RESTRICTING PUBLIC ACCESS TO PUBLIC INFORMATION


(June 2, 2006) Salmon are now the latest threat to national security.

The Bush Administration has continually pursued policies aimed at restricting access to, and the flow of, information.

As Representative Henry Waxman, (D-CA) put as early as several years ago, the Bush Administration:

"has repeatedly rewritten laws and changed practices to reduce public and congressional scrutiny of its activities. The cumulative effect is an unprecedented assault on the laws that make our government open and accountable."  

A related development has been the excessive use by the current administration of so called "Presidential signing statements." Not only has President Bush used such tactics to change congressional laws far more than most of his predecessors combined, he has often used them in a fundamentally different manner.

For example, one of the administration's signing statements changed a law that said this:

When requested, scientific information ''prepared by government researchers and scientists shall be transmitted [to Congress] uncensored and without delay."

To one that said this:

The President can tell researchers to withhold any information from Congress if he decides its disclosure could impair foreign relations, national security, or the workings of the executive branch.

Of course, "workings of the executive branch," ultimately means any information that the administration wishes to withhold. This changes a congressional law to the effect that scientific information shall be transmitted to Congress, to one that says "at the executive branch's discretion," essentially rendering the law itself null and void.

A similar, far more egregious example of the excessive use of such signing statements, is found here.

The general, and very anti-democratic "information control" approach of the Bush Administration has affected topics far and wide. For example, the administration has reportedly sought to even control what government climate change information is publicly shared, and has even allegedly altered the accuracy of related reports.

Now such heavy handed approach to information sharing apparently even extends to salmon. The fish. In an article on the bottom of page a17, Washington Post reporter Blaine Harden writes:

The Washington office of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration -- the agency responsible for protecting endangered salmon -- has instructed its representatives and scientists in the West to route media questions about salmon back to headquarters. Only three people in the entire agency, all of them political appointees, are now authorized to speak of salmon, according to a NOAA employee who has been silenced on the fish (emphasis added).

The order was issued the day after an article appeared last month in The Washington Post quoting federal technocrats making positive statements about two recent decisions -- one by a federal judge, the other by federal scientists -- that challenged previous Bush administration policy about protecting salmon in the troubled Klamath River, which flows out of Oregon into California.

The underlying presumption in all of this is that the public can not be trusted with even basic science information, or be trusted to know what information is relevant. 

A lot of countries have been founded upon this principle.  Just none of them democracies.