The Associated Press reports the House Oversight Committee has asked the Department of Homeland Security for documents about its policy requiring political appointees to review Freedom of Information Act requests.
Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility says the Dec. 21 memo implies that existing EPA openness policy meets White House criteria. Meanwhile, the Office of Management and Budget may again be tampering with agency science for political purposes — accused by Arizona congressman Raúl Grijalva (pictured) of censoring FOIA'd documents relating to the mid-summer estimate of Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
Anonymous White House lawyers have blacked out all information about how the administration's science openness policy was arrived at, and are fighting in court against efforts to shed light on it.
"Rare minerals. Food and water. Arable soil. Air-cleansing forests. In the intellectual heart of the American military and policy-making world, these are emerging not just as environmental issues, but as the potential stuff of conflict in the 21st century."
The order gives agencies 120 days to review their existing secrecy designations and to come up with standardized ones "in a timely manner." When there is doubt, Obama's order states, agencies are to err on the side of disclosure.
The Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility is suing the administration under the Freedom of Information Act for documents that would explain the delay in issuing a long overdue, government-wide integrity policy.
FBI agents during the Bush administration "investigated members of the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace over their protest activities 'with little or no basis,' [a Justice Department Inspector General's] report said. Agents kept the case open for more than three years, even though no charges were filed, and put the activists on a terrorist watch list, it said."
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