WMR

July 27, 2006 -- The Bush administration is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by authorizing the Defense Department to pay $1 million to a former Special Forces legal adviser to find ways to limit FOIA and rein in state freedom of information acts to comply with a much more restrictive Federal access to information policy. The Pentagon is paying Dr. Jeffrey Addicott's St. Mary's University School of Law in San Antonio, Texas the million dollars to find out new ways for the federal government to classify previously open government information in the name of protecting it from access by "terrorists." Pentagon funding for the FOIA scale-back program is being laundered through the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, New York. Addicott's mission is to create a model designed to prevent the public and the media from having access to currently public federal and state government information, including information on environmental hazards and homeland security information. Addicott, as previously reported by WMR, has been associated with neo-confederate causes, including the Sons of Confederate Veterans.

The Detroit Free Press wrote in an editorial yesterday, "Information is power, and in this nation, ultimate power is supposed to rest with the people, not the public officials who are temporary custodians of the records. Instead of spending a million bucks to figure out what else can be kept secret, the federal government instead ought to reaffirm the public's right to know. That wouldn't cost a thing."

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