Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: W. Cronkite: "Segreti e bugie"

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0405-08.htm
Published on Monday, April 5, 2004 by CommonDreams.org
Secrets and Lies Becoming Commonplace
by Walter Cronkite
The initial refusal of President Bush to let his national security
adviser appear under oath before the 9/11 Commission might have been in
keeping with a principle followed by other presidents -- the principle
being, according to Bush, that calling his advisers to testify under
oath is a congressional encroachment on the executive branch's turf.
(Never mind that this commission is not a congressional body, but one he
created and whose members he handpicked.)
But standing on that principle has proved to be politically damaging, in
part because this administration -- the most secretive since Richard
Nixon's -- already suffers from a deepening credibility problem. It all
brings to mind something I've wondered about for some time: Are secrecy
and credibility natural enemies?
When you stop to think about it, you keep secrets from people when you
don't want them to know the truth. Secrets, even when legitimate and
necessary, as in genuine national-security cases, are what you might
call passive lies.
Take the recent flap over Richard Foster, the Medicare official whose
boss threatened to fire him if he revealed to Congress that the
prescription-drug bill would be a lot more expensive than the
administration claimed. The White House tried to pass it all off as the
excessive and unauthorized action of Foster's supervisor (who shortly
after the threatened firing left the government).
Maybe. But the point is that the administration had the newer, higher
numbers, and Congress had been misled. This was a clear case of secrecy
being used to protect a lie. I can't help but wonder how many other
faulty estimates by this administration have actually been
misinformation explained as error.
The Foster story followed by only a few weeks the case of the U.S. Park
police chief who got the ax for telling a congressional staffer -- and
The Washington Post -- that budget cuts planned for her department would
impair its ability to perform its duties. Chief Teresa Chambers since
has accepted forced retirement from government service.
Isolated incidents? Not really. Looking back at the past three years
reveals a pattern of secrecy and of dishonesty in the service of
secrecy. Some New Yorkers felt they had been lied to following the
horrific collapse of the World Trade Center towers. Proposed warnings by
the Environmental Protection Agency -- that the air quality near ground
zero might pose health hazards -- were watered down or deleted by the
White House and replaced with the reassuring message that the air was
safe to breathe.
The EPA's own inspector general said later that the agency did not have
sufficient data to claim the air was safe. However, the reassurance was
in keeping with the president's defiant back-to-work/business-as-usual
theme to demonstrate the nation's strength and resilience. It also was
an early example of a Bush administration reflex described by one
physicist as "never let science get in the way of policy."
In April 2002, the EPA had prepared a nationwide warning about a brand
of asbestos called Zonolite, which contained a form of the substance far
more lethally dangerous than ordinary asbestos. However, reportedly at
the last minute, the White House stopped the warning. Why? The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, which broke the story, noted that the Bush administration
at the time was pushing legislation limiting the asbestos manufacturer's
liability. Whatever the reason, such silence by an agency charged with
protecting our health is a silent lie in my book.
One sometimes gets the impression that this administration believes that
how it runs the government is its business and no one else's. It is
certainly not the business of Congress. And if it's not the business of
the people's representatives, it's certainly no business of yours or mine.
But this is a dangerous condition for any representative democracy to
find itself in. The tight control of information, as well as the
dissemination of misleading information and outright falsehoods,
conjures up a disturbing image of a very different kind of society.

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