JACKSON - On the freedom of information front, the state of Mississippi last week was doing much better than the administration in Washington in protecting the people's right to know.
We advocates of open government in Mississippi were greatly encouraged last week that a bill was passed by the Legislature strengthening the 1975 Open Meetings Law and signed into law by the governor.
The new state measure provides a civil penalty on local or state governmental bodies that arbitrarily bar the public and press from their meeting.
On the national level, meantime, there's mounting evidence that the right of Americans to know what is going on in their federal government is being trampled almost daily by the Bush administration.
And the Bushies seem to be getting away with it while the nation's attention is focused on the war in Iraq. Before that, the panic that gripped the nation after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 was used as a pretext to curb press freedom.
Just last week, President Bush quietly signed an executive order which makes it easier for government agencies, including the White House, to keep documents classified and hidden from the public.
Amazingly, the executive order also gives unprecedented power to Vice President Dick Cheney to also classify documents. This comes after we've already seen some classic instances of how Cheney's disdain for governmental openness can work to the detriment of the American people.
More about Cheney later.
Bush's latest move to keep more government documents out of public view is further evidence of his obsession with secrecy.
Veteran reporters in Washington say that the Bush administration is the most secretive they have ever encountered, and it didn't just start with 9/11.
A chronological case study of the Bush administration's slamming the doors on public access to information since 9/11 has just been published by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the national organization of reporters and editors dedicated to defending First Amendment rights of journalists.
The 30-member Reporters Committee is certainly no recently created collection of journalistic malcontents. Begun 27 years ago in response to the Watergate cover-ups, its membership includes such luminaries as Tom Brokaw, Walter Cronkite, Peter Jennings and Dan Rather and noted political cartoonist Chip Bok of the Akron, Ohio, Beacon.
I'm honored that for 12 years, I've been the only member from the Deep South, even though I can rarely attend a full committee meeting, usually held in Washington.
Attorney General John Ashcroft has frequently been cited by Reporters Committee reports as a key culprit in the administration's steady chipping-away of existing freedom of information (FOI) guarantees.
Ashcroft on Oct. 12, 2001, virtually muzzled federal agencies by revoking prior Justice Department policies that gave them discretion to release information.
Three weeks later, Bush signed an executive order which impounds indefinitely the release of former presidents' papers, which normally are opened 12 years after an administration ends.
The order effectively sealed such important documents as those which could implicate Bush's father and his role in the 1980s Iran-Contra scandal. Then the elder Bush was Ronald Reagan's vice president.
Also kept out of the hands of reporters or other researchers are the documents drawn up by a small cabal of war hawks high up in the first Bush administration that initially pushed the idea of a pre-emptory strike and military invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam Hussein and then remake the entire Arab world in America's image.
That plan was shelved as too extreme by the first President Bush during his last year in office. But it was resurrected by its same adherents who are now highly placed in the younger Bush's administration and are the basis for the present military invasion of Iraq.
Dick Cheney had been known as an enemy of press freedom all the way back to the 1974-76 administration of President Gerald Ford, when he was Ford's chief of staff.
Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, also a top assistant in the Ford White House, had convinced Ford to veto the landmark 1975 Freedom of Information Act passed by Congress. The Ford veto was promptly overridden by Congress.
Thus, it was not surprising that Cheney, after becoming vice president in 2001, kept the public in the dark on the makeup and workings of an energy task force he convened in response to the major electric power blackouts in California.
Although names of his task force were kept secret, leaks coming out of it indicated most were Cheney's old energy company cronies when he was CEO of the energy giant Halliburton.
The General Accounting Office went to court to force disclosure of the energy task force's records, but the Bush administration blocked the GAO from pursuing the court action, reportedly by having congressional Republicans threaten to cut the budget of the watchdog agency.
Cheney reported that his task force found that state environmental regulations were the main cause for California's electric crisis. He turned out to be dead wrong.
But the American people didn't find out until three weeks ago, when the Federal Energy Regulation Commission concluded, with a mountain of evidence, that market manipulation by energy companies caused the crisis. The commission ordered them to pay back $3 billion to California.
The Reporters Committee fears there's an onslaught in this administration to methodically roll back the 1980 Privacy Protection Act that specifically prohibits searching or seizing reporters' work products.
Government authorities last September had intercepted a package containing copies of investigative materials sent via FEDEX from one AP reporter in Manila to another AP reporter in Washington in connection with stories the two were doing on terrorism. The package was turned over to the FBI without notifying the reporters.
The AP has said it had only learned about confiscation of the package in early March after asking FEDEX to trace the missing package. The FBI is yet to return it to the AP.
The documents, said the AP, contained information previously disclosed in two court proceedings of cases growing out of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Previously, in May 2001, the Department of Justice had subpoenaed home phone records of John Solomon of the AP Washington Bureau to discover his confidential source in the investigation of then U.S. Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey.
The AP reporter didn't learn about the subpoena until three months later, and by then his phone records had been seized.
And we thought Ashcroft and the Bush administration were waging a war on terrorism, not our preciously guarded free press in America!
