Not such a secret that the boyz in the house...the white one have a huge hard-on for all things secret and spooky. Now, courtesy of the AG, John "I am not a racist" Ashcroft, our tax dollars get to be spent by the Justice Department keeping documents heretofore available to all of us under the decades-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) buried at more expense to all of us. Silly me, I thought our government was strapped for cash. Adam Clymer of the NY Times (remember him? one of BushCo's favorite reporters) has this story here's a nice little quote:
A telling example came in late 2001 when Attorney General John Ashcroft (news - web sites) announced the new policy on the Freedom of Information Act, a move that attracted relatively little public attention.
Although the new policy for dealing with the 1966 statute that has opened millions of pages of government records to scholars, reporters and the public was announced after Sept. 11, it had been planned well before the attacks. (italics are mine)
The Ashcroft directive encouraged federal agencies to reject requests for documents if there was any legal basis to do so, promising that the Justice Department would defend them in court. It was a stark reversal of the policy set eight years earlier, when the Clinton administration told agencies to make records available whenever they could, even if the law provided a reason not to, so long as there was no "foreseeable harm" from the release.
