The Law: Blasting Facts Free

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In October 1973, when Ralph Nader wanted to learn more about Internal Revenue Service investigations of "ideological, militant, subversive and radical organizations," his Tax Reform Research Group cited the Freedom of Information Act and asked to see 41 confidential IRS documents. Not a chance, said the revenue service. Nader's group responded with a suit, and the IRS reluctantly agreed to open its books. Last week Nader revealed that the service's intelligence gathering had been prompted by the Nixon White House. The 99 organizations investigated between 1969 and 1973 included

Americans for Democratic Action, the John Birch Society, the Urban League, the Congress for Racial Equality and the National Council of Churches.

Back in 1969, Realtor Philip Long and his wife Susan also invoked the Freedom of Information Act to get IRS reports and manuals for their fight against a claimed tax debt of $38,144. Three years later, a federal judge ruled for the Longs. Two weeks ago, chastened by its initial loss, the Government agreed to a new Long request and turned over statistical summaries of the 2 million audits made each year since 1954. While dredging through their latest haul, the Longs will be seeking to find whether established agency procedures and practice discriminate against small taxpayers.

To judge from these examples, the

Freedom of Information Act is alive, well and helping information seekers to blast facts out of the Washington bureaucracy just as it was supposed to. Though information seekers have begun to crack the stone wall of official secrecy, they have still been meeting adamantine resistance. Many Government bureaucracies have continued to use all available weapons, tactics, loopholes and weaknesses in the law to maintain their sheltered ways.

Two weeks ago the University of Florida law school's Center for Government Responsibility reported to Congress that, despite Executive objections, the law could and should be amended to assure greater access. That critical conclusion found detailed support in an examination of the act in the current Columbia Law Review. Without needed amendments, said Author Gregory Waples, "the statute cannot attain the lofty ideals that mesmerized its drafters."

Those ideals, stated in the 1966 law, were simply that every federal agency must make "records promptly available to any person." Apart from exceptions so numerous and broad, complained Yale Law Professor Thomas Emerson, that they took away "most of what was previously granted."

The exception for law-enforcement investigatory records, for example, was recently cited to protect Federal Bureau of Investigation files on the Alger Hiss-Whittaker Chambers case. Attorney General William Saxbe reversed an earlier decision to disclose and decided instead that FBI techniques and informers would be compromised, even though the case is a quarter-century old. Angered, Smith College Historian Allen Weinstein will now press his claim in court under the act's provision for judicial review. He may not have much luck. Judges have upheld similar bureaucratic refusals when a Congressman sought reports on the My Lai massacre investigation and a Warren Commission critic asked to see tests of the "single bullet" that killed John Kennedy and wounded John Connally.

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