Hightower Lowdown

On the night of March 25, with none of the fanfare that usually accompanies a major policy decree, George W. issued a 10,000-word executive order that: (1) gives the government more discretion to keep information secret indefinitely, as long as it’s for “national security”; (2) gives the vice-president, for the first time, power to classify government information as secret; (3) treats all routine material sent to American officials by foreign governments as secret; (4) expands the ability of the CIA to keep its records secret; and (5) delays the release of old presidential records that would have been declassified automatically after 25 years.
In a formal statement, Bush claimed that he was acting to make government more open: “Our nation’s progress depends on the free flow of information,” he declared, apparently hoping that such high-minded rhetoric would deter anyone from reading deeper into this insidious document.
Like all autocrats, the Bushites don’t want anyone questioning their actions, so they routinely try to hide records from the public. To battle Bush’s lockdown, contact the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists at www.fas.org.