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■"Psst. President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy: The Future of open government is now up for grabs," editorial by Dorothy Samuels, New York Times, 1 November 2004, p. A28.
Good bit about an expanding new security rule set coming out of the 9/11 experience that receives very little press coverage (hmm, must be because it's so secret!).
It is clearly true that the Bush Administration has gone hog wild in expanding the Cone of Government Silence in response to 9/11, which is a direct reversal of what Clinton did. Does that make one administration evil and the other good? Not exactly. It means we were more willing during the Clinton years to think America would not only do better economically but be safer security-wise in a global environment of greater openness. 9/11, not surprisingly, makes us collectively recoil from that vision, but the question is, For how long and how hard?
Did we get careless with info in the 1990s? Sure, it was happening all over society and the economy and government, and privacy was suffering plenty in the process. Now privacy suffers in a different way, or so it would seem (Now it's just the government that wants to know all about you? Come on! Business still does too!).
My problem with the extent and tone of this push for secrecy from the Bush Administration is that it so negatively dovetails with their close-mouthed tendencies in explaining themselves and their national security strategies, instead leaving it to the conspiracy theorists to fill in the many blanks. Of course, when you're as obsessed with secrecy as this White House has often been, what happens too often is that countries that are or should be your allies end up feeling really outside of the loop, which is what gets you the backlash we have today on Iraq, meaning not just the American people but the rest of the Core feel like they were sold a bill of goods on that one.
Samuels' last para says it all:
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.
Amen, sister.
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