Washington Post

12/23/03

Under Bush, Expanding Secrecy

By Dana Milbank

It was a banner week for government secrecy.

Last Monday, the Supreme Court announced it would consider an effort by
Vice President Cheney to keep private the records of the energy policy
task force he ran. On Friday, the White House announced that it has
known for two weeks about an attack on a convoy carrying Iraq
administrator L. Paul Bremer -- but had decided not to divulge the
information. Later that day, President Bush announced a disarmament deal
with Libya reached during nine months of secret negotiations.

Also last week, it emerged that the government was acting to keep more
Pentagon information out of the public domain and that it has removed
from the U.S. Agency for International Development Web site remarks by
an administration official that had badly understated the cost of Iraqi
reconstruction.

In the meantime, however, the chairman of the federal Sept. 11, 2001,
commission, in remarks released last week, criticized needless
government secrecy.

"I've been reading these highly, highly classified documents. In most
cases, I finish with them, I look up and say, 'Why is this classified?'" said the chairman, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, a Republican.

"And so one of the things that I hope is that maybe out of our work and
maybe others, a lot of these documents that are classified, will be
unclassified."

Well, governor, keep hope alive. But don't bet on it. As last week's
events and discoveries make clear, the Bush administration seems to be
going in the other direction. The administration has been unusually
successful keeping its policy deliberations out of public view, and
millions of government documents -- including many historical records
previously available -- have been removed from the public domain.

Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists'
Project on Government Secrecy, says it is nothing less than a "mutation
in American politics" away from open government. "There is an
unwholesome change in the deliberative process unfolding before our
eyes," he said.

"These are not technicalities. These are fundamental issues of American
government that are now up for grabs."

Last week showed the full range of government secrecy efforts, from the
universally accepted to the hotly disputed.  At one extreme was the Libya
announcement -- even the strongest proponents of open government say it
is useful to handle such sensitive negotiations in secret, because a
premature exposure of the talks could have scuttled an agreement.  At the
other end was the Cheney energy task force -- the vice president, sued
by liberal and conservative groups, has fought the release of the
information even though he has not invoked executive privilege or cited
national security concerns.

The administration, of course, sees it differently. Justice Department
spokesman Mark Corallo last week called the energy case "critical to the
effective functioning of the presidency and the vice presidency."

The Libya case shows why "it's perfectly acceptable to keep certain
things secret," said Morton Halperin, a former Clinton State Department
official now with the liberal Center for American Progress.

"The government should be able to presumptively keep secret diplomatic
negotiations, war plans and weapons systems."

But Halperin brands other actions "Orwellian," including the decision
to wait two weeks before disclosing that Bremer's convoy was attacked.

"A day or two you could understand," he said. "Two weeks? It's part of
an effort to portray things as getting better when they're not."

After the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq on Friday
confirmed a report of the attack, White House press secretary Scott
McClellan acknowledged that the White House had previously known about
the attack but chose not to disclose it.  Asked why, McClellan repeatedly
said: "Talk to the Coalition Provisional Authority."

Just as the White House was preparing to reveal the secret Libya
negotiations, Defense Week published a Dec. 5 memo from the Pentagon's
Office of the Inspector General. "Pending a more thorough review," it
said, "the following classes of information will not be available to the
general public via the OIG DoD Web site."

The list included not just the usual exemptions for classified,
national security or "official use only" information but also two new,
and potentially broad, restrictions: "Information not specifically
approved for public release," and "information of questionable value to
the general public."