I teach courses in journalism and tell my students about the tools available to them for telling the public about our government. No tool is more important than the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). For almost 40 years, it has guaranteed access to federal documents to press and public alike.
Sadly, the terms secretive and non-cooperative apply not only to Bush's Iraq war but also to his approach to FOIA and our access rights to documents.
George W. Bush issued an executive order that effectively gutted the Presidential Records Act of 1978. Bush arbitrarily allowed former presidents, such as his father, to delay release of records from their presidencies for longer than the dozen years currently provided.
Some of us remember the elder Bush's pardons during the closing lame-duck weeks of his administration. The pardons short-circuited prosecutions that could have revealed more about George Herbert Walker Bush's role in the Iran-Contra scandals. The younger Bush may have given his father a tool to shield embarrassing material, but such a gift is a lousy legacy to our nation.
The current president also has granted new authority to the Department of Agriculture, Environmental Protection Agency, and Department of Health and Human Services to classify documents as secret. Of course, Vice President Dick Cheney went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court to avoid identifying his non-governmental energy advisers.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has made it plain he will help federal agencies fight FOIA requests. Ashcroft also has changed the presumption. Agencies previously looked for ways to release documents. Now, they scour the FOIA exemptions and interpret them broadly to frustrate our access to our own government's actions.
Bush also joined forces with congressional Republicans to abandon a bipartisan compromise regarding the new Department of Homeland Security. This let stand a broadly worded loophole allowing private parties voluntarily to submit critical infrastructure information to the new department and effectively hide the data. Thus, even routine matters elsewhere reported to the government, such as employee health and safety concerns, could be hidden regarding privately operated power plants, bridges, dams, ports or chemical plants.
White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card directed agencies to restrict sensitive but unclassified information. He offered no definitions, but agencies removed thousands of previously public documents from disclosure. The Pentagon alone shielded about 6000 documents from FOIA.
Bush even skipped the legal requirements for publicly vetting his choice for Archivist of the United States, earning criticism from more than two dozen library, historical and archivist associations.
One should note that these changes really have nothing to do with national security and pending law enforcement, all of which have been exempted since the beginning of open records laws. Ian Marquand, chairman of the Society of Professional Journalists Freedom of Information committee, put it best. In short
we now know the Bush approach to FOIA-and it's a whole new ballgame. You may remember it. It's called 'keep-away.' And guess who has the ball.
Something is wrong with an administration that talks the talk but won't walk the walk of open government. Instead, it follows the mushroom-growing approach to public information, keep us in the dark and knee deep in manure.
-Dr. Mark D. Harmon, a 1988 OU graduate, teaches courses in journalism and broadcasting at the University of Tennessee. Send him an e-mail at markdharmon@comcast.net. 17
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