Psst. President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy

[R.A. Hettinga]

<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/opinion/01mon4.html?th=&pagewanted=print&position=>

The New York Times

November 1, 2004
EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Psst. President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy
By DOROTHY SAMUELS

t is only inevitable, I suppose, that some big issues never make it onto
the agenda of a presidential campaign, and other lesser issues, or total
nonissues, somehow emerge instead. Electoral politics, as Americans are
regularly being reminded these final hard-fought days before the election,
is a brutal, messy business, not an antiseptic political science exercise.

 That said, I hereby confess to feeling disappointed over Senator John
Kerry's failure to home in hard on one of the more worrisome domestic
policy developments of the past four years - namely the Bush
administration's drastic expansion of needless government secrecy.

 President Bush's antipathy to open government continues to garner only a
trivial level of attention compared with the pressing matters that seem to
be engaging the country at the moment, including, in no particular order,
the Red Sox, Iraq, terrorism, taxes and the mysterious iPod-size bulge
visible under the back of Mr. Bush's suit jacket at the first debate. But
the implications for a second term are ominous.

 Beyond undermining the constitutional system of checks and balances, undue
secrecy is a proven formula for faulty White House decision-making and
debilitating scandal. If former President Richard Nixon, the nation's last
chief executive with a chronic imperial disdain for what Justice Louis
Brandeis famously called the disinfecting power of sunlight, were alive
today, I like to think he'd be advising Mr. Bush to choose another role
model.

 As detailed in a telling new Congressional report, Mr. Bush's secrecy
obsession - by now a widely recognized hallmark of his presidency - is
truly out of hand.

 The 90-page report, matter-of-factly titled "Secrecy in the Bush
Administration," was released with little fanfare in September by
Representative Henry Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the
House Committee on Government Reform, and one of the most outspoken critics
of the Bush administration's steady descent into greater and greater
secrecy. The objective was to catalog the myriad ways that President Bush
and his appointees have undermined existing laws intended to advance public
access to information, while taking an expansive view of laws that
authorize the government to operate in secrecy, or to withhold certain
information.

 Some of the instances the report cites are better known than others. Among
the more notorious, of course, are the administration's ongoing refusal to
disclose contacts between Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force
and energy company executives, or to explain the involvement of Mr.
Cheney's office in the awarding of huge sole-source contracts to
Halliburton for Iraq reconstruction; the post-9/11 rush to embrace
shameful, unconstitutional practices like secret detentions and trials; and
the resistance and delay in turning over key documents sought by the Sept.
11 commission.

 The report lists many other troubling examples as well. Mr. Bush and his
appointees have routinely impeded Congress's constitutionally prescribed
oversight role by denying reasonable requests from senior members of
Congressional committees for basic information. They forced a court fight
over access to the Commerce Department's corrected census counts, for
instance, withheld material relating to the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and
stonewalled attempts to collect information on meetings and phone
conversations between Karl Rove, the presidential adviser, and executives
of firms in which he owned stock. The administration has also taken to
treating as top secret documents previously available under the Freedom of
Information Act - going so far as to reverse the landmark act's presumption
in favor of disclosure and to encourage agencies to withhold a broad,
hazily defined universe of "sensitive but unclassified" information.

 Under a phony banner of national security, Mr. Bush has reversed
reasonable steps by the Clinton administration to narrow the government's
capacity to classify documents. Aside from being extremely expensive, the
predictably steep recent increase in decisions to classify information runs
starkly counter to recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission geared to
strengthening oversight of the intelligence agencies.

 Not one for self-criticism - or any kind of criticism, for that matter -
President Bush says he's content to leave it to historians to assess his
presidential legacy. What he fails to mention is that he has seriously
impeded that historical review by issuing a 2001 executive order repealing
the presumption of public access to presidential papers embedded in the
1978 Presidential Records Act.

On a superficial level, the hush-hush treatment of this issue on the fall
campaign trail might seem perversely fitting. But Mr. Bush's unilateral
rollback of laws and practices designed to promote government
accountability surely rates further scrutiny by voters. We've learned over
the last four years that what we don't know can hurt us.

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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'