When national security becomes secrecy

COMMENT Nobody likes to be criticised in public, especially all those politicians in Washington who fervently hope to be re-elected.

But the Bush administration has taken the desire to avoid critical commentary to an extreme. In incident after troubling incident, federal agencies have been quietly censoring information that previously had been available on their Web sites, and otherwise curbing public oversight.

About a week ago, the US Army surreptitiously pulled the plug on one of its more popular Web sites, call.army.mil, after The Washington Post wrote about a report that had been posted on it.

The Post's 25 October article said "the US military intelligence gathering operation in Iraq is being undercut by a series of problems in using technology, training intelligence specialists and managing them in the field," citing the report prepared by the Centre for Army Lessons Learned. The report, which the Post had the foresight to mirror on its own Web site, talked about the "poor quality" of mission planning and "marginally effective" training for certain reserve troops.

The report was not classified. It was merely a sober analysis of the Army's problems in Iraq. It had the ring of truth to it, unlike Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's appearance on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, which he used to blandly reassure viewers. "We can win this war. We will win this war," he said.

This is not an isolated example. In the two years since the 11 September, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush administration has systematically reduced the amount of information available to the public, which in turn has made government officials less accountable to taxpayers. Attorney General John Ashcroft set the tone in a 12 October, 2001, memo that urged agencies to withhold information from requests made under the Freedom of Information Act. Then, in January, Rumsfeld claimed that too much data was popping up on military Web sites. Citing al-Qaida, Rumsfeld warned that "one must conclude our enemies access DOD (Department of Defense) Web sites on a regular basis."