their case by now.

4) "The whale hunt is bankrupt on all counts: financially, morally, ecologically and scientifically."

• The goal of the JARPA research has never been to be a financial success, and indeed the Japanese government has subsidised the programme. Greenpeace has built up the strawman criticism that the hunt if commercial whaling in disguise, and now Rattenbury is crowing that it's a commercial failure? Wakey wakey Shane...
  
• Hunting whales is in no way immoral. Go ask anyone who slaughters cows or pigs for a living.
  
• 2 decades of ongoing research prove that the hunt is ecologically sound. If Rattenbury disagrees, then he needs to state by which date his projections show the southern Minke whale stocks will be driven to extinction by (or otherwise point out damaging ecological consequences of the hunt, comparing the activity with the means by which he himself obtains sources of food)
• The IWC's own Scientific Committee made it quite clear that JARPA programmes are not scientifically bankrupt either, as shown above.

Shane Rattenbury is the master of his propaganda.