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Gold9472
04-30-2006, 07:49 PM
Bush administration practicing `selective secrecy'

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/news/politics/14468364.htm

BY MARK SILVA
Chicago Tribune
5/1/2006

WASHINGTON - Early in President Bush's first term, Andrew Card, then the White House chief of staff, summoned a group of new staffers to a West Wing office to thank them for coming aboard and to stress the importance of secrecy.

"He said very clearly that the president wants the right to announce things first, and that he also has a right to have information managed and he doesn't want people freelancing," one staffer recalled. "It was very clear that it was a cardinal sin to leak and that you'd better not."

One year later, Bush himself authorized the release to selected reporters of "relevant" portions of a once-classified National Intelligence Estimate to rebut criticism of the Iraq war, according to court documents. The assertion, which the administration has declined to address, is contained in a filing by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald that cites testimony from former White House aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

This double approach - clamping down on unauthorized disclosures while releasing documents on carefully chosen occasions - illustrates how the White House has attempted to manage closely held government information since the terrorism of Sept. 11 made Bush a wartime president.

"It's selective secrecy for political control," said Tom Blanton, director of the independent National Security Archive at George Washington University. "Secrecy puts power in the hands of officials who then can abuse it. It also covers up the abuse."

The Bush administration's determination to manage information, which experts say goes far beyond the efforts of recent presidents, drew added attention recently when the CIA fired an official for unauthorized conversations with a reporter. The FBI, for its part, has asked the family of the late investigative reporter Jack Anderson for permission to screen his papers for any secrets before they are donated to George Washington University. The family is resisting that request.

The hiring of a media-savvy White House press secretary, Tony Snow, has prompted questions about whether the Bush team is preparing to relax its hold on information at least a little.

But in the aftermath of Sept. 11, the White House asserts broadly that it is necessary to re-evaluate what information should be available to the public, such as technological or strategic information that could offer terrorists an opening.

"There is some information that in a pre-Sept. 11 mindset would have been viewed one way that is viewed differently in a post-Sept. 11 mindset," said Dana Perino, Bush's deputy press secretary. "We don't want to give the terrorists an open invitation to view our playbook for protecting the American people."

But critics say the Bush administration's instinct to keep information confidential goes beyond reasonable precautions.

"The theme of insularity and secrecy is pervasive," said former Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee and now teaches at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "They are adopting a position that the American people cannot be trusted with information that is critical to their well-being."

Graham noted that the CIA attempted to broadly censor the report of the joint House and Senate committee that investigated the intelligence community's performance before and after Sept. 11. Graham served as co-chairman of the inquiry.

When the report was released on July 24, 2003, according to a book Graham later wrote, "virtually every section of the report had been censored." While agreeing that several sections were redacted "for the right national security reasons," Graham argued that one section did not need to be kept secret - "the one area where the White House simply refused to relent."

The blacked-out 27 pages involved financial assistance that the Saudi Arabian government may have provided to some of the Sept. 11 terrorists living in the United States, according to Graham.

Other post-Sept. 11 actions have also proved controversial. The Bush administration has held "enemy combatants" in custody and established military commissions to try suspected terrorists, providing for far more secrecy than ordinary legal proceedings.

And Bush, shortly after the 2001 attacks, secretly authorized the National Security Agency, without obtaining a court order, to intercept telephone and e-mail communications between people inside the United States and suspected members of terrorist groups overseas. When this came to light, Bush insisted Congress had been briefed more than a dozen times, but Graham said the briefing he attended merely "focused on a technical issue."

Supporters of the administration say it's only natural that secrecy would increase after Sept. 11. Even a society like the United States that prides itself on its openness, they say, has to allow its government to operate with some confidentiality. Bush himself has made the point that for his subordinates to give him candid advice, they must be certain that advice will not be made public.

And just as the nation would never publicize the troop movements of its armed forces, Bush's backers say, it would be folly not to take reasonable steps when dealing with terrorists. None of this means the republic is in danger or that basic principles of open government are being violated, they add.

But the administration's critics do see a threat in its approach.

To test the administration's tightening control in 2004, the National Security Archive, an independent research group based at George Washington University, asked the Federal Aviation Administration for copies of warnings about terrorism it issued to U.S. airlines prior to Sept. 11. The FAA denied the request, and even withheld the titles and dates of the FAA documents as "sensitive security information."

Yet these documents had been cited by title and date in a 2004 bestseller, "The 9/11 Commission Report."

The FAA had circulated a memo to airlines warning of the potential for "an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States," the Sept. 11 commission noted, citing an FAA circular, "Possible Terrorist Threat Against American Citizens," from June 22, 2001.

In 2003, when Bush updated an executive order on classification of secret information, he empowered agencies to reseal information that already has been made public.

"Prior to 2003, if it had been declassified under proper authority and released to the public, that was it, you couldn't reclassify it at all," said Bill Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office at the National Archives.

Several agencies and presidential libraries already had been withdrawing information from the National Archives, and the CIA last year withdrew 254 documents after it found that declassified documents had been circulated on the Internet. In an audit of a sample of such withdrawals from the Archives since 1995, the ISOO last week reported that 24 percent "were clearly inappropriate for continued classification" and that an additional 12 percent were "questionable."

"A stunning, large percentage of the documents examined were wrongly classified," said Allen Weinstein, U.S. archivist. "In short, more than one of every three documents removed from the open shelves and barred to researchers should not have been tampered with."

All this has raised calls for tougher oversight. "Any White House that wants more authority, and there is going to be more authority during times of conflict, has to have strong oversight," said Rep. Chris Shays, R-Conn. "You need a continuous review of documents to make sure they should be classified."

It's not clear how much of the administration's tightening of the information flow will extend to future presidencies, since many measures were enacted by presidential authority and can be rescinded by future presidents.

Facing bipartisan calls for greater openness, Bush issued an executive order in December on "Improving Agency Disclosure of Information."

The order called for "a citizen-centered and results-oriented approach" to improving performance and "strengthening compliance" with the Freedom of Information Act. But it did not reverse the administration's determination, laid out in a 2001 policy, to protect information in which "institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure."

The 2005 order does require every agency to review its handling of requests and deliver an "improvement plan" by June. This nod to critics followed legislation filed by a bipartisan team, the Open Government Act of 2005, demanding greater public access.

Sens. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., recently gave Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Joshua Bolten, who is now the president's chief of staff, a gentle reminder in a letter: "Unfortunately, as we approach the 40th anniversary of (the Freedom of Information Act), the speed and urgency with which several federal agencies treat FOIA requests is sorely lacking."