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Post-9/11 secrecy frightens speaker By BILL KETTLER Mail Tribune Jane Kirtley has studied freedom of the press for more than 20 years, and she doesn't like what she sees today. Terrorist attacks have given the Bush administration a convenient justification for tightening access to government information and restricting civil liberties on a scale unimagined a few years ago, Kirtley said Wednesday evening at Southern Oregon University's First Amendment Forum. "I do stand in fear and trembling as I review what has happened to this country since Sept. 11," the University of Minnesota law professor told about 200 people at Stevenson Union. Kirtley said nebulous warnings about imminent terrorist attacks and new rules that restrict access to government information suggest a policy designed to "keep me frightened and servile." Federal policy regulating access to government documents changed "180 degrees" since Bush entered the White House, said Kirtley, who teaches media ethics and law. Before earning her law degree, she served for 14 years as executive director of the Reporters' Committee for Freedom of the Press. She noted that federal officials in the Clinton administration operated under the premise that government information would be available to the public unless there was some significant reason to withhold it. Under Attorney General John Ashcroft, the Justice Department has told government agencies it will support their efforts to withhold documents if there is any legal justification to keep them secret. Kirtley noted the Bush administration's new rules to restrict release of previous presidents' official papers ignores a procedure that had been established by members of both political parties. The new restrictions provide "a recipe for cover-ups and secrecy." "I feel as if I'm in the position of those good German people who didn't know what was going on in those concentration camps in Poland," she said. She assailed Ashcroft's willingness to protect the privacy of officials such as Vice President Dick Cheney while invading the private lives of ordinary citizens as part of an undeclared war on terrorism. "Americans' personal privacy has never been in greater peril," she said. Following Kirtley's sobering assessment, former Grants Pass Daily Courier columnist Dan Guthrie described how he was fired for writing a column that assailed Bush's conduct in the first hours after the Sept. 11 attacks. "He skedaddled," Guthrie wrote, and suggested Bush behaved very much unlike a commander in chief. Guthrie said his editor approved the column, but he was fired days later after the newspaper received hundreds of angry letters and e-mails. He noted that some national media figures raised similar questions briefly right after the attack, but soon all criticism stopped. Guthrie said he received support from all over the world after he was fired. "People really care about freedom of speech in America," he said. "That's what makes us us." Reach reporter Bill Kettler at 776-4492, or e-mail [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.