For their eyes only The democratic principle of open
government is under pressure from a US administration obsessed with
secrecy and media manipulation, writes Julian Borger
The Guardian
Wednesday March 6, 2002
The United States possesses an extraordinary institution which
sets it apart from almost every other nation on Earth and helps
define America as an open democracy. It is called the 1966
Freedom of Information Act, and it is in serious trouble.
For journalists and ordinary citizens alike, Foia (pronounced
"foyer") is the daily embodiment of government of, by and for the
people. In theory at least it works like this: you fill in a Foia
request form and ask for any piece of information you want from
any government agency, and that agency is obliged - barring
clear national security considerations - to open its files.
In practice, the time this process takes has always depended
on who you are. The New York Times tends to get better service
out of the system than Joe Public, but the principle of universal
access to information has by and large been upheld. That is
beginning to change under the present administration, which is
emerging as the most obsessive about government secrecy
since Watergate.
Government officials are under instructions from the attorney
general's office to drag their heels on Foia requests whenever it
is legal to do so. Furthermore, the White House issued an
executive order in November restricting access to the
documentary records of past presidencies, while the Pentagon
is experimenting with infotainment in place of information.
In part, the emphasis on government secrecy is an inevitable
consequence of September 11. The terrorist attacks
demonstrated that the nation was vulnerable to attack on many
fronts not previously thought of as having anything to do with
national security. Information about city water supplies or public
health contingency plans has been stripped from open websites,
for example.
However, the information clampdown has a history which
predates the war on terror. The official papers from the Texas
governor's mansion under George Bush's stewardship might
have revealed much about the influence of big business on the
way he ran the state. But instead of sending them to the Texas
archives, where they would have been subject to the state's own
Public Information Act, he had them shipped to his father's
presidential library, where they will be considerably harder to get
at.
The key document that is currently strangling Foia is a
memorandum from John Ashcroft, the attorney general,
explicitly urging government employees to be stingy with their
treatment of information requests. It was issued back in October
and was being drafted BEFORE September 11. The memo tells civil
servants that "when you carefully consider Foia requests and
decide to withhold records . . . you can be assured that the
department of justice will defend your decisions."
The chill induced by Ashcroft's note is only now making itself
felt. The energy department delayed the release of documents
concerning the corporate role in drawing up the administration's
energy policy for months, until a court judgment published last
week rebuked it for its "glacial pace" and ordered it to hand the
papers over. In an unambiguous ruling judge Gladys Kessler, of
the US district court in Washington said: "The government can
offer no legal or practical excuse for its excessive delay."
The ruling represented a significant victory for government
transparency, but the administration is standing firm on other
fronts. The vice-president, Dick Cheney, has vowed not to hand
over the papers from the deliberations of his energy task force
last year and is being taken to court by Congress's auditing
arm, the general accounting office.
Meanwhile the health and human services department has sat
on a two year study into the effects of fallout from Cold War
nuclear testing, which estimated that it caused the deaths of
15,000 Americans.
The study, ordered by Congress in 1998 sat on the department's
shelves for months, while officials insisted that it was a work in
progress, until a democratic senator, Tom Harkin, pressured the
administration into issuing a "progress report". The health
department insists it dispatched that report in September, but it
only arrived in the senator's office - less than a mile away - in
February.
Confidentiality imposed for reasons of national security is also
showing signs of "spillage", corroding formally entrenched civil
rights. Examples of this include the secrecy surrounding the
large-scale detention of illegal immigrants, and the refusal to
allow detainees in Guantanamo Bay have access to legal
advice.
Meanwhile, the Pentagon has severely rationed the flow of
information about the war in Afghanistan, appropriately enough
in a campaign so reliant on special forces operations and covert
action. But the defence department too has gone far beyond the
requirements of national security in its zeal for news
management. Television cameras have been barred from
"negative" incidents, like the evacuation of friendly fire
casualties, while film crews have been encouraged to
concentrate on soft lifestyle features about US soldiers.
The apotheosis of this policy was the aborted creation of an
office of strategic influence (OSI), designed to feed ready-made
stories - both true and otherwise - to the world's media. In a sign
that investigative journalism is going to be a hard beast to
defeat, the New York Times revealed the OSI's intentions last
month forcing its hasty closure, amid half-hearted denials from
the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld.
But Rumsfeld has not given up making the news in his desired
image. The Pentagon has bypassed the ABC News, and done a
deal with the television network's entertainment division to
produce a reality series about the lives of the troops in
Afghanistan. It will be co-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, who
cooperated closely with the Pentagon to make Black Hawk
Down, and Bertram Van Munster, who produces a regular
television show called Cops offering a sympathetic
fly-on-the-wall portrait of the police.
Like Cops, the Afghan show is likely to be compulsive viewing,
but it's unlikely to tell Americans very much about what is being
done in Afghanistan in their name. That, of course, may be the
whole point.
guardian.co.uk.
· This article will also appear in Guardian Weekly |
