Bush wages unprecedented, systematic assault on openness

By PIERRE TRISTAM EDITORIAL VOICES Last updated: Jan 26, 03:58 AM

It took President Bush eight months and the attacks of Sept. 11 to "look presidential." It took him no time after that to start acting like an emperor who owed explanations to no one and who was owed deference by all. He was actually nowhere near presidential, despotism a-la-King George having been the Framers' opposite intent for the presidency. He was only back to his old corporate, imperious, secretive self, liberated by a cataclysmic event that would finally let him act the only way he feels comfortable.

Three weeks into his post-Sept. 11 reign he showed Congress exactly how imperious and secretive. It was the morning of Oct. 4. He was furious that a report in the Washington Post had revealed an FBI and CIA warning to members of Congress that more terrorist attacks were likely. A leak? Not exactly. Congressmen are briefed by government agencies all the time, or should be. It's up to them, as it should be, to decide whether and what to tell constituents through the media.

But not in Bush's world. He drafted an order stating that from then on only the Republican and Democratic leadership and the ranking chairmen of intelligence committees would be privy to sensitive law enforcement information and ordered his chief of congressional liaison, Nick Calio, to messenger the memo to his staff and to Capitol Hill.

As Bob Woodward, the Washington Post writer who'd co-authored the story of the Oct. 4 "leak," describes it in his recent book on the Bush White House, Calio told the president that "such a restriction would be a disaster" -- like cutting off oxygen to 527 of the 535 members of Congress."

"I don't care. Get it up there. This is what's going to happen," Bush ordered.

"Okay," said Calio, "But I just want to tell you that you can expect -- "

"I'm not defending it," Bush said. "Do you get the picture here? Get it up there to them, okay?"

"Fine," Calio said.

"It's tough s---," the president said, a foretaste of the profanities he would later unleash on Sen. Bob Graham, then chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In a later interview, Bush was just as candid when Woodward asked him if he thought he owed his own Cabinet any explanations: "Of course not. I'm the commander -- see, I don't need to explain -- I do not need to explain why I say things. That's the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something. But I don't feel like I owe anybody an explanation."

And that's just how the Bush administration governs, replicating the president's contemptuous attitude through a wholly new application of the don't ask, don't tell rule.

Secrecy has become a pathological impulse at every level of government. The president seals previous administrations' records sealed in spite of the law. The Justice Department orders Freedom of Information requests to be effectively denied. The vice president chairs a secret energy policy task force, then refuses to reveal his business links with members of the task force.

The Pentagon forbids universities conducting research for the military from involving foreigners or sharing any of the research, even among other researchers, without permission. Courts sanction the administration's secret detentions of "enemy combatants," of secret and open-ended detention of aliens deemed illegal and of secret deportation hearings.

The Homeland Security Department, now the second-biggest government agency, is created as a separate entity with its records and dealings with outside agencies, private or public, to be kept secret. And at every level, through every government news conference -- beginning with those at the White House, where the president has virtually shrugged off the expectation to give any -- mum's the word.

Ari Fleischer, the president's spokesman, is the face of this administration's facelessness: Evading, obfuscating, lying and when pressed, belittling questions to the point of scorn -- the "tough s . . ." response with the presidential seal of approval.

In 2001, Peggy Noonan, the columnist and Bush family publicist, called Bush's presidency a "return to civility." The columnist Marjorie Williams called it "flamboyant humility." And a few months later National Review called it "A Return to Modesty" in a fawning cover story in which Bush is described as "being civil, polite, unassuming, non-threatening, unobtrusive, attentive to law, and respectful of others." Of being, in short, precisely what he has not been.

The attitude stands in direct opposition to that of the reputedly uncivil Clinton White House. "The Clinton administration for all of its flaws made the dissemination of government information a positive value," says Steven Aftergood, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.

"They did so not simply rhetorically but in concrete, measurable terms. The whole infrastructure of government on the World Wide Web was created in the Clinton administration, and a nearly unimaginable 1 billion pages of historically valuable records were declassified."

Bush's systematic assault on openness, allegedly in the name of national security but in the service of a pathological need for secrecy, pre-dates Sept. 11, and will have damning consequences on democratic institutions and open government far outlasting any physical damage the likes of Osama bin Laden and his band of barbarians have inflicted. To fully appreciate the extent of the Bush assault to date, a systematic summary:

PRESIDENTIAL RECORDS ACT

On Jan. 20, 2001, the first batch from President Reagan's papers -- 68,000 documents -- should have been made public according to a 1978 law requiring that all documents from any given administration be made public 12 years after a president leaves office. Highly sensitive documents are exempt. On March 23, 2001, Alberto R. Gonzales, the White House counsel and a potential Bush nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, ordered the papers sealed for 90 days. The papers, incidentally, include those of Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush.

On Nov. 1, 2001, President Bush signed an executive order not only sealing the papers, but giving authority to past presidents, vice presidents or their close relatives to bar release of the papers. A bill was introduced in Congress to negate the order. It failed. It is likely to be introduced again this year. A private citizen has filed suit, challenging the legality of the executive order.

EX-GOVERNOR'S POPPY REFUGE

The November executive order wasn't Bush's first end-run around the Freedom of Information Act. When he became president, he shipped all his Texas governorship's papers to his father's presidential library at Texas A&M University.

By putting them in a federal institution, Bush was shielding the papers from Texas' quite liberal Public Information Act -- and shielding his years as governor from the kind of scrutiny that might have revealed the extent of his dealings with scandal-ridden corporations such as Houston-based Enron, or with the oil-and-gas lobby now fueling much of the White House's energy policies. The president, a former baseball executive, knows how to cover his bases.

CHENEY'S TASK FORCE

In 2001, Cheney chaired secret meetings with energy executives which helped formulate the administration's energy policy. For 10 months the Government Accounting Office, an arm of Congress, demanded to know who took part in the meetings. Cheney refused to yield.

The GAO sued and lost. A federal district court judge appointed by Bush less than a year earlier ruled that since the GAO had not suffered personally from Cheney's actions, the suit could not be considered. Cheney acted victorious.

U.S. Rep. John Dingell, the Michigan Democrat who suspects favoritism for Republican campaign donors taking part in the meetings, called it a cover-up. An appeal of the district court ruling is likely.

JUSTICE DEPARTMENT'S FREEZE

In 1993, President Clinton rescinded a 1981 rule that encouraged federal agencies to withhold information whenever there was "a substantial legal basis" for doing so, substituting a "presumption of disclosure" on all FOI requests.

On Oct. 12, 2001, Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed course. He returned to the 1981 presumption of secrecy.

"You can be assured," Ashcroft told staffers, "that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis."

Even if there is no legal basis for resisting an FOI request, there is also the bureaucratic basis for doing so: The backlog of pending FOI requests has grown from about 125,000 at the end of 1998 to about 170,000 at the end of 2001. Meanwhile, the Bush administration's mania to classify documents, and thus put them out of reach of FOI requests, has also reversed the previous administration's directive to declassify. By the end of the 2001 fiscal year, 261,000 were classified, an 18 percent increase from the previous year.

WEB BLACK OUT

In a memo dated Jan. 3, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered Pentagon officials to filter the content of military Web sites essentially the same way that Ashcroft's directive filters FOI requests. Anything deemed remotely sensitive, even if declassified, must not be posted.

Rumsfeld's memo is fresh. The censoring of taxpayer-funded government Web sites is old news. The Sept. 11 attacks were the justification behind shutting public access to loads of information previously available on the Internet.

Removing detailed maps of nuclear power plants that could be used by terrorists makes sense. But the Department of Energy has removed environmental impact statements informing local communities about the potential dangers posed by nuclear plants. It has ordered research arms such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory to delete entire databases from public access because it would have taken too long to filter and delete only sensitive information.

(In Florida, Gov. Jeb Bush signed a law closing public access to hospital security plans and information on emergency medical supplies. )

It is difficult to see how any of that information might have inspired a terrorist plot. It is easier to see how removing it from public access reduces the government's exposure to its own greatest fear: accountability.

CONTINUING TREND

Courts have backed the administration's indefinite imprisonment of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, without charge and without access to lawyers, ruling that constitutional guarantees don't extend to foreign territories. Courts have backed the administration's similar imprisonment of U.S. citizens in military brigs. Courts have also backed the government's indefinite imprisonment of non-citizens in the United States.

And an obscure, secret court has backed the administration's expansion, under the USA Patriot Act, of secret surveillance tactics on citizens and aliens alike. In short, once they invoke terrorism and national security, the Bush administration and its law enforcement complex are exempt from constitutional constraints, making their targets exempt from due process.

Other examples of compulsive secrecy abound, from gag orders on university researchers contracted by the military to the new Department of Homeland Security's exemption of many of its future activities from Freedom of Information scrutiny or open-meeting laws to the White House's obsessively stingy dealings with the press.

It is a pattern of silence and obstruction that transcends any emergency to the point of making a mockery of the reasoning behind the secrecy. Witness the experience of Steven Aftergood, the Project on Government Secrecy director, when he filed an FOI request for the 1947 budget of the CIA, the first year the agency was in operation. The 1997 budget totals were declassified. He figured 55-year-old budget totals would be, too. He figured wrong. Ashcroft's Justice Department denied the request. Aftergood is suing.

James Aune chuckles at the suggestion that Bush's compulsion for secrecy has much to do with the events of Sept. 2001. He experienced the Bush-family silencer firsthand in 1998 when then-Gov. Bush was running for re-election in Texas, an obvious warm-up for a presidential run. Aune kept a close ear on him. As a professor of speech communication at Texas A&M University, he remembered George H.W. Bush's dismal public speaking and wanted to see how Junior compared. Aune was surprised. Bush performed brilliantly during a debate the professor watched on C-SPAN, only the second debate in Bush's political career. It sounds improbable now, given a media subculture devoted to documenting W's Waterloos with English, but at the time the governor seemed to have stumbled on fluency, taming whatever gremlins had bedeviled the senior Bush's tongue.

Aune said as much when a Dallas Morning News reporter contacted him for an analysis of the debate. "Almost against my own better judgment, I thought he looked presidential," Aune told the reporter. W's demeanor was identical to his father's, he said. "But his father was so utterly inept as a public speaker. The governor seems to have corrected all that."

Those last two remarks spoke an indisputable truth about the father and should have flattered the son. Yet the remarks kicked off a minor scandal. At the time Aune was a researcher at the Center for Presidential Studies at the brand new George Bush School for Government and Public Affairs, then closely affiliated with Texas A&M. The governor's office was incensed that a faculty member had been critical of senior Bush, and asked that Aune be reprimanded.

It turned out not to have been the first time. Articles in the local paper and in Editor & Publisher, a newspaper industry trade weekly, revealed that the governor's office had on several occasions so pressured the school to silence critics that the Bush School director drafted a memo warning against causing "embarrassment to the Bush family" and raising the possibility of firings in case of a "failure to comply." The memo never actually reached faculty members. It didn't have to. It was printed in the local paper. The message was sent. Don't mess with the Bushes.

A minor, dated scandal that anticipates with chilling precision two co-dependent Bush family traditions: Loyalty and secrecy.

"As years have gone by I've just gotten madder and madder about it," Aune now says, his affiliation with the school long over (although he's just been promoted to full professor at A&M).

The Bush school, where W's governorship papers are stored in a wall of boxes, itself is no longer intimately affiliated with Texas A&M so much as a right-wing think pod on campus, a stand-alone institution closed to anyone ideologically left of the senior Bush, as Aune describes it, but not one lacking influence.

Robert Gates, the CIA chief under George H.W. Bush was its interim dean for three years. And when A&M went looking for a president of its own last spring, Gates managed to find himself as the sole finalist for the $300,000-a-year post. University professors grumbled about those appointments, too, citing the Bush family's undue influence and such. But they'd learned their lesson.

Tristam is a News-Journal editorial writer.