Watergate Blowback

The White House's ongoing battle against post-Nixon sunshine laws.

Matt Welch from the August/September 2004 issue

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The problem, Judicial Watch's Fitton and the NSA's Blanton agree, is that the administration's national security justifications are frequently bogus. "I'm not talking about the blueprints to a nuclear weapon, or our national defense and secrets related to that," says Fitton. "We're talking about using those types of national security arguments to just cover up corruption and things that are politically inconvenient."

Blanton says documents that administrations fight tooth and nail to suppress -- such as the Pentagon Papers, or the infamous August 6, 2001, presidential daily briefing about Osama Bin Laden, or the 56-year-old Air Force accident reports whose classification formed the legal basis for withholding information on national security grounds -- typically contain little or no truly sensitive information. "The banality of the thing is what strikes you," he says.

Watergate taught millions of Americans about the dangers of government operating without sunshine. But Bush administration officials, especially those who lived through the scandal, learned an altogether different lesson -- that checks and balances can be distractions and handcuffs.

"Corruption thrives in secrecy," Fitton says. "And if a bureaucrat thinks that everything he does is never going to see the light of day, and a politician or a political appointee thinks the same, then you can bet that the temptation to do incorrect things will be greater.

"If the idea is that what they can do can be exposed by an intrepid reporter or an activist group, it does keep people in line. And we're not talking about the speeding violations that often pass for ethics enforcement here in Washington. We're talking about, for instance, lying to Congress about the costs of a huge entitlement program. We're talking about bribery for pardons by the president of the United States....These aren't technical violations of ethics rules; this is hammer-in-the-head stuff, and anyone who doesn't understand that this is wrong, and the secrecy surrounding it is wrong, frankly shouldn't be trusted with the public's trust."