Open Gov’T Act Does Not ‘Restore Presumption Of Openness’

The bill recently signed into law by George W. Bush does not change the flawed criteria for our current system of government secrecy. OPEN Gov’t Act Does Not ‘Restore Presumption Of Openness’By Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 10th, 2008George 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.Like what you’re reading so far? Then why not order a full year (52 issues) of thee-newsletter for only $15? 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