Posted on 03/06/2002 4:11:42 PM PST by vannrox
The democratic principle of open government is under pressure from a US administration obsessed with secrecy and media manipulation, writes Julian Borger
Wednesday March 6, 2002
The United States possesses an extraordinary institution which sets it apart from almost every other nation on Earth and helps define America as an open democracy. It is called the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, and it is in serious trouble.
For journalists and ordinary citizens alike, Foia (pronounced "foyer") is the daily embodiment of government of, by and for the people. In theory at least it works like this: you fill in a Foia request form and ask for any piece of information you want from any government agency, and that agency is obliged - barring clear national security considerations - to open its files.
In practice, the time this process takes has always depended on who you are. The New York Times tends to get better service out of the system than Joe Public, but the principle of universal access to information has by and large been upheld. That is beginning to change under the present administration, which is emerging as the most obsessive about government secrecy since Watergate.
Government officials are under instructions from the attorney general's office to drag their heels on Foia requests whenever it is legal to do so. Furthermore, the White House issued an executive order in November restricting access to the documentary records of past presidencies, while the Pentagon is experimenting with infotainment in place of information.
In part, the emphasis on government secrecy is an inevitable consequence of September 11. The terrorist attacks demonstrated that the nation was vulnerable to attack on many fronts not previously thought of as having anything to do with national security. Information about city water supplies or public health contingency plans has been stripped from open websites, for example.
However, the information clampdown has a history which predates the war on terror. The official papers from the Texas governor's mansion under George Bush's stewardship might have revealed much about the influence of big business on the way he ran the state. But instead of sending them to the Texas archives, where they would have been subject to the state's own Public Information Act, he had them shipped to his father's presidential library, where they will be considerably harder to get at.
The key document that is currently strangling Foia is a memorandum from John Ashcroft, the attorney general, explicitly urging government employees to be stingy with their treatment of information requests. It was issued back in October and was being drafted before September 11. The memo tells civil servants that "when you carefully consider Foia requests and decide to withhold records . . . you can be assured that the department of justice will defend your decisions."
The chill induced by Ashcroft's note is only now making itself felt. The energy department delayed the release of documents concerning the corporate role in drawing up the administration's energy policy for months, until a court judgment published last week rebuked it for its "glacial pace" and ordered it to hand the papers over. In an unambiguous ruling judge Gladys Kessler, of the US district court in Washington said: "The government can offer no legal or practical excuse for its excessive delay."
The ruling represented a significant victory for government transparency, but the administration is standing firm on other fronts. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has vowed not to hand over the papers from the deliberations of his energy task force last year and is being taken to court by Congress's auditing arm, the general accounting office.
Meanwhile the health and human services department has sat on a two year study into the effects of fallout from Cold War nuclear testing, which estimated that it caused the deaths of 15,000 Americans.
The study, ordered by Congress in 1998 sat on the department's shelves for months, while officials insisted that it was a work in progress, until a democratic senator, Tom Harkin, pressured the administration into issuing a "progress report". The health department insists it dispatched that report in September, but it only arrived in the senator's office - less than a mile away - in February.
Confidentiality imposed for reasons of national security is also showing signs of "spillage", corroding formally entrenched civil rights. Examples of this include the secrecy surrounding the large-scale detention of illegal immigrants, and the refusal to allow detainees in Guantanamo Bay have access to legal advice.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has severely rationed the flow of information about the war in Afghanistan, appropriately enough in a campaign so reliant on special forces operations and covert action. But the defence department too has gone far beyond the requirements of national security in its zeal for news management. Television cameras have been barred from "negative" incidents, like the evacuation of friendly fire casualties, while film crews have been encouraged to concentrate on soft lifestyle features about US soldiers.
The apotheosis of this policy was the aborted creation of an office of strategic influence (OSI), designed to feed ready-made stories - both true and otherwise - to the world's media. In a sign that investigative journalism is going to be a hard beast to defeat, the New York Times revealed the OSI's intentions last month forcing its hasty closure, amid half-hearted denials from the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
But Rumsfeld has not given up making the news in his desired image. The Pentagon has bypassed the ABC News, and done a deal with the television network's entertainment division to produce a reality series about the lives of the troops in Afghanistan. It will be co-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who cooperated closely with the Pentagon to make Black Hawk Down, and Bertram Van Munster, who produces a regular television show called Cops offering a sympathetic fly-on-the-wall portrait of the police.
Like Cops, the Afghan show is likely to be compulsive viewing, but it's unlikely to tell Americans very much about what is being done in Afghanistan in their name. That, of course, may be the whole point.
· This article will also appear in Guardian Weekly
These liberals have nothing better to do than whine. Will someone please refill their bottles and change their diapers, please? The noise from all their crying is really getting old.
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