heraldtribune du 05/11/08
The fierce urgency of FOIABy Billy Cox
[justify]Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 3:42 p.m.
Last Modified: Wednesday, November 5, 2008 at 3:50 p.m.
There were never any real expectations from Bush Inc. Even before it was sworn in, when the imminent new regime announced it intended to run government like a corporation, you knew the only element of surprise would be one of degree.
From the get-go, long before 9/11, Bush Inc. flipped the bird at transparency by refusing to comply with the Presidential Records Act of 1978. On three separate occasions, it refused to release 68,000 Reagan-era documents as required by law. Finally, by November 2001, the White House nullified the law altogether with an executive order giving the commander in chief — as well as former presidents and vice presidents — veto power over the public distribution of American history.
Within months of taking his oath, Dick Cheney forced the Government Accountability Office into playing an historically unprecedented hand: suing the executive branch for access to the names of the Veep’s energy policy advisors. The guy charged with spearheading this uncomfortable litigation — GAO Comptroller General David Walker — wasn’t your typical a bomb-throwing weasel. He’d served under Reagan and Bush I.
Threats by congressional Republicans to slash GAO’s budget brought the suit to an end. Larry Klayman — the litigious, right-wing Clinton harasser extraordinaire who joined the GAO suit — went into orbit and called Bush Inc. “the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration.”
When the names were eventually leaked to the media by a White House source in 2007, the revelations were so thin and constipated, even people who attended those closed-door policy sessions felt free to marvel over the administration’s feeble grasp of proportion. Volunteered Charles Samuels, who represented the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers in hopes of obtaining tax credits for inventing new energy-saving devices: "I never knew why they fought so hard to keep it secret."
But the Cheney/GAO tussle was just a tuneup for Bush Inc.’s full-court press on Sunshine Law culture following 9/11. The result was an information clampdown so deep and black it was like they’d sucked every last tendril of hydrogen out of Earth’s closest star. And John Ashcroft’s expanded list of FOIA exemptions at the end of 2001 was just the beginning.
On March 25, 2003, as American troops rumbled towards Baghdad and nobody was paying attention, #43 decided to nuke Executive Order 12958.
Executive Order 12958 was signed by President Clinton in 1995 to end an archaic classification system jamming the pipes with Cold War-vintage documents that had no contemporary bearing on national security. Some 800 million declassified federal papers subsequently flooded the public domain, most notably from the old Atomic Energy Commission. Some of it, like the plutonium experiments conducted on American citizens, was ghastly stuff. But like the saying goes: you’re only as sick as your secrets.
Five years ago, Bush Inc. “amended” Clinton’s action with Executive Order 13292. Among other things, the new rules a) extended deadlines for the declassification of federal data, b) allowed for the reclassification of government material already in the public domain, c) gave classification authority to the Veep’s office, and d) offered those same privileges to agencies which had never stamped “Secret” on anything before.
Once 13292 kicked in, federal entities from the Office of Science & Technology Policy to the Environmental Protection Agency to the Department of Health and Human Services to the Department of Agriculture could legally withhold whatever they could rationalize as national security. It was a breathtaking prescription for abuse of power.
We may never learn the full extent of the vandalism conducted in the dark by Bush Inc., but in two months, this national disgrace will collapse into the history books. And now, suddenly, overnight, there are expectations.
In January, a scholar in Constitutional law will move into the White House. Given the wreckage Barack Obama is inheriting, it’s hard to know where he'll begin. If he intends to restore credibility to what’s left, transparency should be at the center of it. But that could put the new administration in a pickle.
When, in 2002, Obama transition team leader John Podesta called for the declassification of government data on UFOs, he cited Executive Order 12958: “We ought to do it because it’s the law.”
But it’s not anymore, thanks to Bush Inc. And for a close-up glimpse of the breezy disregard for open government in the backwash of this malignancy, look no farther than the Mutual UFO Network’s attempts to document this year’s Stephenville, Tex., UFO controversy through the Freedom of Information Act.
The military — which pursued the object with jet fighters — refuses, without justification, to release its radar records or flight logs. The U.S. Customs & Border Protection Department, which monitors American boundaries for the Department of Homeland Security and has access to Air Force radar data, shirked its legal obligations and simply ignored MUFON’s FOIA request altogether.
Reality check: The only way Obama or Podesta or anybody else with the new government is going to talk seriously about UFOs anytime soon is via Photoshop. So if Tuesday night’s election really produced Change We Can Believe In, let’s start with the fundamentals first. Executive Order 13292 needs to be buried with the rest of the sludge.[/justify]
