Bush closes door on open access

c-n.com

Despite the Bush administration’s dismal record on privacy, there is still one area of privacy that it zealously safeguards — its own.

The number of documents that have been listed as “secret” jumped from 9 million in 2001 to 16 million in 2004. Moreover, this same administration has granted the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Agriculture and the Health and Human Services Department the power to classify any of their documents as “secret.” (I guess the purpose was to keep such vital information from falling into the hands of terrorists who might try, for example, to blow up a silo or two in the Midwest.)

In that same period, thousands of unclassified documents have been purged from government Web sites and the National Archives. In 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft instructed federal agencies to “resist” Freedom of Information Act requests whenever they could find legal grounds to do so.

If information is the oxygen of democracy (the system President Bush is trying to install in Iraq), the Bush administration seems to be doing everything in its power to cut off the supply here in the good old USA.

Hail O mighty defender of the Constitution.