Today's Article
The bill recently
signed into law by
George W. Bush does
not change the flawed
criteria for our current
system of government
secrecy.
The American Spark
OPEN Gov't Act Does Not 'Restore Presumption Of Openness'

By Cliff Montgomery - Jan. 10th, 2008

George W. Bush quietly signed into law on December 31st the "Openness Promotes Effectiveness in our
National (OPEN) Government Act of 2007." The new law is an amendment to the Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA).

The OPEN Government Act makes a number of much-needed, long-overdue changes to FOIA procedures.

The law finally enables FOIA requesters to track the current status of a disclosure request, and will empower a
requester to expand processing fee waiver proposals. It also will create a number of other new procedures
designed to hold government agencies accountable for processing FOIA requests in a timely manner.

But regardless of numerous claims in the corporate media, the version of the bill recently signed into law by
George W. Bush does
not change the flawed criteria for our current system of government secrecy.

Any records which legally were withheld by government bureaucrats before the enactment of this FOIA
amendment--however false their reasoning--may still be withheld from the American people.

But this fact didn't keep many of the supposed "heavy hitters" in the corporate media from incorrectly stating
just the opposite.

"The [OPEN Government Act]...restores a presumption of a standard that orders government agencies to
release information on request unless there is a finding that disclosure could do harm," wrongly asserted a
January 1st
Associated Press (AP) release published by The New York Times, The Washington Post, The
Wall Street Journal, USA Today and a host of other big media outlets.

"The legislation is aimed at reversing an order [issued] by former Attorney General John Ashcroft after the 9/11
attacks, in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty
about how doing so would affect national security," claimed the widely-published
AP story.  

But the new law in fact does not change that highly dubious Bush Administration order.

Most likely, the corporate media became confused on the issue because the original House legislation did
offer a repeal of the Ashcroft order, and further would have instituted that much-needed "presumption of
openness." But the provision which would have provided those measures was struck from the bill before its
passage.

That's why House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA)
regrettably noted during a December 18th speech on the floor of the House of Representatives that the final
version of the bill "does not include a provision which I thought was a key one: Establishing a presumption that
government records should be released to the public unless there is a good reason to keep them secret."

But not everyone was as keen on letting the American people know what its government is really doing in their
name.

Rep. Tom Davis (R-VA) is quite happy to keep Americans in the dark on Bush Administration activities.

He crowed his approval that "the provision repealing the so-called Ashcroft memorandum was eliminated...The
Ashcroft memorandum established that the administration would defend agency decisions to withhold records
under a FOIA exemption if the decision was supported by a sound legal basis, replacing the pre-9/11 Janet
Reno standard of always releasing information absent foreseeable harm."

But Rep. Davis is engaging in a favorite Bush Administration logical fallacy: The
Argument from Ignorance. This
deliberate falsehood states that if something cannot be proven true, it is therefore necessarily false (and vice
versa).

In short, Davis re-iterates the rhetorical basis for Ashcroft order, in claiming that if American citizens cannot
prove in a court of law that the Bush Administration is unfairly keeping data secret, we must presume that the
data has been fairly and accurately made secret for our own good.

But since the proof of intent is itself often within the very data declared "secret", the Ashcroft order gives a
practically unchecked authority to the Bush White House--indeed, to
any White House--to suppress almost
any information it pleases under the veil of "national security".

However, the need for a more open government formed an essential part of the 9/11 Commission's learned
recommendations.

That bipartisan panel revealed the error of undue government secrecy. Far from protecting America, such
secrecy helped to create a lack of intelligence oversight which ultimately made it easier for al-Qaeda to attack
the United States, the panel discovered.

When facts are kept from the American people for no clear reason, far too often it then becomes  "hard to
judge priorities and foster accountability," stated the famed 9/11 Commission report.

Thus a government no longer accountable to its people does not protect its people. Such a government is no
longer even a democracy, but simply a tyranny--one all the more tyrannical because its dictatorship derives
from the false claim that its unchecked power somehow keeps us safe.

But with government, citizen safety
is the accountability of its politicians.



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