From The Salt Lake Tribune, 8/7/05:
http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_2922649
What's the Bush administration hiding? Everything!
By Robyn Blumner
Tribune Media Services
President Bush has made it a point to bring as much opacity to his
administration as possible.
To Bush, the public has a right to know . . . very little.
His White House is downright allergic to open government.
We saw it with the John Bolton nomination.
Bush claimed he wanted his nominee as U.S. ambassador to the United
Nations to receive an up or down vote in the Senate, but not enough to
turn over the State Department documents that would have brought light
to some of Bolton's controversial actions.
Had that material been released, the Democrats blocking Bolton's
confirmation promised to let a vote go forward.
But Bush would rather snub the Senate and appoint Bolton during a
congressional recess than let the public see the truth of Bolton's
record.
No matter where you look, secrecy is the impulse:
From the decree by former Attorney General John Ashcroft encouraging
denials of records under the Freedom of Information Act by promising
that any defensible refusal would be supported by his office;
to the president's executive order overriding parts of the
Presidential Records Act, so that records from past administrations
can be indefinitely hidden at the behest of past or current presidents
and vice presidents.
To give you an idea of how resistant the administration is to open
records, during Bill Clinton's presidency, documents were declassified
at a significant clip:
204 million in fiscal year 1997 alone.
In the 2003 fiscal year, the last year for which numbers are
available, only 43 million documents were declassified.
Everything's a secret except, of course, the identity of a covert CIA
operative whose husband went off script.
Keeping the public in the dark allows the advance of a political
agenda without messy facts interfering with the administration's
manipulated ones.
When Richard Foster, a top government Medicare cost analyst,
determined that adding a prescription drug benefit to Medicare would
cost $551 billion over 10 years and not the $395 billion figure
supplied to Congress, he was threatened with firing if he revealed the
discrepancy.
When, last month, an Environmental Protection Agency report on our
poor national efforts at fuel economy would have brought inopportune
news for the administration just before a vote on the energy bill in
Congress, the report was simply pulled until after the vote.
This is all part of a pattern that is illustrative of Bush's view of
the office he holds.
Bush's arrogant swagger is more than a cowboy affectation; it is a
state of mind.
To Bush, being president is not an act of public service in which you
are accountable to the press and the people and are limited by the
power of two other governmental branches.
It is the anointing of a regent for a four- or eight-year stint.
That includes the ability to imprison people at will, to offer
untruths without compunction as justifications for war and to spend
the entire treasury (and more) without worrying about the
consequences.
In that now-famous press-conference question, Bush was unable to
identify a single mistake he had made as president, because monarchs
don't err.
Currently, despite a court order to do so, the Defense Department is
refusing to turn over 87 photographs and four videos taken at Abu
Ghraib that depict additional acts of depravity against Iraqi
detainees.
A federal judge had ordered the department to make the pictures public
with the identities of the subjects redacted.
But the department let the deadline for release come and go, claiming
that the photos are so incendiary that they could put lives in danger.
The photos could also provoke Congress to hold more hearings and add
safeguards against abusive interrogation practices - something
Republican senator and former POW John McCain is attempting to do over
the loud objections of Bush and Vice President ***** Cheney - or they
could spur momentum for chartering an independent commission to
investigate all abuse allegations.
This is really what the administration is afraid of.
Bush has promoted nearly everyone with fingerprints on the
now-repudiated torture memos.
He doesn't want new, horrific pictures to excite public interest in
the issue.
The latest skirmish over transparency involves the work of Judge John
Roberts Jr. when he was a deputy solicitor general under the first
President Bush.
Senate Democrats have asked for his work product on 16 key cases that
would open a window into Roberts' legal philosophy at the time.
He is, after all, under consideration for a lifetime appointment to
one of the most powerful posts in the country.
No go, says Bush.
No surprise, say I.
__________________________________________________________________
"The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy"
Niels Bohr
Harry
.
|
