Date:   4/7/2003 9:28:34 AM ( 21 y ago)
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Palm Beach Post Editorial
Monday, April 7, 2003



Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late four-term senator from New York, championed open government. So Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., probably was not alone in noticing that on the eve of Sen. Moynihan's death last week, the White House delayed the release of millions of government documents, most more than 25 years old and due for automatic declassification April 17.

Sen. Graham, a former chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, quoted on the Senate floor from one of Sen. Moynihan's 18 books, The Torment of Secrecy: The Background and Consequences of American Security Policies, which concluded: "A case can be made... that secrecy is for losers. For people who don't know how important information really is. The Soviet Union realized this too late. Openness is now a singular, and singularly American, advantage. We put it in peril by poking along in the mode of an age now past. It is time to dismantle government secrecy.... It is time to begin building the supports for the era of openness...."

President Bush's low regard for the public's right to know, however, is reflected not only in the excessively broad executive order that gives bureaucrats new authority to reclassify information. The administration's obsession with secrecy also has been seen in the failure to release details on the makeup of Vice President Dick Cheney's task force that shaped energy policy, in the attempt to limit intelligence briefings to only eight members of Congress because of a leak, and in the rescission of access to a president's records 12 years after he had left office. There have been such misguided trial balloons as the "Office of Strategic Lies," whose misinformation and secret propaganda campaign would have included missions in friendly and neutral nations. Secret detentions without charges or lawyers, meanwhile, have been institutionalized.

Sen. Graham warned, too, against "incestuous amplification," defined by Jane's Defense Weekly as "a condition in warfare where one only listens to those who are already in lock-step agreement, reinforcing set beliefs and creating a situation ripe for miscalculation." Against the backdrop of Iraq, the senator is correct that a fitting tribute to Sen. Moynihan would be recognition of the damage excessive secrecy exacts on the government's credibility, and a recommitment to trusting citizens to know the truth.

 

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