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"Disappeared" Info: The List Still Grows
This week we've been tallying up all the instances Bush administration officials have attempted to remove data from the public record or block its publication, particularly if it was in conflict with White House policy.
Thanks to the help of readers, fellow bloggers and watchdog organizations, we've by now counted over 20 examples: databases pulled from public view, reports suppressed, studies de-funded and more, in areas like climate change, unemployment, poverty and the Iraq war.
You can find the growing list here. Know of another instance? Let us know.
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Comments (144)
Spoon wrote on December 21, 2006 10:51 PM:Elimination of the M3 report on money supply in 2006. It is allowing a flood of currency to be printed (now being done) and kills the report which would first detect the excess of currency and resulting inflationary effects domestically.
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 8:45 AM:From 'The Great Wealth Transfer' by Paul Krugman in this month's Rolling Stone http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12699486/paul_krugman_on_the_great_wealth_transfer/5
"Furthermore, the administration has engaged in a systematic campaign of disinformation about whose taxes have been cut. Indeed, one of Bush's first actions after taking office was to tell the Treasury Department to stop producing estimates of how tax cuts are distributed by income class -- that is, information on who gained how much. Instead, official reports on taxes under Bush are textbook examples of how to mislead with statistics, presenting a welter of confusing numbers that convey the false impression that the tax cuts favor middle-class families, not the wealthy."
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 8:54 AM:For years, a citizen who wanted to know the name and phone number of a Pentagon official could buy a copy of the Defense Department directory at a government printing office. But since 2001, the directory has been stamped ''For Official Use Only," meaning the public may not have access to such basic information about the vast military bureaucracy.
(From the Boston Globe's article 'In war's name, public loses information')
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/04/24/in_terror_wars_name_public_loses_information/
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 8:56 AM:"After a 1984 chemical plant accident killed 20,000 people in Bhopal, India, Congress in 1986 passed the Emergency Planning & Community Right to Know Act, giving Americans the right to know if they lived downwind from dangerous chemicals. Until 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency posted on its website each plant's plans for dealing with a disaster, leading to public pressure on the chemical industry to maintain safer conditions. The database has been removed from the website for security reasons."
(From the Boston Globe's article 'In war's name, public loses information')
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/04/24/in_terror_wars_name_public_loses_information/
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 9:00 AM:"In another recent case, Human Rights Watch earlier this month (April 2005) found an unclassified draft of a new policy on a Defense Department website. The document proposed holding suspected Iraqi insurgents without trial in the same way that accused Taliban members have been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay.
After Human Rights Watch denounced the idea, the Pentagon took down its entire electronic library of unclassified documents, including many hundreds of unrelated papers. The military later put part of the website back up, but dozens of unrelated documents that were previously available to the public are still gone."
(From the Boston Globe's article 'In war's name, public loses information')
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 9:04 AM:"Last month, Representative Edward J. Markey, Democrat of Malden, asked the inspector general of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to examine whether the agency was using security threats as a ''pretext to prevent the public from accessing documents that do not pose a security risk." The inspector general agreed last week to launch an investigation.
Markey contended that the commission had blocked the public from viewing unclassified nuclear information, so that only members of the industry were able to discuss regulatory changes with the government. For example, the NRC recently withheld a National Academy of Sciences report challenging the idea that the industry-preferred way of storing spent nuclear fuel rods was safe from terrorism, prompting Markey to accuse the agency of suppressing information ''based on the fact that it disagrees with the conclusions, not on any legitimate security" fears"
(From the Boston Globe's article 'In war's name, public loses information')
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 9:10 AM:"Under a Clinton administration policy, FOIA officers were supposed to operate with a ''presumption of disclosure" unless it was ''reasonably foreseeable that disclosure would be harmful."
But in October 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft reversed course, instructing agencies to withhold information unless there was no ''sound legal basis" for doing so.
This policy discourages the release of information because few people are willing to go to the trouble of filing a lawsuit. The administration has also stretched the legal definitions of what is exempt, making FOIA exceptions for documents that would invade personal privacy or reveal internal agency procedures apply more sweepingly.
For example, Forbes Magazine reported in July 2004 that the Justice Department cited ''unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" in rejecting an FOIA request for press releases it had already issued concerning terrorism-related indictments."
(From the Boston Globe's article 'In war's name, public loses information')
PurpleK1 wrote on December 22, 2006 9:20 AM:"The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive."
In a 1971 appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird offered a chart showing, among other things, that the United States had 30 strategic bomber squadrons, 54 Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,000 Minuteman missiles.
Those numbers, made public on March 9, 1971, are redacted in a copy of the chart obtained by the archive's researchers in January as part of a declassified government history of the U.S. air and missile defense system, according to archive officials.
"It's yet another example of silly secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director.
In another case, Burr cited two declassified copies of a 75-page memo on military policy issues that Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, one obtained from the National Archives in 1999 and the other from the Pentagon this year.
In the 2006 copy, Pentagon reviewers blacked out numbers that were left untouched in the earlier version, including the number of ballistic missile launchers and the number of heavy bombers the United States expected to have in 1965, 1967 and 1970.(Comparative numbers for the Soviet Union were left alone.)
Burr also compared two copies of a memo that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote for President Gerald R. Ford for a 1974 National Security Council meeting on arms control negotiations.
One copy, obtained from the NSC through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1999, has visible references to "200 older B-52 bombers" and 240 Trident missiles, among other weapons data. In the second copy, released by the Gerald R. Ford Library in May 2006, such information is blacked out -- as is similar data for the Soviet Union.
Experts say there is no national security reason for the administration to keep such historical information under wraps -- especially when it has been publicly available for years.
Robert S. Norris, a senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said U.S. officials handed more detailed accounts of the U.S. nuclear arsenal over to the Soviets as part of the two Strategic Arms Reduction Treaties (START) and the two Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) agreements in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.
"Is that now going to be reclassified?" asked Norris. "I would say that the horse is out of the barn and they are only making themselves look ridiculous. At someone's direction, declassification reviewers have gotten carried away and are applying the rather vague and open-ended guidelines to the point of absurdity."
(From 'Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout' in the Washington Post)
Alison wrote on December 23, 2006 2:53 AM:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/20/AR2006082000625.html
The clampdown on the USGS may not be as bad as we first heard. I think it's worth talking to some insiders, who may know more than they did at first. I am hearing more nuanced rumors.
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