For the week of January 23 - 29, 2002

John Ashcroft: 
a danger to freedom

Commentary by DICK DORWORTH

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"Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity."

- Martin Luther King

 

"No government ought to be without censors; and where the press is free, no one ever will."

- Thomas Jefferson

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Martin Luther King believed, with good reason, that ignorance and conscientious stupidity were the foundation of racism and of the destruction of civil rights and basic freedoms.

King had a dream, but his worst nightmare would have been to have a man with the bigoted and racist ideas and record of John Ashcroft as Attorney General of the United States.

Thomas Jefferson believed in the principle that an informed citizenry is the foundation of a democracy. That is, Jefferson believed, with good reason, that a government not accessible and accountable to its citizens is not a democracy. John Ashcroft, the current U.S Attorney General is doing all in his considerable power to make our government less accessible and less and less accountable to its citizens. That is, you and me.

Ashcroft epitomizes the danger that King warned us about, and among his many assaults on the rights and freedoms of the people is his barely noted memo of October 12, 2001 which urges all federal agencies to stonewall Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by American citizens. More, he promised the support of the Department of Justice in defending these agencies in circumventing U.S. law. In the wake of Sept. 11, had Ashcroft emphasized that federal agencies need to pay closer attention to releasing information that might compromise the government’s mandate to safeguard our security, his memo would not be disturbing. But he asked them to take into account whether "institutional, commercial and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of the information." These interests have nothing to do with protecting America from terrorism.

The memo reads, in part, "When you consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect important records."

Ashcroft is a dangerous man.

FOIA was signed into law by Lyndon Johnson on July 4, 1966. Because the very idea of the law was (and is) unpopular with many entrenched federal officials, Washington insiders and career politicians for whom a free press is, at best, a nuisance, Johnson quietly signed the act into law on his Texas ranch, far from the capital and the media. Ever since, FOIA has been an invaluable aid in keeping the public informed, the press free, the government liable and politicians and public officials at least answerable, if not honest. Without FOIA, just to mention a few recent public revelations, it would not be public record the extent to which Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were involved in the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile in 1972, resulting in death, torture and jailing of thousands of innocent people. Nor would we know that Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger orchestrated the 1975 invasion of East Timor by Indonesian dictator Suharto, an act of terrorism that left 200,000 people dead. And FOIA allowed the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization, to publish the names of recipients of billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies, money intended to help small family farmers but which went mainly to large agricultural corporations. (Their Web site, www.ewg.org, is worth a visit.)

FOIA, like the press and freedom themselves, has not been perfect, but, as was intended, it has been a ragged tear in the cloak of secrecy our government (like all governments) tends to wrap around itself. FOIA supports the people’s right to know what its government, its officials and its agencies have done, are doing, and, therefore, might do. An uninformed populace is not free.

Thirty-five years later, because it has been the people’s most effective tool for holding the government accountable, John Ashcroft, quietly knifed FOIA and the American people’s freedom in the back, without a press conference or even a news release. His memo, for the most part, has received no coverage in the media or questioning from the Congress. Part of this is attributable to the enormous popularity President Bush is enjoying as a consequence of the war on terrorism. In the prevailing atmosphere of America, where criticism, dissent and open discourse (and freedom of information) is wrongly viewed by many as a lack of patriotism, the media, the Congress and the citizenry have been reluctant to question too closely the actions of its government. Fear of terrorism is no reason (or excuse) to protect government officials, agencies or policies from public scrutiny. Fear as an operating premise of public or private life is tyranny, and Ashcroft is using that fear to curtail the freedom of the press and the right of the people to shine the light of information into those dark holes of ignorance and conscientious stupidity that Ashcroft seems to favor.

Ashcroft is a dangerous man. Unfortunately, he is a bigger danger to American freedom than to international terrorism.

 

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