Fox in The Chicken Coop?

The following was posted to my Yale class list. For me the bellwether here was Gonzales' recommendation that torture was ok. This set the pattern for what has most disgraced the Bush administration and which shames Americans -- we have had it even here in Brooklyn in the administrative detention of Muslims with abuse by one of the same guards who turned up doing his thing at Abu Ghraib -- and reeks of the comparable abuses in South America during the 1970s and early 1980s. One of my current doctors is Chilean and, I imagine, would have even stronger things to say about the nomination of this man as Attorney General. A hackneyed image, but setting the fox to guard the chicken coop . . . ? Ed Kent


Alberto Gonzales and Trickle-Down Secrecy
Retro vs. Metro: Divided Times

By Chris Colin

Where critics of previous administrations zeroed in on one or two of the president's blunders - Watergate, Monicagate - President Bush's detractors have felt obliged to sort their multiple grievances into themes; among the richest of these has been secrecy. The nomination for attorney general of White House legal counsel and longtime Bush friend Alberto Gonzales, a prime architect of Bush's shrinking transparency over the years, suggests no departure from this pattern, as much of the press has already noted. But the Gonzales nomination also represents movement toward a broader culture of opaqueness - the sort that seeps beyond Pennsylvania Avenue, some fear, and that tolerates more and more irregularities like those seen in last month's election.

Gonzales' locking down of information - more or less on par with outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft's - has been well-documented. A recent Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press report claims he's demonstrated "a penchant for strictly regulating access to government and executive-branch information." Meanwhile, the Project on Government Oversight has noted that Gonzales "played a leading role in attempting to chill whistleblowers who contact Congress with information about corporate fraud and abuse." The patterns go back years: The Houston Chronicle reported that Gonzales was crucial in getting then-Governor Bush excused from jury duty in 1996 - a strategy that allowed the governor to avoid revealing his 1976 drunken driving arrest.

Structurally, Gonzales' resistance to open government bears no direct connection to, say, the lack of open-source coding in our e-voting machines or Florida's failure to publish a comprehensive purge list well before the election. But that's not to say one has nothing to do with the other. What Gonzales steps into as successor to Ashcroft is a fierce and pervasive culture of wagons circled and lips sealed. Critics say it's not just the direct consequences they fear - the secret energy task force meetings, the revision of Freedom of Information Act guidelines, the expansion of the president's ability to classify documents - but an indirect trickling down. Ultimately, they argue, citizens will no longer feel entitled to know what their elected officials do, and by extension how these officials are elected in the first place.

We've arrived at an interesting moment in the history of information. Americans have long demonstrated their abundant mistrust of politicians; now, as evidenced by a recent Pew survey, it seems we've come to mistrust the media in nearly equal measure. Without a trusted institution to press for open government and transparent elections, the duty falls largely to the attorney general - caretaker of the FOIA and by extension "the right of the public to know what its government is doing," as MSNBC put it.