Rumsfeld on Openness

From WSJ via FAS Secrecy News is the following:

"I have long believed in the importance of granting the public greater access to information about their government–the good and the bad," wrote Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in a Wall Street Journal opinion article this week, noting that he had co-sponsored the Freedom of Information Act as a member of Congress in 1966.

He wrote of the challenges of informing the public in "this new Information Age," and observed that "a healthy culture of communication and transparency between government and the public needs to be established."

"This openness, however, does not obviate the necessity of protecting the secrecy of confidential information that, if revealed, could harm the security of the U.S."

"While I have long believed that too much material is classified across the federal government as a general rule, an increasingly cavalier attitude towards sensitive information in various quarters can put the lives of our troops at correspondingly increasing risk."

During Secretary Rumsfeld’s tenure, a growing quantity of formerly public information has been withdrawn from public access.

MediaChannel.org has the complete 18 July 2005 article.

2 thoughts on “Rumsfeld on Openness

  1. A whole lot of conflict and contradiction in Rummy’s words. Partially a side affect of the security reaction to 9/11.Rumsfelf has done his duty – he’s “written” the article/speech only problem is it means little.

  2. >only problem is it means littleThis is a too prevailing attitude on the part of the media. It begs the question: when do you call a liar a liar? If Scott McClellan consistently reverses himself, states that which is not true, etc when does the media decide to stop considering him a credible person, let alone spokesman? If the Press Secretary’s actions were in private personal relations, do you think he’d have many friends? Do you think the media would really trust him to pick up the tab? And yet he and others are allowed to continue to not tell the truth without objection or question from the media. The media and the public simply mark it up to politics while they would not accept the practice between people… interesting how we allow this to happen. More interesting is how the media allows it to happen because they are so reliant on the White House, in part because they refuse to get the story on their own. Reporters on the fringe, outside of the mainstream, are those who refuse to tow the line of the politicians. hmmm

Comments are closed.