3.25.2005
Reopening Government (WashingtonPost.com)
Thursday, March 24, 2005; Page A18
OPENNESS IN government has diminished during the Bush administration. Classification actions rose 75 percent between 2001 and 2004. Immigration authorities kept secret the names of hundreds of detainees rounded up after Sept. 11, as did military authorities for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Legal memorandums authorizing key tactics in the war on terrorism were needlessly kept secret. The administration has stiffed Congress on oversight requests across a wide range of areas, and it has aggressively sought to withhold material -- even such obviously nonsensitive data as aggregate intelligence spending from the late 1940s -- under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Some secrecy is inevitable during wartime, but that's not the whole story; too often the Bush administration has viewed it as a positive value.
It is, consequently, encouraging to see a bipartisan consensus slowly emerging that open government needs a helping hand. A Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing last week on a bill by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) to bolster FOIA. The act creates a presumption that government documents are available to the public on request, subject to a limited number of exemptions. But over time, because of congressional amendments and judicial interpretations, the exemptions have sometimes seemed to swallow up the presumption.
(More ... Reopening Government (washingtonpost.com)
¶ 11:28 OPENNESS IN government has diminished during the Bush administration. Classification actions rose 75 percent between 2001 and 2004. Immigration authorities kept secret the names of hundreds of detainees rounded up after Sept. 11, as did military authorities for detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Legal memorandums authorizing key tactics in the war on terrorism were needlessly kept secret. The administration has stiffed Congress on oversight requests across a wide range of areas, and it has aggressively sought to withhold material -- even such obviously nonsensitive data as aggregate intelligence spending from the late 1940s -- under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Some secrecy is inevitable during wartime, but that's not the whole story; too often the Bush administration has viewed it as a positive value.
It is, consequently, encouraging to see a bipartisan consensus slowly emerging that open government needs a helping hand. A Senate Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing last week on a bill by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) to bolster FOIA. The act creates a presumption that government documents are available to the public on request, subject to a limited number of exemptions. But over time, because of congressional amendments and judicial interpretations, the exemptions have sometimes seemed to swallow up the presumption.
(More ... Reopening Government (washingtonpost.com)
