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The New York Times
Opinion
The Cult of Secrecy
at the White House
EDITORIAL,
nytimes.com on the Web, February 7, 2008
There’s no end to President Bush’s
slyness in subverting new Congressional law and clinging to the secrecy that has
been the administration’s executive cloak. When a vital measure to
strengthen the tattered freedom-of-information law won unanimous approval by
both houses of Congress, the president was forced to soften his stand and
quietly sign it into law on New Year’s Eve.
But, of course, even as open-government groups celebrated, the White House had
another trick up its sleeve.
A bit of fine print inserted in the president’s new budget proposal would gut a
major provision of the law — the empowerment of a new ombudsman to mediate
disclosure disputes and prod agencies to end disgraceful runarounds in which
legitimate citizen requests have been deep-sixed without a trace for a decade
and more.
Rather than fulfilling Congress’s bipartisan mandate to establish the ombudsman
at the respected National Archives, the Bush budget attempts a shell-game switch
of the new watchdog to the Department of Justice. Mediator?
This is the very administration-friendly agency already responsible for
defending agencies against lawsuits by citizens denied their information
requests.
It’s not hard to see what the administration has in mind, for it was former
Attorney General John Ashcroft who exploited 9/11 panic and notoriously urged
federal agencies to use all legal means to kill public document requests.
This has remained de facto policy, all the administration lip service to sunlit
government notwithstanding.
The information law passed four decades ago set a 20-day deadline for agencies
to reply to requests — a standard that soon became the bureaucracy’s cobwebbed
joke on the public. The new law sets penalties for foot-dragging and
requires a numerical tracking system so citizens can find out what’s happening
to their requests. For the “litigation gamesmanship” documented by the
National Security Archive, a private watchdog group, the law provides that
requesters driven to sue in court could, if successful, have their attorney fees
paid.
The ombudsman’s independence is at the heart of repairing the information law.
Congress must strike down the president’s end-run and keep the new watchdog at
the National Archives, alert to the public’s understandable suspicions about its
government.
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