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Under the rule of the Bush Crime Family, alot of info that the press and the public could get from the FOIA has been curtailed. Many documents that used to be declassified have been reclassified as secret under the Bush warlord scheme of things.
PBS Frontline did an interview with Steven Aftergood, who directs the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. Here are a few excerpts of the interview.
[Tell me about the Information Security Oversight Office's study.]
The Information Security Oversight Office is an organization within the federal government that is responsible for overseeing classification and declassification activity throughout the government. Among their responsibilities, they produce a report annually which tabulates agency statistics on how much they have classified, how much they have declassified. They provide one of the few objective, statistical measures of changes in classification policy. Among other things, they have shown record growth in classification activity in this administration. The volume of new classified material has literally reached a record high in the Bush administration. Meanwhile, declassification activity, which was at record-high levels in the 1990s, has tapered off considerably. Records still do get declassified, but much more slowly than in the recent past.
Describe [the state secrets privilege] and how it's used under this administration.
The state secrets privilege is a privilege of the executive branch which permits it to block someone who is suing a government agency from obtaining information that is subject to the privilege. That's a roundabout way of saying that the state secrets privilege enables a government agency to withhold information from a litigant who is suing the government.
It is recognized by the courts that there are certain types of information that, if disclosed, would jeopardize national security, and the court permits a government agency to assert the privilege if it believes it is warranted. Now, what has happened in recent years is that the state secrets privilege is being invoked more and more frequently to block litigation.
It is not being used to prevent the disclosure of individual facts A, B or C, but instead to shut down entire proceedings. People who sue the government -- whether they are whistleblowers or they claim that they have suffered an injustice of one kind or another or even patent claims, patent-infringement claims -- a wide variety of cases have in effect been thrown out of court when the government invokes the state secrets privilege, as it has done increasingly in recent years. It is an alarming way of short-circuiting the judicial process, and not simply protecting one or two facts, but effectively closing the courthouse doors to cases that the government does not want to see tried.
Do you have an example of [the] state secrets privilege being used?
One of the most shocking cases to me in which the state secrets privilege was invoked was the case of Khaled al-Masri, who was allegedly kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and alleges that he was subjected to illegal detention and torture. Now, he filed suit against the Central Intelligence Agency, and the CIA said: "State secrets. This case cannot go forward because state secrets are involved."
As a consequence, this fellow, al-Masri, could not get his day in court. The judge said that it may well be that his claims, his allegations, are true; it may well be that he was tortured. But he will not be permitted to argue his case in court or to get a ruling on his allegations, because the CIA says state secrets are involved.
State secrets were well served by this case. Justice was explicitly not served. Justice was not done here. That, to me, is shocking.
[Take us through what happened with the Associated Press' attempt to cover Guantanamo.]
Yeah. In the course of covering Guantanamo Bay and the situation of the hundreds of detainees held there, the Associated Press was forced to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in order to gain access to the information it needed to report on the story. The government took the peculiar position that it could not disclose information about the detainees because their personal privacy would be compromised if it did so.
In the end, of course, much of what we know about Guantanamo Bay was disclosed thanks to that lawsuit. The government eventually conceded that such information could and should be disclosed. That is a great tribute to the power of the Freedom of Information Act. It's also, one could say, a disgrace that it was necessary to sue the government in order to gain access to such information. ...
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