New Report-Executive Privilege Used to Expand Government Secrecy-Through Legally Dubious Assertions

[kpete]

Amid claims of executive privilege by President Bush in the firing of US attorneys, a bipartisan coalition of civil liberties groups has published a new report charging that the administration's stonewalling is simply part of a six-year pattern of unprecedented government secrecy.

Executive Privilege Used to Expand Government Secrecy
By William Fisher
t r u t h o u t | Report

Tuesday 31 July 2007

The report - "Government Secrecy: Decisions Without Democracy 2007" - was prepared by two advocacy groups - OpenTheGovernment.org and People For the American Way Foundation. It documents how executive power has dramatically expanded while executive accountability has diminished.

The report charges that "Over the past six years, President Bush has used executive orders to limit use of the Freedom of Information Act and Presidential Records Act, expanded the power to classify information for national security reasons, and created a range of new categories of "sensitive" information. In some cases, the government has gone so far as to reclassify documents that had been available to the general public for many years."

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Barr and Podesta charge that "In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the current administration has laid claim to a dramatic expansion of executive power, sometimes with Congressional approval, as with the Patriot Act, and sometimes through legally dubious assertions, as with the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program. At the same time, the administration has routinely withheld information that should be made public, thereby insulating itself from democratic accountability."

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It says that governments have "discovered that secrecy is a source of power and an efficient way of covering up the embarrassments, blunders, follies and crimes of the ruling regime. When governments claim that a broad secrecy mandate is essential to protect national security, they mostly mean that it is essential to protect the political interests of the administration. The harm to national security through breaches of secrecy is always exaggerated."

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/073107K.shtml

[fasttense]

1. Secrecy - a necessary tool of a dictatorship.

“The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy; the best weapon of a democracy is openness.” Edvard Teller