The mother of a man who died while he was being apprehended by police has sued Broadview Heights, a suburb of Cleveland, to obtain public records concerning her son’s arrest and death, the Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting today. The following is a link to the story:
Why make a tape: so others, not in the torture room, could hear and watch the statements. Why destroy: to hide the abuse.
Here it is:
“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’s No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. “You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top Al Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.”
Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started?
“By that time,” Mr. Krongard said, “paranoia was setting in.”
Contrary to predictions, President Bush signed a new bill aimed at giving the public and the media greater access to government information. The new law strengthens FOIA by creating a tracking system for FOIA requests, a hot line service for federal agencies to deal with problems, and an ombudsman to resolve problems with requests. The law restores the presumption that government agencies should release information if disclosure could do harm. Agencies are required to meet a 20-day deadline for responding to FOIA requests. In an enlargement of the law, nonproprietary information held by government contractors is now subject to FOIA requests and attorney fees are easier to get when a FOIA lawsuit is successful. Justice Department statistics show that last year the government received 21.4 million FOIA requests.
From the Blog Grits for Breakfast out of Texas:
A FOIA request revealed to News 8 in Austin, Texas that some of the people who got the Ex-Im Bank loans may have drug connections. The $243 million worth of bad loans were originally made to help trade with Mexico.
The loans have been linked to the Juarez drug cartel, which is known for its brutal murders. The cartel killed one dozen people and buried them in a suburban backyard across the border fro El Paso.
Another loan was linked to the Sinaloa drug cartel, whose business is smuggling heroin into the United States.
The federally funded Ex-Im Bank apparently backed loans to people affiliated with both cartels and the Mexican drug trade.
Under the Freedom of Information Act, News 8 asked for all documentation related to defaulted small business loans made to Mexico from 2002 to 2005. Although there were nearly 200 bad loans, so far, information on only 34 cases has been turned over.
But the bank did give a list of the defaulted loans and the names and addresses of the people who got them in Mexico.
“They have drug connections, which is very disheartening to think that the U.S. government is lending money to documented traffickers in the drug trade that are tied into the cartels in Mexico,” said Phil Jordan, the former head of the El Paso Intelligence Center for the DEA and Border Patrol in El Paso.
Jordan ran background checks of the borrowers with two federal sources and found borrowers from Juarez and Sinaloa with criminal ties to money laundering, organized crime or drugs in Mexico. Jordan said he was surprised to find that the Ex-Im Bank didn’t do similar checks before guaranteeing the loans.
“To lend them millions of dollars and then to not be a fail safe system of checks and balances is just throwing money away,” he said.
Between these revelations and the questions about US ownership of a drug plane downed earlier this year, not to mention the raft of official corruption, you have to seriously wonder whether at least some of the “drug bosses” on the American side might just reside quietly in the bowels of government?
FOIA has got a few baby teeth now. In March, the House passed H.R. 1309, the OPEN Government Act, sponsored Reps. Todd Platts (R-Penn.), Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and William Lacy Clay (D-Mo.). The Senate passed its version last week and yesterday the House accepted the final bill through a unanimous voice vote. FOIA now provides for an independent ombudsman to resolve citizen disputes, better tracking of requests, and more opportunity for the public to recover the costs of litigating denied requests.
A Freedom of Information Act (”FOIA”) request has shown the United States had detailed knowledge of Japanese communications throughout WWII and before the attack on Pearl Harbor. According to Robert Stinnett, author “Day Of Deceit” the documents he obtained through his FOIA request show cable after cable of decrypted military messages that show Japanese ships were preparing for war and going to Hawaii. Stinnett, a WW II veteran, spent sixteen years at the National Archives examining over 200,000 documents. He found that from November 17 to 25, 1941, the U.S. Navy intercepted eighty-three messages that Japanese Admiral Yamamoto sent to his carriers. On November 25th Yamamoto’s message was in part: “the task force, keeping its movements strictly secret and maintaining close guard against submarines and aircraft, shall advance into Hawaiian waters, and upon the very opening of hostilities shall attack the main force of the United States fleet in Hawaii and deal it a mortal blow.”
Chuck Osborne from North Canton, Ohio recently sent out an email with the following quote:
In a concurring opinion from New York Times v. Sullivan, Justice Hugo Black joined by Justice William O. Douglas in stating:
“…a representative democracy ceases to exist the moment that the public functionaries are by any means absolved from their responsibility to their constituents; and this happens whenever the constituent can be restrained in any manner from speaking, writing, or publishing his opinion upon any public measure, or upon the conduct of those who may advise or execute it. An unconditional right to say what one pleases about public affairs is what I consider to be the minimum guarantee of the First Amendment.”
Of course how can you speak unless you are informed. And, how can you be informed unless you can access the government records. NYT v. Sullivan is an good example of the societal impact of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Common Pleas Clerk in Portage County denied a Record-Courier reporter access to its files according to a story in the Record Courier on 10-4-2007. Linda Fankhauser, the Clerk of Courts, is apparently reading the new law to allow her to deny access until her office receives training. I like Linda, but I don’t understand her position on this issue. The decision opens the Clerk of Courts to a Public Records mandamus lawsuit. It would be interesting to file it in the Portage County Court of Common Pleas, but I think more prudent to file directly in the Supreme Court. The article is at
Portage court denies access to records
The paper’s editorial is at
Over 100 years ago an Ohio Court got it right:
In England the fountain head of justice is the king. In theory at least the courts are his courts, and the government is his government. Whatever power the people have he has granted to them; and if no grant has been made to them to examine the public records, it may well have been in England that they have no such power.
But in this country we proceed upon an entirely different theory of government. Here the people are the fountain head of justice. The courts are their courts; and the government is their government. Whatever power they have not granted to their officials remains with them . . . .
As public records are but the people’s records it would seem necessarily to follow that unless forbidden by a constitution or statute, the right of the people to examine their own records must remain.
Wells v. Lewis, 12 Ohio N.P. 170, 175-176 (Superior Ct 1901).
The basic philosophy of this site is that a Government not accountable to the public will run amok. Funds will be misspent, bad behavior will be covered up, and cronies will be rewarded. Ohio’s Public Records Statute provides a strong tool for citizen oversight, but it is underused. The statute provides the successful citizen with a chance to recover attorney’s fees spent in pursuit of public records and a $1000.00 penalty for each record destroyed improperly. These incentives led to the $983,000.00 settlement in Kish v. City of Akron in early 2007, a $90,000.00 settlement in Kelley v. Mogadore, and many other smaller settlements statewide.