[governance] Bush Administration Ramps Up Secrecy

Tue Sep 11 03:49:00 EDT 2007

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/091007A.shtml
     Bush Administration Ramps Up Secrecy
     By William Fisher
     t r u t h o u t | Report

     Monday 10 September 2007

     The Bush administration is continuing its campaign to keep the 
public in the dark about the federal government's policies and decisions 
and to suppress discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and 
their implications.

     This is the conclusion reached in the latest annual "report card" 
on government secrecy compiled by OpenTheGovernment.org, a coalition of 
consumer and good government groups, librarians, environmentalists, 
labor leaders, journalists, and others who seek to promote greater 
transparency in public institutions.

     Summarizing developments during the past year, the report card 
says, "Government secrecy, particularly in the executive branch, 
continues to expand across a broad array of agencies and actions, 
including military procurement, new private inventions, and the 
scientific and technical advice that the government receives."

     But, the authors of the report also see "glimmers of progress 
toward more openness and examples of continued determination on the part 
of the public and its representatives." They conclude, "Even as more and 
more categories that exclude information from access are created by 
agencies, the public use of the Freedom of Information Act to obtain 
information from our government continues to rise."

     The report card's principal findings for fiscal year 2007 include:

     * More than 25 percent of all federal dollars ($107.5 billion) 
awarded to Defense Department contractors were without competition. Only 
a third of contract dollars were subject to full and open competition. 
On average since 2000, more than a quarter of all contract funding was 
not competed.

     * Some 18 percent of the Department of Defense's FY 2007 
acquisition budget is classified. These so-called "black programs" 
amounted to $31.5 billion. Classified acquisition funding has more than 
doubled in real terms since fiscal year 1995, the report said.

     * The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approved 2,176 orders 
by the Justice Department - rejecting only one - in 2006. The Court, 
established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) 
following the Watergate scandals to restrict government snooping on 
citizens, has been at the center of a political firestorm since 
President Bush revealed the administration had been conducting 
electronic surveillance without seeking FISA warrants.

     * The administration continued to invoke the so-called "state 
secrets" privilege, which allows the president to withhold documents 
from the courts, Congress and the public. At the height of the Cold War, 
the administration used the privilege only six times between 1953 and 
1976. Since 2001, it has been used a reported 39 times - an average of 
six times a year in 6.5 years, or more than double the average (2.46) 
over the previous 24 years.

     * Requests for information under the Freedom of Information Act 
(FOIA) totaled 21,412,736, an increase of 1,462,189 over the previous 
year. The report card says backlogs of unfilled request remain 
significant: The oldest FOIA request in the federal government has now 
been pending for more than 20 years.

     * The government recovered more than $3.1 billion in settlements 
and judgments as a result of complaints from whistleblowers. Over the 
last two decades, whistleblowers helped the federal government recover 
more than $18 billion according to the latest figures from the US 
Department of Justice.

     * While the number of original classified documents decreased from 
258,633 in 2005 to 231,995 in 2007, classification activity still 
remains significantly higher than before 2001. For every dollar the 
government spent declassifying documents in 2006, it spent $185 
maintaining the secrets already on the books, a $51 increase from last 
year. Although more pages were declassified this year, the total 
publicly reported amount spent on declassification decreased. However, 
the report card notes, the intelligence agencies, which account for a 
large segment of the declassification numbers, are excluded from the 
total reported figures.

     * Government departments and agencies continued their practice of 
designating documents as "Sensitive But Unclassified" (SBU). Only some 
19 percent of 107 SBU designations were based on formally promulgated 
regulations, about half with comment and half without. The rest - 82 
percent - were made up by the agencies as they went along, the report 
card charges.

     * In six years, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing 
statements, challenging 1149 provisions of laws. "In the 211 years of 
our Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue 
with the bills were issued," the report card asserts. In six years, it 
says, President Bush has issued at least 151 signing statements, 
challenging 1,149 provisions of laws, adding, "In the 211 years of our 
Republic to 2000, fewer than 600 signing statements that took issue with 
the bills were issued. Among recent presidents, Reagan issued 71 
statements challenging provisions of laws before him; G.W.H. Bush issued 
146; Clinton, 105." The most notorious of the current president's 
signing statements related to the so-called McCain Amendment to a 2005 
defense authorization bill that barred the "cruel, inhuman, or degrading 
treatment or punishment" of detainees. The presidential statement raised 
serious questions about whether Bush intended to obey this new law.

     * The report card cites a report by the Justice Department's 
inspector general indicating the government made 143,074 National 
Security Letter (NSL) requests between 2003 and 2005. The number for 
2006 remains classified. NSLs can be used to obtain information about 
individuals without the government applying for a court-reviewed 
warrant. With 2,176 secret surveillance orders approved in 2006, federal 
surveillance activity under the jurisdiction of the secretive Foreign 
Intelligence Surveillance Court has more than doubled in five years.

     * The federal penchant for secrecy is also spilling over to state 
governments, the report card claims. Since 2001, it says, "States have 
continued to introduce and enact new laws that limit, rather than 
loosen, access to government information at the state and local level. 
In that period, some 339 bills were introduced in the states and 266 
passed the respective legislatures. The largest number of bills 
introduced (114) had to do with expanded executive powers, 
confidentiality based on federal regulations or programs, and closure of 
otherwise public meetings for security meetings. Fewer than half (52) 
passed; the lowest percentage of passage among 6 categories of bills."

     OpenTheGovernment.org concludes, "The current administration has 
exercised an unprecedented level not only of restriction of access to 
information about federal government's policies and decisions, but also 
of suppression of discussion of those policies, their underpinnings, and 
their implications. It has also increasingly refused to be held 
accountable to the public through the oversight responsibilities of 
Congress. These practices inhibit democracy and our representative 
government; neither the public nor Congress can make informed decisions 
in these circumstances. Our open society is undermined and made insecure."

     The Open the Government coalition includes representatives of the 
Federation of American Scientists, the Sunlight Foundation, the American 
Association of Law Libraries, OMB Watch, the National Security Archive, 
the Project on Government Oversight, the Reporters Committee for Freedom 
of the Press, the National Freedom of Information Coalition, the US 
Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Democracy & Technology, 
the Society of Professional Journalists, the Fund for Constitutional 
Government, the Center for American Progress, the AFL-CIO and the 
Electronic Frontier Foundation.

     In a related development, the White House has declared the Office 
of Administration (OA) exempt from the FOIA to avoid complying with a 
request to make public its information about five million missing emails.

     Citizens for Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed a FOIA request with 
the White House's OA for records that would document the White House's 
knowledge of the missing emails, its failure to restore the email or put 
in place an electronic record-keeping system that would prevent this 
problem, and the possibility the emails were purposefully deleted.

     In response, the Justice Department declared the OA is not subject 
to FOIA. CREW is suing the White House's OA for failing to respond to 
their request.

     At least five million emails "disappeared" between March 2003 and 
October 2005, according to a report by CREW. The missing emails were 
discovered by the White House in 2005, according to a briefing given to 
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee staff by Keith Roberts, 
the deputy general counsel of the White House Office.

     Rep. Henry Waxman (D-California), chairman of the House Oversight 
and Reform Committee, is demanding the OA turn over its analysis of the 
email system, conducted by the Office of the Chief Information Officer. 
According to the letter Rep. Waxman sent to White House counsel Fred 
Fielding on August 30, Roberts informed the Oversight Committee that an 
unidentified company working for the Information Assurance Directorate 
of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily 
audits of the email system and the email archiving process.

     According to Rep. Waxman's letter, Roberts was not able to explain 
why the daily audits conducted by this contractor did not detect the 
problems in the archive system when they first began. The revelation 
that there were daily audits suggests emails were destroyed, Anne 
Weismann, general counsel of CREW, told Bloomberg News.

     The White House recently changed its FOIA web site to exclude the 
OA from White House entities subject to FOIA. A note in the FOIA 
sections of the OA web site now says, "The Office of Administration, 
whose sole function is to advise and assist the President, and which has 
no substantial independent authority, is not subject to FOIA and related 
authorities." Under OA's FOIA Regulations, it says, "The OA's 
Regulations concerning FOIA are currently being updated." OA's annual 
FOIA reports are available on the White House web site for 1996-2006. In 
2006, OA processed 65 requests and spent $87,772 on FOIA processing 
(including appeals).

     The National Security Archive, a member of the 
OpenTheGovernment.org coalition, filed a lawsuit against the White House 
last week seeking the recovery and preservation of the emails.

     William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the 
Middle East and in many other parts of the world for the US State 
Department and USAID for the past thirty years. He began his work life 
as a journalist for newspapers and for the Associated Press in Florida. 
Fisher also served in the international affairs area during the Kennedy 
administration. Go to The World According to Bill Fisher for more.
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