The Demise of FOIA and The Special Prosecutor (freepress. net)

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The Demise of FOIA and The Special Prosecutor

Soon after the Armstrong Williams scandal broke, Melanie Sloan of the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington(CREW) fired off Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to 22 federal agencies. Sloan is seeking official evidence of similar arrangements between the executive branch, PR firms and pundits. She faces an uphill challenge, though, as the Bush administration has thrown up a bureaucratic maze to prevent citizens from navigating this path to government transparency.

The Freedom of Information Act, signed into law by President Johnson in 1966, enshrined the public’s right of access to federal government records. It has since become the victim of a government that would rather cloak its operations behind a veil of secrecy.

In their 2004 annual report, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP) provide a rundown of actions taken by public officials to turn basic government information into state secrets. RCFP executive director Lucy Dalglish says that many Bush administration actions were designed to undermine the Act. Since September 11, 2001, rollbacks to access have included striking the release of names of terrorism-suspect detainees to library information on bodies of water. The change in attitude can be traced straight to the top, as seen in the policy statement released by Attorney General John Ashcroft in October 2001 that has come to be known as “The Ashcroft Memorandum.”

Dalglish writes: “A month and a day after the events of September 11, {Ashcroft} revoked what had been a seemingly permissive Clinton-era Freedom of Information Act instruction to federal agencies. He issued his own: a hard-nosed missive that promised agencies that if there were any ‘sound legal basis’ for withholding information from FOIA requesters, the Justice Department would support the withholding.”

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