The FBI and Jack Anderson
Among the Bush Administration horrors that tend to get ignored in favor of the Iraq War, Supreme Court nominations, and the Hurricane Katrina response is the administration's efforts to roll back public access to government documents. One of the more recent manifestations of this was the revelation that since 2001, the CIA has been secretly reclassifying documents that had been made available to researchers by the National Archives. This came to light when a researcher discovered that documents he had used years ago were no longer available.
Now comes the FBI demand to be allowed to snoop through the hundreds of boxes of papers donated by the family of the late investigative reporter/columnist Jack Anderson to George Washington University in Washington, D.C. And it wants to confiscate any it deems were illegally in the columnist's possession. Anderson, who wrote the Washington Merry-Go-Round syndicated column for years after taking it over from Drew Pearson, was a frequent antagonist of the FBI. His sources were legendary, and they provided Anderson with secret documents used by him to embarass the government on any number of occasions. Anderson's papers had originally been at Brigham Young University (he was Mormon) in Utah. It was only when the family chose to move them to GWU, probably for more convenient scholarly access, that the FBI intervened. Revenge against the dead, more or less.
As a journalist who writes books, I wonder where this could lead. Might the Bush Administration or some future President decide that certain documents were "wrongly" released under the Freedom of Information Act and sue or threaten to jail scholars to get them back? The legal fees alone could be devastating, let alone the possibility of serious prison time. Anyone who thinks this couldn't happen should check out the rantings of morality czar and gambling addict William Bennett earlier this week. Bennett said three of the Pulitzer Prize winners should be jailed for what they wrote. What they wrote, of course, was less a threat to national security than embarassing to the lamentable Bush Administration.
Perhaps most troubling in the longterm is the restrictions Bush placed on access to certain documents that should have become public under law in the Reagan Presidential Library and his father's Presidential Library. He did it by executive order, so it will end when his Presidency ends, but that is scant comfort. Our Democracy depends on freedom of information, the exposing of dirty linen so mistakes can be analyzed and, hopefully, not repeated.