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Current | Special Report Archives Hiding the Truth?President Bush's Need-to-Know DemocracyBy Stephen Pizzo Download the Report (PDF) It's been said that the first casualty of war is always truth. But with the Bush administration's war on terrorism, it's hard to know, because even before 9/11 the administration had begun hermetically sealing formerly public sources of government information. It began when Vice President Dick Cheney refused to provide details of his energy task force meetings with energy companies, particularly top Enron officials. Then, came President George Bush's November 2001 executive order allowing the administration or former presidents to order executive branch documents withheld from the public. At the time, the administration said the new restriction on presidential papers was to protect the privacy of former presidents and those they dealt with while in office. But, the order also shields from public view documents from President Bush's father's term in office that could be awkward now. The suspicion was that the executive order was designed to protect several current White House officials who served in the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations from embarrassment --specifically, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Vice President Dick Cheney, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, and former Budget Director Mitch Daniels, Jr. Each official had brushes with controversial policies in earlier administrations -- not the least of which was the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. The elder Bush, then-Vice President, maintained he was "out of the loop." Documents in the Reagan archives might contradict that version of history. Both Cheney's refusal to hand over his energy task force documents, and the presidential order shielding past administrations' archived documents caused uproars among open-government advocates, historians and members of Congress. Most of that resistance melted away in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. A scared and rattled nation was told that information was potentially dangerous. During World War II, the admonition read, "Loose lips sink ships." After 9/11, the list of perceived dangers expanded to previously unclassified information from virtually every executive branch department. Any one of these actions would have had negligible effects. But, the cumulative effect of executive orders and new legislation restricting pubic access to public records has alarmed even many conservative groups. "This administration is the most secretive of our lifetime, even more secretive than the Nixon administration. They don't believe the American people or Congress have any right to information," said Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is suing the administration to force it to reveal the members of the energy task force. Gary Bass, executive director of OMB Watch, an independent public advocacy group, says that the United States, "is moving from a society based on the right to know to one based on the need to know." The breadth and scope of the Bush administration's clamp down on information is the largest such effort to restrict public disclosure since World War II. Because much of these changes have come in little-noticed dribs and drabs since 9/11, many have largely escaped public notice or explanation. In this report we chronicle some of the most significant changes. Download the Report (PDF) Please note you will need Adobe Acrobat to download the Special Report. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat, please click here to download it here. |
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