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You Know You're Too Secretive When . . .
John Dean knows secretive. As White House counsel to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s, Dean served one of the most manipulative and secretive men ever to hold the presidency.
Dean also gained notoriety as the staffer who essentially blew the whistle on the Watergate break-in and coverup, and who boldly told President Nixon, "You have a cancer on your presidency."
But Dean says he has concluded that when it comes to secrecy, the current Bush administration is the worst he’s seen. In a recent talk in Seaside, Calif., Dean told his audience, " This is a bad presidency because it is a secretive presidency."
According to a report in The Salinas Californian, Dean said the upcoming November election could be susceptible to rigging or scandals. "Could you have another Watergate? Sure you could," he said.
Dean has been promoting his book, Worse Than Watergate, which criticizes the administration for excessive secrecy and numerous other abuses.
Posted 08-24-2004 6:07 PM EDT
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Government Uses Secret Evidence in Patriot Act Cases
The American Civil Liberties Union is challenging the Justice Department’s use of the Patriot Act to get information about people without judicial oversight, but the ACLU says its legal work is being hampered by the government’s use of gag orders and secret evidence.
According to The Washington Post, "the government also censored more than a dozen seemingly innocuous passages from court filings on national security grounds, only to be overruled by the judge." Among the censored passages was a quotation from a 1972 Supreme Court ruling warning about the danger of the government using national security reasons to stifle dissent.
The ACLU is challenging as unconstitutional two practices permitted by the Patriot Act:
- the power to access medical, library and other private records without a subpoena or warrant based on probably cause; and,
- the FBI’s authority to use "National Security Letters" to demand customer records from Internet service providers and other businesses without judicial oversight.
In each case, the government has filed an affidavit with the court that the plaintiffs (the ACLU) and the public are entirely barred from seeing. This, of course, puts the plaintiffs at a disadvantage in arguing their case.
According to the Washington Post, "The disclosures provide the latest example of the Bush administration’s aggressive classification of documents and information related to terrorism and other national security issues, even as its efforts have come under increasing attack in the courts, in Congress and from the Sept. 11 commission."
The ACLU posted on its Web site several examples of text that the Justice Department initially wanted to keep secret but which the courts permitted to be released.
Posted August 20, 2004
Posted 08-20-2004 6:17 PM EDT
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Auto Safety Data Kept Secret
Four years ago, after learning that defective Firestone tires mounted on Ford Explorers were causing a rash of deadly rollover crashes, Congress passed a new law to quickly make auto safety data available to the public. But to the dismay of Public Citizen and other safety advocates who pushed for the law, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) decided that the detailed information about unsafe automobiles, tires and parts will be kept secret.
The reason for the cover-up? Auto manufacturers complained that release of the data would hurt their companies, and NHTSA bowed to the pressure.
The episode is a prime example of how the administration uses the regulatory process to make pro-business policy far from public scrutiny.
"Apparently, the automakers and the government have decided they don’t want people to have accurate information because they might be misled, because they can’t be trusted with this data," Public Citizen attorney Scott Nelson told the Detroit Free Press in an Aug. 18 story. "They are arguing that this information is too confusing for the public, but at the same time they argue this information is so valuable their competitors could ferret out detailed data from it."
Public Citizen, which is waging legal battles with the administration over secrecy on several fronts, has sued the Department of Transportation to make the safety information public.
"Secrecy is rampant in this administration," Public Citizen President Joan Claybrook told the paper. "It’s shocking to me that information that should be out there for consumers should be kept secret from them."
The Free Press article came on the heels of a related Aug. 14 New York Times story describing how the Bush administration has used the public’s preoccupation with terrorism and war to get away with a raft of anti-consumer and anti-environmental regulations. Said the Times, "Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others."
Posted 08-20-2004 12:51 PM EDT
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NRC Turns Out the Lights on Power Plant Security Ratings
For years, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission made public how well nuclear power plants were performing on tests and inspections of plant security. But on August 4, the NRC announced that it had shut down that flow of information.
Citing concerns that terrorists could use information about security flaws, the NRC removed from its Web site previously posted reports on each of the nation's 64 nuclear power plants and stated it would no longer release updated information to the public. Where information was previously given on each plant under the category "Physical Protection," it now reads "Not Public." The information had been available at www.nrc.gov/NRR/OVERSIGHT/ASSESS/index.html.
"We need to blacken [hide] some of our processes so that our adversaries won't have that information," NRC official Roy Zimmerman told the Associated Press. See www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-Nuclear-Security.html.
But Public Citizen and other public interest groups say that by taking this action, the NRC is hiding rather harmless safety information from the communities that surround the power plants in addition to information that could be used to help stage an attack.
Brendan Hoffman, a specialist in nuclear issues at Public Citizen's Critical Mass Environment and Energy Program, said the information shutdown was almost certainly related to NRC's anticipated reactivation in November of its "force-on-force" exercises. In those exercises, mock terrorists stage commando-style attacks to probe for potential deficiencies in nuclear power plant defenses. Those exercises were suspended after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and have since been made more realistic.
Public Citizen also raised concerns about how useful some of the force-on-force tests would be. The private security firm Wackenhut has been hired to stage the mock attacks but is also contracted to guard nearly half of America's nuclear plants, which hardly gives the "attackers" an incentive to reveal weaknesses in plant defenses.
Posted 08-06-2004 5:53 PM EDT
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Justice Dept. Rescinds Order to Destroy Documents
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) ordered all federal depository libraries to destroy five DOJ documents, but then changed its mind when the American Library Association (ALA) vigorously objected.
The flap arose when the DOJ decided in June that five non-secret government documents had been mistakenly distributed to the 1,300 libraries around the country that store government documents. The documents deal with how citizens can retrieve items that the government has confiscated during an investigation. Two of the documents were the texts of U.S. laws.
The DOJ said the documents were for internal training use, were not "appropriate for external use," and should be destroyed.
ALA disagreed. It urged its members to contact Congress to oppose the DOJ move, and filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the withdrawn materials to underline its objection.
The Justice Department quickly reversed course, and declared Aug. 2 that it had rescinded the document-destruction order. Casey Stavropoulos, a DOJ spokesperson, told The Washington Post that while the department had not intended to share the five documents, "there wasn't sensitivity in the actual material that required removal from the library system."
The ALA says it's happy with that result, and has withdrawn its FOIA request.
To read the ALA's statement, click here.
Posted 08-05-2004 6:14 PM EDT
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