Our secretive government

A federal judge has slapped down yet another Bush administration attempt to assert broad, unchecked powers of secrecy.
At issue is a manuscript by Danny Stillman, a retired top official at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. The proposed book is not about his 28 years at Los Alamos but about his trips to China in a private capacity to visit a nuclear lab and test site. The book is tentatively titled "Inside China's Nuclear Weapons Program."

Like other employees in sensitive posts, Stillman had agreed to submit any manuscripts to review by government security specialists.

Disputes about what can and cannot be published are resolved by negotiation or, in an impasse, by the writer going to court to force the government to justify its censorship.

What's at issue here is not what Stillman wrote, but his right to go to court. The Bush administration insists he has none. Astonishingly, the administration insists that the federal courts have no standing to review its decisions about classifying information. And if those decisions violate someone's constitutional rights, that's just too bad.

The Bush administration is no friend of open government, but, even so, this sweeping assertion is, as U.S. District Judge Emmet Sullivan said, "stunning." He ruled — and hurray for him — that, "This court will not allow the government to cloak its violations of plaintiff's First Amendment rights in a blanket of national security."