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KEEP IT IN THE FAMILY - Update 12/21/01 Dear friend, Yesterday White House counsel Alberto Gonzales announced (via an op-ed in the Washington Post) that the administration was backing down from its attempt to stall public release of Reagan-era documents under the Presidential Records Act. This retreat came exactly three weeks after we filed suit against Bush administration policy on presidential records, in a case brought by Public Citizen Litigation Group on our behalf and that of the American Historical Association and other scholars and public interest groups. Ironically, the Justice Department attorney on the other side of the case also found out the news by reading the Post yesterday morning! Not included in the Gonzales op-ed was the fine print: Only 8,000 of the 68,766 pages that have been stalled since January are cleared for release; the others are still under review by Reagan and Bush representatives. Until we win the lawsuit, we can expect more of this kind of indefinite delay, with no deadline. Also in the Post yesterday morning was an angry quote from House Government Reform Committee chairman Dan Burton (R-Indiana), blasting the Bush administration's penchant for secrecy and refusal to turn over documents to Congress on a variety of issues - dating back well before September 11th to Vice President Cheney's stonewalling on the names of the Enron lobbyists who advised him on the administration's energy proposals. Rep. Burton charged, "An iron veil is descending over the executive branch." I have to admit that I rarely agree with Rep. Burton on anything, but he's onto something here. Attorney General Ashcroft has sent around a memo to Freedom of Information officers telling them the Justice Department will defend their withholding information from the public if they can find any technicality in the law to use as justification. An interagency task force is reviewing President Clinton's secrecy reform executive order, and you can bet any changes next year will not be in the direction of more reform, but towards more secrecy. This is what we're up against. And yet, as in yesterday's victory on presidential records, far from giving up, we can demonstrate real success - and we expect even more, with your support. Earlier this month, for example, we published the previously secret documents showing that President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, on their December 1975 trip to Jakarta, gave the green-light for Indonesia's bloody invasion of East Timor. Kissinger had previously claimed "Timor was never discussed with us when we were in Indonesia" - a denial that Slate magazine ranked as "Whopper of the Week" in their December 7 issue. On December 8, the respected National Journal cited our "September 11th Sourcebooks" series as one of the top five terrorism-related sites on the entire World Wide Web, hailing our "fascinating primary data and analysis." Our Web site hosted more than 600,000 visits in November, and visitors are downloading two gigabytes (!) per day from the site. Of course, as an e-mail subscriber, you well know the riches now posted at http://www.nsarchive.org. I have only one request, which is the reason I am writing: Please also support the Archive financially. The National Security Archive Fund is a public charity, making your contribution tax-deductible, and relies completely on grants, royalty revenues, and donations from friends like you. A gift of $100 covers the costs of designing, filing and following up a declassification request (we file over 1,000 of these each year). A gift of $50 pays for coding and loading a new document, like the Ford-Kissinger-Suharto memcon, onto the Web site for the world to see. A gift of $250 supports a whole week of one of our half-time graduate students who suffer most of the paper cuts around here, not to mention the ionized particles from the computer screens. Your check, made out to the National Security Archive Fund, should be mailed to: National Security
Archive On behalf of all of us here at the National Security Archive, I thank you again for joining our e-mail list and lending your eyes and mice to the Archive's mission. You have our best wishes for the holiday season, and our warm regards! Sincerely,
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