The Last Page
Rosen, Ruth
In early October 2001, grief still gripped much of the nation. Anthrax-laced letters kept the public, as well as media, in a state of acute anxiety. In this tense atmosphere, the U.S. government...
...As a result, most Americans had no idea that one of their most precious freedoms disappeared on October 12...
...Nor did the attorney general hold a press conference...
...No one disputes that we must safeguard our national security...
...It may be a very long time before we know how Ashcroft's memo will affect FOIA requests...
...Even more disturbing, he wrote: When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records...
...Now, months later, I am still astonished that nearly all the mainstream media have ignored Ashcroft's memo...
...Yet it happened...
...government quietly changed its policy governing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA...
...I discovered this memo in late December, quite by accident, while investigating how a FOIA request had exposed the abuse of farm subsidies...
...This memo overturned his predecessor Janet Reno's 1993 policy of releasing all public papers unless the government could demonstrate the potential for serious harm...
...Many anti-terrorist measures carefully balanced the public's right to know with the government's responsibility to protect its citizens...
...I was stunned that such a change in policy had received so little public attention...
...Think of it as our national sunshine law...
...Enacted in 1966 and strengthened in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandals, the FOIA has been hailed as one of our greatest democratic reforms...
...Without fanfare, the attorney general simply quashed it...
...The president didn't ask the networks for television time...
...Attorney General John Ashcroft vigorously urged federal agencies to resist most FOIA requests...
...But we must never allow the public's right to know, enshrined in the Freedom of Information Act, to be suppressed for the sake of official convenience...
...Yet by the start of 2002, half the country already worried that the Bush administration might use the fear of terrorism as a pretext for protecting officials from public scrutiny...
...For more than a quarter of a century, the Freedom of Information Act has substituted transparency for secrecy, and we, as a democracy, have benefited from the truths extracted from public records...
...Who, for example, would argue against taking detailed plans of nuclear reactors, oil refineries, or reservoirs off the Web...
...Rather than asking the heads of federal agencies to consider when the public's right to know might collide with the government's need to safeguard our security, Ashcroft instead asked them to judge whether "institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of the information...
...When coupled with George W. Bush's November 1 executive order in which he gave himself the power to seal all presidential records since 1980, the crackdown on information is chilling...
...Because of FOIA requests, American citizens have exposed all kinds of official skullduggery, some of which violated the law...
...Even under the best of circumstances, the government has taken years to release public documents...
...It allows ordinary citizens—journalists, newspapers, historians, and watchdog groups—to hold the government accountable by requesting and scrutinizing public documents and records...
...And that, I fear, is what has happened...
...RUTH ROSEN 128 n DISSENT / Spring 2002...
...In a memo that slipped beneath the political radar, U.S...
...Some of these revelations have disgraced public officials or resulted in criminal charges, but that is the consequence for violating the public trust...
...In the aftermath of September 11, we witnessed a flurry of federal orders designed to beef up the nation's security...
Vol. 49 • April 2002 • No. 2
