The Bush Administration's War Against Open Government
by TChris
It is axiomatic that Supreme Court decisions are a matter of public record. If they weren't, they would be useless as precedent. Why, then, did the Justice Department classify as secret "a four-line quotation of a published Supreme Court decision"?
The culture of secrecy in government has flourished in the Bush administration. The NY Times reports that federal departments are "classifying documents at the rate of 125 a minute." What is it the Bush administration doesn't want you to know about its governance? Pretty much everything.
A record 15.6 million documents were classified last year, nearly double the number in 2001, according to the federal Information Security Oversight Office. Meanwhile, the declassification process, which made millions of historical documents available annually in the 1990's, has slowed to a relative crawl, from a high of 204 million pages in 1997 to just 28 million pages last year.
The administration's effort to avoid public scrutiny of its actions is so outrageous that even some Republicans are starting to complain.
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