Sounds good so far, huh....the public's right to seek and receive information about what it's government is doing (disclosure of federal public records) is open government and supportive of the foundations of a democracy.
Well now that principle might just be going south, at least at the White House. In order to withhold information from the American public, the Post article says that the Bush administration has now:
...argued in court papers this week that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act [emphasis provided] as part of its effort to fend off a civil lawsuit seeking the release of internal documents about a large number of e-mails missing from White House servers.
Here's the background:
Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit group, filed a lawsuit in May seeking Office of Administration records about the missing e-mails, including when they were deleted from government computer files. CREW said it understood that internal White House documents had estimated at least 5 million e-mails were missing from March 2003 to October 2005....
Congress has sought access to them as part of its probe into the administration's firing of nine U.S. federal prosecutors in 2006.
Well it looks like one more blatant example of the President and the Department of Gonzales believing and arrogantly demonstrating that they are above the law and they will do anything to obstruct the public's right to know about its government.
The article concluded with this assessment by Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists:
"It's obnoxious, and it's a gesture of defiance against the norms of open government," Aftergood said. "But it turns out that a White House body can be an agency one day and cease to be one the next day, as absurd as it may seem."
The title of this diary was inspired by an old song frequently sung by the jazz great Ella Fitzgerald, "Undecided". Here's how it sounds.