Bush's stance on secrecy draws a number of critics
Papers, pretzel cited as instances lacking disclosures
By Anne E. Kornblut, Globe Staff, 2/11/2002
WASHINGTON - During a tussle with Congress last summer,
President Bush cracked that ''a dictatorship would be a
heck of a lot easier'' than negotiating the maze of American
democracy.
A few months later, Bush joked that he admired the media
strategy of Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who abruptly
ended a joint news conference and walked away after fielding
one question.
Now, conservatives and liberals have begun to suspect that
Bush is not kidding about his bent toward secrecy. The battle
between Congress and the administration over documents
from Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force has made
headlines, and lawmakers and government watchdogs have
characterized other actions as abuses of executive power.
During his first year in office, Bush has delayed the release of
presidential papers from the Reagan White House, imposed
limits on public access to government documents, refused to
share revised data from the 2000 Census, and shielded
decades-old FBI records from scrutiny. Advisers even declined
to disclose the brand of pretzel that Bush choked on last
month.
''This is the Old-World style of government, where the
sovereign is considered to be elite and the people are
considered to be the rabble, and they have little to no right to
know what the government is doing,'' said Larry Klayman,
head of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that pursued
Clinton administration records in court. ''It's very similar to
Nixon, and many of these people come out of the Nixon era.
They're like Dr. Strangelove.''
Bush officials take strong exception to that view, and maintain
that many of their confidentiality measures have been
designed to protect national security in the aftermath of the
Sept. 11 attacks. Administration advisers describe their
withholding of certain documents as an effort to return to the
principles of the Constitution, which they say recognizes a
need for a higher degree of confidentiality in the executive
branch than now exists.
''We have been forthcoming at every turn, and we have always
valued the right and the need of the public to have information
about their government,'' White House spokeswoman Anne
Womack said. ''But when there are important constitutional
principles at stake, we will always stand with the Constitution,
as I think the American people would expect and appreciate.''
According to presidential scholars, the White House has a right
to protect some degree of opaqueness to the Oval Office
regarding national security matters .
But critics across the political spectrum agree that Bush has
taken his penchant for secrecy too far in several instances. The
White House is facing a number of lawsuits, reminding some
observers of the ongoing legal battles that dogged the Clinton
administration.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, has
sued the administration for withholding revised data from the
2000 Census that could increase federal funding for California.
Judicial Watch has filed a lawsuit in pursuit not only of the
confidential Cheney energy documents, but also the names of
possible donors who attended a function at the vice president's
mansion in May 2001, an event administration officials deny
was a political fund-raiser.
In conjunction with the American Civil Liberties Union,
Representative John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat, is suing
the administration for closing some immigration hearings.
White House officials say the practice protects national
security.
Outside the courtroom, Representative Dan Burton, a
Republican from Indiana, has expressed outrage over the
Justice Department's refusal to share decades-old documents
concerning the FBI's use of informants to investigate James
''Whitey'' Bulger and organized crime in Boston.
''It's a fiction to say the presidency's powers have eroded
dramatically over the last 20 years,'' said Mark Rozell, a
professor of politics at Catholic University and author of the
book, ''Executive Privilege: The Dilemma of Secrecy and
Democratic Accountability.''
Of the pending lawsuit against Cheney over the energy
documents, Rozell said, ''This isn't Watergate. There is a
principle here that the two parties are fighting over. But I think
there's something of a secrecy pattern developing in the Bush
administration.''
''Our situation is a subset of a broader issue,'' said David
Walker, who oversees the General Accounting Office and its
struggle over the records of the energy task force. Cheney has
said he believed coming into this administration that the
president's power had been eroded over the years, and there
needed to be a new line drawn. The GAO, the investigative arm
of Congress, has announced its intent to sue to get the
records.
''We believe that the facts and the law are on our side, that if
we go to court we will win,'' Walker said. ''This is not foreign
policy. This is not national security. I'm not going to sit here
and allow our agency to be stonewalled.''
To some extent, the pattern of secrecy may simply reflect a
Republican tendency toward a strong executive branch, and a
distrust of a Washington press corps that White House aides
believe is biased toward liberals.
''In a way, I have some sympathy with the Bush administration
because Congress went so far overboard in its harassment of
the Clinton administration,'' said Steven Aftergood of the
Project on Government Secrecy.
He contended, however, that the adminstration has been
''keeping information secret that has no relevance to the war
on terrorism, whether it's the Reagan papers or energy task
force papers. They are trying to put in place a new ethos and to
alter the character of congressional oversight.''
Critics note that the Bush administration has continued to
share with Congress some documents and e-mails from the
Clinton administration - undermining this White House's
argument that it has withheld its own documents as a matter
of principle. Waxman has accused the Bush White House of
hypocrisy.
Another example of the administration's tight-fisted approach
is its recent changes in implementing the Freedom of
Information Act, a Watergate-era law that allows the public to
request copies of a wide range of government documents.
Reversing the Clinton administration rule, which mandated
that all agencies comply with FOIA requests whenever possible,
Attorney General John Ashcroft has ordered federal agencies
to deny requests as long as doing so won't be a clear violation
of law.
Despite the Clinton policy, Judicial Watch still found itself in
court, fighting for government documents. ''We rejoiced at the
end of the Clinton regime. Yet we are worried that Clintonism
is still the ethic of this city,'' Klayman wrote.
Anne E. Kornblut can be reached via e-mail at
akornblut@globe.com
This story ran on page A3 of the Boston Globe on 2/11/2002.
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