Are you seeing changes in how the Bush administration handles Freedom of Information Act requests?

A lot of these changes were encapsulated in a policy memorandum that was issued by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft in October of 2001. What Attorney General Ashcroft said is that the prior policy, which encouraged disclosure of information unless some foreseeable harm would result, that policy was being overturned in favor of withholding information whenever there was a legal basis to do so. So the whole orientation of the FOIA program was in a sense reversed. Instead of saying, "Release whenever you can," the policy became, "Withhold whenever you have a legal argument to justify."

One can detect the influence of that policy in how FOIA requests are handled. There are all kinds of things that once would have been released or were released that now get withheld under FOIA, and it's disturbing... continue reading on pbs.org.

Republished from the Frontline PBS Interview at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/interviews/

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