Part 4
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FEATURE STORY | February 25, 2002
What Are They Hiding?
by Russ Baker
"Secrecy in the Bush Administration is not limited to one or two individuals. It is a guiding philosophy," says Aftergood. "Whether it is the war in Afghanistan or presidential records from two decades ago, the Administration wants to control what the public is permitted to know. It is a dramatic shift from the Clinton Administration, where there were several agency heads speaking out in favor of greater disclosure, and in which an unprecedented volume of declassified information was released."
In October Attorney General John Ashcroft sent out a memo saying that the DOJ should adopt a policy of not giving out information requested under the Freedom of Information Act whenever possible, reversing a Clinton administrative policy stating that documents should be withheld only when there was foreseeable harm that would result from disclosure. In essence, Ashcroft was replacing "withhold rarely" with "withhold whenever possible."
Compared with Bush, the despised (by Burton) Clinton Administration had a virtual open-door policy with Congress. In response to requests from Burton's committee, Clinton produced more than 1.2 million pages of documents from January 1997 to January 2001. The GAO found that between October 1996 and March 1998, White House staff spent more than 55,000 hours responding to more than 300 Congressional requests. These included prosecution memos and documents containing legal advice normally protected by attorney-client privilege. Clinton also provided the GAO with the names of private individuals who worked for or consulted with the President's healthcare task force.
Of course, Clinton was hardly forthcoming with information that could get him into trouble personally. He invoked executive privilege thirteen times, usually in circumstances like Whitewater and the Lewinsky scandal. In some sense, Mark Rozell says, Clinton helped to bring the phrase "executive privilege" back from the netherworld to which it had been consigned since its arrant misuse by the Nixon Administration.
Intriguingly, one of the leading architects of the Bush Administration's "don't tell" policy is Brett Kavanaugh, a former deputy to Whitewater investigator Ken Starr. Kavanaugh, who once defended Starr's insatiable appetite for information on presidential doings as being not about politics but about the sanctity of the law, has apparently changed his tune (Kavanaugh did not respond to a request for an interview). The ironies abound. "Because of Ken Starr and Dan Burton himself, even the assertion of attorney-client privilege has been eviscerated," said Lanny Davis, who served as a special counsel to Clinton. "Any assertion by the White House is [now] challengeable."
Last August, before the terror attacks, the Bush Administration set up an interagency task force to review a Clinton executive order that provided for automatic declassification of non-national security information after a specified waiting period. In soliciting proposed changes from federal agencies, Bush's clear objective at that time was to slow down the entire declassification process.
Since September 11, Bush's secrecy initiatives have proliferated. In October, Bush sent out a memo stipulating limits on what members of Congress could be told about the "War on Terrorism." In mid-December, the Administration announced that a new interagency task force will investigate how to prevent future leaks of classified information.
In addition, for the first time ever, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has been given the power to classify material. While legitimate reasons for this exist, especially in light of biological and chemical weapons threats, it's a tricky matter. Says Aftergood: "It does signal the beginning of the integration of a domestic agency into the national security bureaucracy."
Hand in glove with the refusal to release information has been a seeming enthusiasm for putting out disinformation. For example, the Administration initially contended that Bush was missing for so long on September 11 because Air Force One was believed to be a target, as William Safire was told by a high-level White House official (per his September 13 column). Two weeks later, the White House was forced to admit that this was never the case. During the presidential campaign, in November 2000, campaign spokespeople first denied that Cheney had had the heart attack later confirmed by his doctors. Once in office, the Bush Administration put out a widely reported story about Clinton staff vandalism of White House property and operations; for a week the story almost dominated the news. Three months later, a GAO report revealed that virtually none of it happened--except that someone left a few pieces of paper with obscenities on a photocopy machine. Claims made in August to justify the President's decision restricting stem cell research involved misleading figures about the number of viable stem cell lines already available. The Administration was just beginning to take hits for its problems with candor when Al Qaeda struck on September 11.
"Every worst tendency toward secrecy has come out of the woodwork of this Administration," says Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive. "The mentality is that of the intelligence agent whose only goal is to protect sources and methods. It is a mentality that does not understand the value of openness."
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