Home of bank president ransacked by ALF

Jan. 5— In an anonymous message to the Animal Defense League, the underground direct action organization “ALF”, or Animal Liberation Front, claimed responsibility for a night-time attack on the New York City home of Stephens Incorporated president, Warren Stephens on January 3.

In January of 2001, Stephens Inc. provided a $33 million bailout package to Huntingdon Life Sciences (HLS), saving them from certain foreclosure. HLS is responsible for the deaths of 180,000 animals each year. At any given time over 70,000 beagles, primates, and other animals lie listlessly in puddles of their own congealed blood and vomit, and each day over 500 animals die within the walls of HLS. HLS contracts to corporations such as Monsanto, Glaxo Smithcline, Bristol Meyers, Dow, Dupont Chemical, Dutch Shell Oil, and Novartis. These companies have often come under fire by animal rights, human rights, and environmental groups for sponsoring environmentally destructive, unethical, and violent practices.

In their communique, the ALF descibed their actions: “After scoping out the area, we jumped over (Warren Stephens) gate to gain access to the front of the house. We quickly smashed out his porch lights and windows, and as an alarm went off, plastered the front of his house with over fifteen paint bombs. We then spray painted PUPPY KILLER on the sidewalk and ran off. We don’t know how Warren lives with himself, or how he sleeps at night knowing the blood of innocent animals is on his hands. We hope this action has made it even more difficult for him to rest. We’ll be back.”

Source: Long Island Animal Defense League

Pentagon seeking large increase in next budget

By James Dao

Washington, DC, Jan. 6— The Pentagon is pushing for a substantial increase, in the range of $20 billion or more, for its 2003 budget, senior military officials say.

Even as Congress is projecting a budget deficit next year, the Pentagon is arguing that it will need significantly more money to cover stockpile precision-guided munitions and accelerate an array of big-ticket programs, including fighter jets and warships.

Senior military and Congressional officials have said the increase will be about $20 billion over the current $329 billion Pentagon budget, or about 6 percent, after adjusting for inflation.

The new request comes in an economic downturn, when other federal agencies are being told to trim spending to balance declining tax revenues.

The proposed increase for the 2003 Pentagon budget will not cover the costs of fighting the war in Afghanistan or tightening defenses against terrorism in the United States, which include fighter jet patrols over some American cities. Those costs will continue to be financed by emergency budget supplements.

Congress has already allocated $17.5 billion in emergency money for the Pentagon since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But Under Secretary of Defense Dov S. Zakheim, the Pentagon comptroller, said the Pentagon would need another major infusion of emergency money by late winter.

That is because the cost of the war, estimated at nearly $2 billion a month, is not expected to decline soon and may rise, Dr. Zakheim said.

Senior uniformed officers have also complained privately that a $20 billion increase will not be enough, officials say, raising the likelihood that they will lobby Congress for more money.

Source: New York Times

Federal judge invalidates Bush union order

Washington, DC, Jan. 7— A federal judge has struck down an executive order by President Bush that required government contractors to post notices informing employees that they do not have to join unions or pay certain union fees.

US District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. said in his ruling last week that Bush’s executive order conflicts with the National Labor Relations Act, which prohibits such requirements.

The president’s father, former President Bush, issued a similar order, which was repealed by President Clinton.

Under the order, federal contractors who did not post such signs faced cancellation of government contracts and being barred from future contracts. The signs also were to inform employees that they were not required to pay union dues that aren’t related to collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment.

United Auto Workers, the UAW Labor Employment and Training Corp., and two affiliates of the Office and Professional Employees International Union sued last year to block enforcement of Bush’s measure.

Source: Associated Press

Oil company adviser named US representative to Afghanistan

By Patrick Martin

Jan. 3— President Bush has appointed a former aide to the American oil company Unocal, Afghan-born Zalmay Khalilzad, as special envoy to Afghanistan. The nomination was announced Dec. 31, nine days after the US-backed interim government of Hamid Karzai took office in Kabul.

The nomination underscores the real economic and financial interests at stake in the US military intervention in Central Asia. Khalilzad is intimately involved in the long-running US efforts to obtain direct access to the oil and gas resources of the region, largely unexploited but believed to be the second largest in the world after the Persian Gulf.

As an adviser for Unocal, Khalilzad drew up a risk analysis of a proposed gas pipeline from the former Soviet republic of Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

He participated in talks between the oil company and Taliban officials in 1997, which were aimed at implementing a 1995 agreement to build the pipeline across western Afghanistan.

Unocal was the lead company in the formation of the Centgas consortium, whose purpose was to bring to market natural gas from the Dauletabad Field in southeastern Turkmenistan, one of the world’s largest. The $2 billion project involved a 48-inch diameter pipeline from the Afghanistan-Turkmenistan border, passing near the cities of Herat and Kandahar, crossing into Pakistan near Quetta and linking with existing pipelines at Multan. An additional $600 million extension to India was also under consideration.

Khalilzad also lobbied publicly for a more sympathetic US government policy towards the Taliban. Four years ago, in an op-ed article in the Washington Post, he defended the Taliban regime against accusations that it was a sponsor of terrorism, writing, “The Taliban does not practice the anti-US style of fundamentalism practiced by Iran.”

“We should ... be willing to offer recognition and humanitarian assistance and to promote international economic reconstruction,” he declared. “It is time for the United States to reengage” the Afghan regime.

This “reengagement” would, of course, have been enormously profitable to Unocal, which was otherwise unable to bring gas and oil to market from landlocked Turkmenistan.

Khalilzad only shifted his position on the Taliban after the Clinton administration fired cruise missiles at targets in Afghanistan in August 1998, claiming that terrorists under the direction of Afghan-based Osama bin Laden were responsible for bombing US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. One day after the attack, Unocal put Centgas on hold. Two months later it abandoned all plans for a trans-Afghan pipeline. The oil interests began to look towards a post-Taliban Afghanistan, and so did their representatives in the US national security establishment.

Liasion to Islamic guerrillas

Born in Mazar-e Sharif in 1951, Khalilzad hails from the old ruling elite of Afghanistan. His father was an aide to King Zahir Shah, who ruled the country until 1973. Khalilzad was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, an intellectual center for the American right-wing, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979.

Khalilzad became an American citizen, while serving as a key link between US imperialism and the Islamic fundamentalist mujahedin fighting the Soviet-backed regime in Kabul - the milieu out of which both the Taliban and bin Laden’s al Qaeda group arose.

He was a special adviser to the State Department during the Reagan administration, lobbying successfully for accelerated US military aid to the mujahedin, including hand-held Stinger anti-aircraft missiles which played a key role in the war. He later became undersecretary of defense in the administration of Bush’s father during the US war against Iraq, then went to the Rand Corporation, a top US military think tank.

After Bush was installed as president by a 5-4 vote of the US Supreme Court, Khalilzad headed the Bush-Cheney transition team for the Defense Department and advised incoming Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Significantly, however, he was not named to a sub-cabinet position, which would have required Senate confirmation and might have provoked uncomfortable questions about his role as an oil company adviser in Central Asia and intermediary with the Taliban. Instead, he was named to the National Security Council (NSC), where no confirmation vote was needed.

At the NSC Khalilzad reports to Condoleeza Rice, the national security adviser, who also served as an oil company consultant on Central Asia. After serving in the first Bush administration from 1989 to 1992, Rice was placed on the board of directors of Chevron Corporation and served as its principal expert on Kazakhstan, where Chevron holds the largest concession of any of the international oil companies.

The oil industry connections of Bush and Cheney are well known, but little has been said in the media about the prominent role being played in Afghan policy by officials who advised the oil industry on Central Asia.

One of the few commentaries in the America media about this aspect of the US military campaign appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle last Sept. 26. Staff writer Frank Viviano observed: “The hidden stakes in the war against terrorism can be summed up in a single word: oil. The map of terrorist sanctuaries and targets in the Middle East and Central Asia is also, to an extraordinary degree, a map of the world’s principal energy sources in the 21st century....

“It is inevitable that the war against terrorism will be seen by many as a war on behalf of America’s Chevron, Exxon, and Arco; France’s TotalFinaElf; British Petroleum; Royal Dutch Shell and other multinational giants, which have hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the region.”

Silence in the media

This reality is well understood in official Washington, but the most important corporate-controlled media outlets - the television networks and major national daily newspapers - have maintained silence that amounts to deliberate, politically motivated self-censorship.

The sole recent exception is an article which appeared Dec. 15 in the New York Times business section, headlined, “As the War Shifts Alliances, Oil Deals Follow.”

The Times reported, “The State Department is exploring the potential for post-Taliban energy projects in the region, which has more than 6 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves and almost 40 percent of its gas reserves.”

The Times noted that during a visit in early December to Kazakhstan, “Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he was ‘particularly impressed’ with the money that American oil companies were investing there. He estimated that $200 billion could flow into Kazakhstan during the next 5 to 10 years.”

Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham also pushed US oil investments in the region during a November visit to Russia, on which he was accompanied by David J. O’Reilly, chairman of ChevronTexaco.

Defense Secretary Rumsfeld has also played a role in the ongoing oil pipeline maneuvers. During a Dec. 14 visit to Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, he assured officials of the oil-rich Caspian state that the administration would lift sanctions imposed in 1992 in the wake of the conflict with Armenia over the enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh.

Both Azerbaijan and Armenia have aligned themselves with the US military thrust into Central Asia, offering the Pentagon transit rights and use of airfields. Rumsfeld’s visit and his conciliatory remarks were the reward. Rumsfeld told President Haydar Aliyev that the administration had reached agreement with congressional leaders to waive the sanctions.

On Nov. 28 the White House released a statement hailing the official opening of the first new pipeline by the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, a joint venture of Russia, Kazakhstan, Oman, ChevronTexaco, ExxonMobil and several other oil companies.

The pipeline connects the huge Tengiz oilfield in northwestern Kazakhstan to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, where tankers are loaded for the world market. US companies put up $1 billion of the $2.65 billion construction cost.

The Bush statement declared, “The CPC project also advances my Administration’s National Energy Policy by developing a network of multiple Caspian pipelines that also includes the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan, Baku-Supsa, and Baku-Novorossiysk oil pipelines and the Baku-Tbilisi-Erzurum gas pipeline.”

There was little US press coverage of this announcement. Nor did the media refer to the fact that the pipeline consortium involved in the Baku-Ceyhan plan, led by the British oil company BP, is represented by the law firm of Baker & Botts. The principal attorney at this firm is James Baker III, secretary of state under Bush’s father and chief spokesman for the 2000 Bush campaign during its successful effort to shut down the Florida vote recount.

Source: Znet: www.zmag.org

Monsanto hid decades of pollution in Alabama town

By Michael Grunwald

Anniston, Alabama, Jan. 1— On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston, the people ate dirt. They called it “Alabama clay” and cooked it for extra flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and played and were baptized. They didn’t know their dirt and yards and bass and kids — along with the acrid air they breathed — were all contaminated with chemicals. They didn’t know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.

Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as ply-chloronated biphenyls (PCBs) at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents — many emblazoned with warnings such as “CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy” — show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.

In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from “slightly tumorigenic” to “does not appear to be carcinogenic.”

Monsanto enjoyed a lucrative four-decade monopoly on PCB production in the United States, and battled to protect that monopoly long after PCBs were confirmed as a global pollutant.

Monsanto and its corporate successors have avoided a regulatory crackdown in Anniston, spending just $40 million on cleanup efforts so far. But they have spent $80 million more on legal settlements, and another lawsuit by 3,600 plaintiffs — one of every nine city residents — is pending.

The Anniston lawsuits have uncovered a voluminous paper trail. The documents — obtained by The Washington Post from plaintiffs’ attorneys and the Environmental Working Group, a chemical industry watchdog — date as far back as the 1930s.

Officials at Solutia Inc., the name given to Monsanto’s chemical operations after they were spun off into a separate company in 1997, acknowledge that Monsanto made mistakes, but point out that Monsanto did stop making PCBs in 1977, two years before a nationwide ban took effect.

Robert Kaley, the environmental affairs director for Solutia who also serves as the PCB expert for the American Chemistry Council, said it is unfair to judge the company’s behavior from the 1930s through 1970s by modern standards.

“Did we do some things we wouldn’t do today? Of course,” he said. “If you put it all in context, I think we’ve got nothing to be ashamed of.”

In Anniston, Solutia has opposed proposals for comprehensive health studies as unnecessary. And it has not apologized for any of its contamination or deception.

In the absence of data, local residents seem to believe the worst. Sylvester Harris, 63, an undertaker who lived across the street from the plant, said he always thought he was burying too many young children.

“I knew something was wrong around here,” he said.

Opal Scruggs, 65, has spent her entire life in west Anniston. In recent years, Monsanto has bought and demolished about 100 PCB-tainted homes and mom-and-pop businesses nearby, turning her neighborhood into a virtual ghost town. Now she has elevated PCB levels in her blood — along with Harris and many of their neighbors — and she believes she’s a “walking time bomb.”

“Monsanto did a job on this city,” she said. “They thought we were stupid and illiterate people, so nobody would notice what happens to us.”

Company town

Anniston was born at the height of the Industrial Revolution as a mineral-rich company town controlled by the Woodstock Iron Works, off-limits to all but company employees. It soon developed into a heavy-industry boomtown, dominated by foundries and factories with 24-hour smokestacks. In 1929, one of those factories began manufacturing PCBs.

Now that the toxic effects of PCBs are widely known, it is easy to forget that they were once known as miracle chemicals. They are unusually nonflammable, and conduct heat without conducting electricity. Many safety codes once mandated the use of PCBs as insulation in transformers and other electrical equipment. They also were used in paints, newsprint, carbon paper, deep-fat fryers, adhesives, even bread wrappers. The American public had no idea of the downside of PCBs until the late 1960s.

Monsanto did. Shortly after buying the 70-acre plant at the foot of Coldwater Mountain in 1935, the company learned that PCBs, in the double negative of one company memo, “cannot be considered non-toxic.” A 1937 Harvard study was the first to find that prolonged exposure could cause liver damage and a rash called chloracne. Monsanto then hired the scientist who led the study as a consultant, and company memos began acknowledging the “systemic toxic effects” of Aroclors, the brand name for PCBs. Monsanto also began warning its industrial customers to protect their workers from Aroclors by requiring showers after every shift, providing them with clean work clothes every day and keeping fumes away from factory floors.

In 1952, Monsanto signed an agreement with the US Public Health Service to label Aroclors: “Avoid repeated contact with the skin and inhalation of the fumes and dusts.” The company also warned its industrial customers about ecological risks: “If the material is discharged in large concentrations it will adversely affect . . . aquatic life in the stream.” But it did not warn its neighbors.

In 1998, a former Anniston plant manager, William Papageorge, was asked in a deposition whether Monsanto officials ever shared their data about PCB hazards with the community.

“Why would they?” he replied.

In the fall of 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist named Denzel Ferguson to conduct some studies around its Anniston plant. Ferguson, who died in 1998, arrived with tanks full of bluegill fish, which he caged in cloth containers and submerged at various points along nearby creeks. This is what he reported to Monsanto about the results in Snow Creek: “All 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3 1/2 minutes.”

“It was like dunking the fish in battery acid,” recalled George Murphy, who was one of Ferguson’s graduate students at the time and is now chairman of Middle Tennessee State University’s biology department.

The problem, Ferguson concluded, was the “extremely toxic” wastewater flowing directly from the Monsanto plant into Snow Creek, and then into the larger Choccolocco Creek, where he noted similar “die-offs.” He warned Monsanto: “Since this is a surface stream that passes through residential areas, it may represent a potential source of danger to children.” He urged Monsanto to clean up Snow Creek, and to stop dumping untreated waste there. Monsanto didn’t.

In early 1967, a group of Swedish scientists demonstrated publicly that PCBs were a threat to the global environment. The Swedes identified traces of PCBs throughout the food chain: in fish, birds, pine needles, even their children’s hair. But Monsanto’s primary response was to prepare for a media war and expand production.

The first thing Monsanto’s board did, in November 1967, was approve a $2.9 million expansion of Aroclors operations in Anniston and Sauget, Illinois.

Records show that the Anniston plant did act to reduce its mercury releases after the Snow Creek fish kills. But it did not try to reduce PCB releases, even though the Anniston plant was leaking 50,000 pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek every year, while burying more than 1 million pounds of PCB-laced waste in its antiquated landfills. Jack Matson, a Pennsylvania State University environmental engineering professor who has consulted for Monsanto, concluded in a report for the Anniston plaintiffs that the company failed to observe even basic industry practices there. It had no catch basins, settling ponds or carbon filters to clean its wastewater. It washed spills straight into its sewers.

It was only in December 1968 — after PCBs had been discovered in California wildlife, setting off a furor in the United States — that Monsanto officials even began to write memos about controlling PCBs. “It only seems a matter of time before the regulatory agencies will be looking down our throats,” one warned.

The company committee

In September 1969, Monsanto appointed an Aroclors Ad Hoc Committee to address the controversies swirling around its PCB monopoly, which was worth $22 million a year in sales. According to minutes of the first meeting, the committee had only two formal objectives: “Permit continued sales and profits” and “Protect image of . . . the Corporation.”

The committee recommended “The Responsible Approach” — phasing out its PCB products, but only once it could develop alternatives. The idea was to maintain “one of Monsanto’s most profitable franchises” as long as possible while taking care to “reduce our exposure in terms of liability.”

But the company’s own tests on rats, chickens and even dogs proved discouraging. “The PCBs are exhibiting a greater degree of toxicity than we had anticipated,” reported the committee chairman. Fish tests were worse: “Doses which were believed to be OK produced 100% kill.”

The committee members saw no benefit in a unilateral crackdown on Monsanto’s PCBs when Monsanto’s customers were still dumping, too: “It was agreed that until the problems of gross environmental contamination by our customers have been alleviated, there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges.”

And what, Kaley asks, is wrong with that? Corporations, after all, have obligations to their shareholders, and the federal law banning the manufacture of PCBs did not take effect until 1979. Monsanto’s critics, Kaley says, do not understand capitalism.

“Look, this was a good product,” Kaley said.

“Did we try to save it as long as we could? Absolutely.”

The reluctant regulators

By May 1970, PCBs were a hot topic in the national media. Members of Congress were calling for hearings. It seemed like only a matter of time before regulators would notice the river of PCBs spewing out of the Anniston plant.

So Monsanto decided to inform the Alabama Water Improvement Commission (AWIC) on its own that PCBs were entering Snow Creek. And AWIC helped the company keep its toxic secrets.

According to a company memo, AWIC’s technical director, Joe Crockett, had been “totally unaware of published information concerning Aroclors.” The Monsanto executives assured him that everything was under control, and Crockett, who is now deceased, is said to have appreciated their forthright approach.

That summer, Crockett came to Monsanto’s rescue after the federal Food and Drug Administration found PCB-tainted fish in Choccolocco Creek. [There were no fish — or any other aquatic life — in Snow Creek.]

“Crockett will try to handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public at this time,” announced a ‘Confidential’ memo. Crockett explained that if word leaked out, the state would be forced to ban fishing in Choccolocco Creek and a popular lake downstream to ensure public safety.

The problem had festered for 36 years, but the Anniston managers finally began to act that fall, installing a sump, a carbon bed and a new limestone pit to trap PCBs. And in 1971, facing as much as $1 billion in additional pollution control costs in Anniston, Monsanto shifted all PCB production to its plant in Illinois.

Before the year was over, Crockett helped out once more. The Justice Department was considering a lawsuit against Monsanto over PCBs, and the EPA wanted it to dredge Snow Creek. So Crockett set up a meeting between Monsanto and an EPA regulator and helped argue the company’s case. The company’s problems disappeared.

In 1985, state authorities found PCB-tainted soils around Snow Creek, but a dispute over cleanup details lingered until a new attorney general named Donald Siegelman took office in 1988. In a letter that April, Monsanto’s Anniston superintendent thanked Siegelman — who is now the state’s Democratic governor — for addressing the Alabama Chemical Association, and meeting Monsanto’s lobbyists for dinner. Then he got to the point: Monsanto wanted to go forward with its own cleanup plan, dredging just a few hundred yards of Snow Creek and its tributaries.

The company soon received approval to do just that.

The larger problem finally burst into public view in 1993, after a local angler caught deformed largemouth bass in Choccolocco Creek. After studies again detected PCBs, Alabama issued the first advisories against eating fish from the area — 27 years after Monsanto learned about those bluegills sliding out of their skins.

By 1996, state officials and plaintiffs’ attorneys were finding astronomical PCB levels in the area: as high as 940 times the federal level of concern in yard soils, 200 times that level in dust inside people’s homes, 2,000 times that level in Monsanto’s drainage ditches. The PCB levels in the air were also too high. And in blood tests, nearly one-third of the residents of the working-class Sweet Valley and Cobbtown neighborhoods near the plant were found to have elevated PCB levels. The communities were declared public health hazards.

That’s when Monsanto launched a program to buy and raze contaminated properties, offering early sign-up bonuses and moving expenses as incentives. “Monsanto intends to be a good neighbor — to those who wish to leave, and to those who wish to stay,” its brochures explained.

The dredged-up past

The EPA officials who set up an Anniston satellite office to deal with the PCB problem are now alarmed about widespread lead poisoning as well. The Army is building an incinerator there to burn 2,000 tons of deadly sarin and mustard gas.

Local activists want Monsanto to dredge all its PCBs out of Anniston’s creeks and move all its buried PCBs to hazardous-waste landfills. That could cost billions of dollars. But state and EPA officials do not agree that such drastic measures are necessary. They have no evidence that PCBs have escaped from the dumps since Monsanto was required to cap them after a spill in 1996; they believe most of Anniston’s PCBs spread from the creeks during floods.

Today, Solutia is negotiating a final Anniston cleanup plan; EPA officials say the company has been aggressive in pressing for lower standards but generally cooperative and the company donates computers and science labs to area schools. Its brochures pledge to “insure environmental safety and health for the community” and to hide nothing from Anniston residents: “You have a right to know, and we have a responsibility to keep you, our valued neighbor, informed.”

Still, the company’s credibility problems linger in Anniston. A recent company e-mail revealed that even the gifts of computers and labs were part of a new damage-control strategy, along with donations to Gov. Siegelman’s inaugural fund: “The strategy calls for significantly increasing . . . community outreach, contributions and political involvement while aggressively seeking . . . to contain media issues regionally.” The company’s critics say little has changed. And they warn that Monsanto, which no longer produces chemicals, is now promising the world that its genetically engineered crops are safe for human consumption.

“For years, these guys said PCBs were safe, too,” said Mike Casey of the Environmental Working Group, which has been compiling chemical industry documents on the Web. “But there’s obviously a corporate culture of deceiving the public.”

Kaley said his company has nothing to hide. “I’m really pretty proud of what we did,” he said. “Was it perfect? No…But I think we mostly did what any company would do, even today.”

Source: Washington Post

The day Ashcroft foiled FOIA

By Ruth Rosen

San Francisco, California, Jan. 7— The President didn’t ask the networks for television time. The attorney general didn’t hold a press conference. The media didn’t report any dramatic change in governmental policy. As a result, most Americans had no idea that one of their most precious freedoms disappeared on Oct. 12.

Yet it happened. In a memo that slipped beneath the political radar, US Attorney General John Ashcroft vigorously urged federal agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made by American citizens.

Passed in 1974 in the wake of the Watergate scandal, the Freedom of Information Act has been hailed as one of our greatest democratic reforms. It allows ordinary citizens to hold the government accountable by requesting and scrutinizing public documents and records. Without it, journalists, newspapers, historians, and watchdog groups would never be able to keep the government honest. It was our post-Watergate reward, the act that allows us to know what our elected officials do, rather than what they say. It is our national sunshine law, legislation that forces agencies to disclose their public records and documents.

Yet without fanfare, the attorney general simply quashed the FOIA. The Department of Justice did not respond to numerous calls from The Chronicle to comment on the memo.

So, rather than asking federal officials to pay special attention when the public’s right to know might collide with the government’s need to safeguard our security, Ashcroft instead asked them to consider whether “institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests could be implicated by disclosure of the information.” Even more disturbing, he wrote:

“When you carefully 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 other important records.”

Somehow, this memo never surfaced. When coupled with President Bush’s Nov. 1 executive order that allows him to seal all presidential records since 1980, the effect is positively chilling.

In the aftermath of Sept. 11, we have witnessed a flurry of federal orders designed to beef up the nation’s security. Many anti-terrorist measures have carefully balanced the public’s right to know with the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens.

Who, for example, would argue against taking detailed plans of nuclear reactors, oil refineries, or reservoirs off the Web?

No one. Almost all Americans agree that the nation’s security is our highest priority.

Yet half the country is also worried that the government might use the fear of terrorism as a pretext for protecting officials from public scrutiny.

Now we know that they have good reason to worry. For more than a quarter of a century, the Freedom of Information Act has ratified the public’s right to know what the government, its agencies, and its officials have done. It has substituted transparency for secrecy and we, as a democracy, have benefited from the truths that been extracted from public records.

Consider, for example, just a few of the recent revelations — obtained through FOIA requests — that newspapers and nonprofit watchdog groups have been able to publicize during the last few months:

- The Washington-based Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit organization, has been able to publish lists of recipients who have received billions of dollars in federal farm subsidies. Their website, www.ewg.org, has not only embarrassed the agricultural industry, but also allowed the public to realize that federal money — intended to support small family farmers — has mostly enhanced the profits of large agricultural corporations.

- The Charlotte Observer has been able to reveal how the Duke Power Co., an electric utility, cooked its books so that it avoided exceeding its profit limits. This creative accounting scheme prevented the utility from giving lower rates to 2 million customers in North Carolina and South Carolina.

- USA Today was able to uncover and publicize a widespread pattern of misconduct among the National Guard’s upper echelon that has continued for more than a decade. Among the abuses documented in public records are the inflation of troop strength, the misuse of taxpayer money, incidents of sexual harassment, and the theft of life-insurance payments intended for the widows and children of Guardsmen.

- The National Security Archive, a private Washington-based research group, has been able to obtain records that document an unpublicized event in our history. It turns out that in 1975, President Gerald Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger gave Indonesian strongman Suharto the green light to invade East Timor, an incursion that left 200,000 people dead.

— By examining tens of thousands of public records, the Associated Press has been able to substantiate the long-held African American allegation that white people — through threats of violence, even murder — cheated them out of their land. In many cases, government officials simply approved the transfer of property deeds. Valued at tens of million of dollars, some 24,000 acres of farm and timber lands, once the property of 406 black families, are now owned by whites or corporations.

These are but a sample of the revelations made possible by recent FOIA requests. None of them endanger the national security. It is important to remember that all classified documents are protected from FOIA requests and unavailable to the public.

Yet these secrets have exposed all kinds of official skullduggery, some of which even violated the law. True, such revelations may disgrace public officials or even result in criminal charges, but that is the consequence — or shall we say, the punishment — for violating the public trust.

No one disputes that we must safeguard our national security. All of us want to protect our nation from further acts of terrorism. But we must never allow the public’s right to know, enshrined in the Freedom of Information Act, to be suppressed for the sake of official convenience.

Source: San Francisco Chronicle