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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

This thankfully-almost-over presidential campaign will be remembered in 
different ways by different partisans. Adjectives such as unfair, odious, 
undignified and shameful seem naive, unsophisticated, old-fashioned, and 
worse, inadequate. I will remember it as a jerky grade-B movie, with as 
many dishonorable as uplifting moments.

I will remember it as falling short of open discourse about important 
matters. We the people endured mundane matters so trivial as to be 
nonsensical. We were treated to columnists discussing the opinions of other 
columnists who were rapt over the words of TV talking heads and radio show 
hosts, who led us down the back alleyways, the underbelly of the political 
beast. The media appears to be seeking its lowest commercially acceptable 
level.

One of the issues in need of an open airing that never made it to 
mainstream discussion is secrecy in government. Our form of government only 
works when we the people know what's going on, so we can keep an eye on 
what our leaders are doing, so we can follow the Jeffersonian admonition 
that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance.

We are the poorer for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/01/opinion/01mon4.html

EDITORIAL OBSERVER

Psst. President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy

By DOROTHY SAMUELS

Published: November 1, 2004

It is only inevitable, I suppose, that some big issues never make it onto 
the agenda of a presidential campaign, and other lesser issues, or total 
nonissues, somehow emerge instead. Electoral politics, as Americans are 
regularly being reminded these final hard-fought days before the election, 
is a brutal, messy business, not an antiseptic political science exercise.

That said, I hereby confess to feeling disappointed over Senator John 
Kerry's failure to home in hard on one of the more worrisome domestic 
policy developments of the past four years - namely the Bush 
administration's drastic expansion of needless government secrecy.

President Bush's antipathy to open government continues to garner only a 
trivial level of attention compared with the pressing matters that seem to 
be engaging the country at the moment, including, in no particular order, 
the Red Sox, Iraq, terrorism, taxes and the mysterious iPod-size bulge 
visible under the back of Mr. Bush's suit jacket at the first debate. But 
the implications for a second term are ominous.

Beyond undermining the constitutional system of checks and balances, undue 
secrecy is a proven formula for faulty White House decision-making and 
debilitating scandal. If former President Richard Nixon, the nation's last 
chief executive with a chronic imperial disdain for what Justice Louis 
Brandeis famously called the disinfecting power of sunlight, were alive 
today, I like to think he'd be advising Mr. Bush to choose another role model.

As detailed in a telling new Congressional report, Mr. Bush's secrecy 
obsession - by now a widely recognized hallmark of his presidency - is 
truly out of hand.

The 90-page report, matter-of-factly titled "Secrecy in the Bush 
Administration," was released with little fanfare in September by 
Representative Henry Waxman of California, the ranking Democrat on the 
House Committee on Government Reform, and one of the most outspoken critics 
of the Bush administration's steady descent into greater and greater 
secrecy. The objective was to catalog the myriad ways that President Bush 
and his appointees have undermined existing laws intended to advance public 
access to information, while taking an expansive view of laws that 
authorize the government to operate in secrecy, or to withhold certain 
information.

Some of the instances the report cites are better known than others. Among 
the more notorious, of course, are the administration's ongoing refusal to 
disclose contacts between Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force 
and energy company executives, or to explain the involvement of Mr. 
Cheney's office in the awarding of huge sole-source contracts to 
Halliburton for Iraq reconstruction; the post-9/11 rush to embrace 
shameful, unconstitutional practices like secret detentions and trials; and 
the resistance and delay in turning over key documents sought by the Sept. 
11 commission.

The report lists many other troubling examples as well. Mr. Bush and his 
appointees have routinely impeded Congress's constitutionally prescribed 
oversight role by denying reasonable requests from senior members of 
Congressional committees for basic information. They forced a court fight 
over access to the Commerce Department's corrected census counts, for 
instance, withheld material relating to the prison abuses at Abu Ghraib and 
stonewalled attempts to collect information on meetings and phone 
conversations between Karl Rove, the presidential adviser, and executives 
of firms in which he owned stock. The administration has also taken to 
treating as top secret documents previously available under the Freedom of 
Information Act - going so far as to reverse the landmark act's presumption 
in favor of disclosure and to encourage agencies to withhold a broad, 
hazily defined universe of "sensitive but unclassified" information.

Under a phony banner of national security, Mr. Bush has reversed reasonable 
steps by the Clinton administration to narrow the government's capacity to 
classify documents. Aside from being extremely expensive, the predictably 
steep recent increase in decisions to classify information runs starkly 
counter to recommendations of the Sept. 11 commission geared to 
strengthening oversight of the intelligence agencies.

Not one for self-criticism - or any kind of criticism, for that matter - 
President Bush says he's content to leave it to historians to assess his 
presidential legacy. What he fails to mention is that he has seriously 
impeded that historical review by issuing a 2001 executive order repealing 
the presumption of public access to presidential papers embedded in the 
1978 Presidential Records Act.

On a superficial level, the hush-hush treatment of this issue on the fall 
campaign trail might seem perversely fitting. But Mr. Bush's unilateral 
rollback of laws and practices designed to promote government 
accountability surely rates further scrutiny by voters. We've learned over 
the last four years that what we don't know can hurt us.