What’s
surprising to me is not that the Department of Homeland Security, which is part
of the self-described “most transparent” administration in U.S. history, waited
a year to produce lame results to my Powertalk 1210 freedom of information request. The
surprise is that it produced any results at all. I mean, the response was so poor and so
meager, why bother at all?
It
was obvious in August and September of last year when I started down this road
that DHS had no intention of shedding any light on its handling of the refugee
crisis that was flooding our southern borders at the time. Supposedly, under the law any time any
governmental event generates a document, you can have access to it as a member
of the public. Exceptions, of course,
are classified documents. The laws and
process at the federal level are not the same as the local. The federal law generally is referred to as
the “Freedom of Information Act” and is pronounced FOY’-ah, whereas there’s a
hodgepodge of state and local laws aimed to achieve similar purposes but which
have no teeth at the federal level.
Journalists usually refer to the local laws as “FOIA” laws as well but
this is not correct.
Last
summer I filed a FOIA request seeking to learn what DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and his
administrators were saying to one another and to congressmen about the
crisis. DHS immediately rejected the request as being too broad. Now, keep in
mind previous similar document requests on all kinds of subjects at the local level have resulted in
vigorous responses sometimes generating hundreds of pages of files; I can’t
tell you how many such requests I’ve handled throughout my career as a journalist, but I do not
recall a case where anyone tried to wiggle out of the work by complaining about
the number of documents involved. Sometimes
public officials will refuse to cooperate, but the vast majority do comply, and there
are systems within local government to support and expedite their responses.
So,
after being told that my request was too broad, I broke it up into 40 pieces,
each narrowly tailored to specific officials, and filed it again. At first DHS didn’t seem to know how to
handle that; the new requests were very narrow in scope, impossible to dismiss
as “overly broad.” What DHS did was to
deny expedited handing (the fact that Americans might like to have had this
information prior to the last congressional election did not impress DHS, which
specifically rejected this as a reason to hurry up the response). And that was the last I heard for a solid
year.
This
past month, the behemoth awakened. A
woman named Maura Busch told me the FOIA filing case had been reassigned to her, and wanted
to know if I were still interested? She
assumed I might not be, telling me by
phone, “Since this is a year old sometimes reporters will say you know I have
ten more stories I’m working on now and I’ve moved beyond it.”
You
see how this works? It’s not rocket
science. You stonewall reporters by
stonewalling the reporter. Then you
might add a lame apology, as Busch did, who said, “Sorry, we just don’t have
enough people anymore.”
I
told her that sure, I absolutely was still interested. What she turned over to me did not come close
to meeting the scope of what I had requested.
There was an unidentified, unlabelled briefing document that looks to
have been prepared either for or by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, discussing the
crisis. And that’s it. Apparently no one else in government had
anything to say about the crisis as it was erupting and playing itself out.
Yeah. Right.
How
do you think it would be if everyday citizens could simply blow off government
requests for information in a similar fashion—starting with, say, IRS
agents? That would be a different world,
wouldn’t it? But DHS gets to follow its own
rules because there are no enforcers.
There is no champion to make sure the administration carries out its
self-declared transparency “policy,” which of course is a policy in name only.
Did you know that FOIA applies not to news types, but also to private
citizens? But as a practical matter, unless
you’re a deep-pocketed news organization and have the legal budget to sue, you’re
screwed. And by the way, the next time
you see Associated Press or some other news organization mention the letters “FOIA,”
look at how many times the news story involves a lawsuit which the news guys
and gals had to win, at their expense, to bring you the information.
As
for what was in the documents—very little.
The document author, presumably Johnson, expressed dismay that the
smugglers were telling the immigrants they were getting a “free pass,” words
which resonated with the refugees and had brought them here by the tens of
thousands. Johnson called this “misinformation”
and said it was “simply wrong,” almost in hurt tones. You can judge for yourself based on a year’s worth of news coverage whether
the refugees did or did not get a “free
pass” for crossing into the United States.
But
one thing is clear. Journalists relying
on DHS to follow FOIA law are in for bitter disappointment. The attitude of DHS officials toward this so-called transparency ranges from indifference to outright hostility. And since this transparency "requirement" comes directly from the top, once again this reflects directly on the competence and ability of this administration to carry out it own so called initiatives.
###
No comments:
Post a Comment