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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Threshold who wrote (15832)	3/28/2003 3:32:33 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Secrecy: The Bush Byword Editorial The New York Times March 28, 2003 Add one more item to the list of things the Bush administration has been quietly doing on the home front while the nation is preoccupied with Iraq. This week President Bush signed an executive order that makes it easier for government agencies, including the White House, to keep documents classified and out of public view. The order does a number of things at once. It delays by three years the release of declassified government documents dating from 1978 or earlier. It treats all material sent to American officials from foreign governments — no matter how routine — as subject to classification. It expands the ability of the Central Intelligence Agency to shield documents from declassification. And for the first time, it gives the vice president the power to classify information. Offering that power to Vice President Dick Cheney, who has shown indifference to the public's right to know what is going on inside the executive branch, seems a particularly worrying development. All of this amends an order by President Bill Clinton that actually eased the process of declassification. The administration says the three-year delay in declassifying documents dating to the Carter administration and earlier is necessary because of a huge backlog of documents that must be reviewed before decisions are made on whether to declassify them. Taken individually, each of these actions might raise eyebrows for anyone who values open government. Taken together, they are reminders that this White House is obsessed with secrecy. President Clinton's policy was that "when in doubt," a document was not automatically classified. That ensured that government papers would not easily be kept under wraps without a compelling reason. And while President Bush keeps in place many of the mechanisms for automatic declassification, he has raised a bar that can only hurt the ability of historians, researchers and all Americans to arrive at informed judgments about the actions of the presidents and their administrations. nytimes.com