ABFFE Fights CIA Censorship, Defends FOIA Reform

On February 7, the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) joined groups opposing both the Central Intelligence Agency censorship of Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House and President George Bush's effort to alter legislation that strengthens the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Fair Game (Simon & Schuster) is Valerie Plame Wilson's account of the controversy that ensued after she was outed as a CIA operative by newspaper columnist Robert Novak.

"The administration is assaulting First Amendment rights on two fronts," ABFFE President Chris Finan said. "On one hand, it is trying to prevent Wilson from publishing once secret information that is now a matter of public record. On the other, President Bush is seeking to undermine a law improving the Freedom of Information Act that he just signed."

On Wednesday, ABFFE joined an amicus brief submitted by the Association of American Publishers in a lawsuit that Wilson and Simon & Schuster filed last year after the CIA refused to allow her to publish the dates of her employment by the agency. Fair Game was published without the information. (In the book, this fact and other information censored by the CIA are blacked out.)

In her lawsuit, Wilson argued that her dates of service had been revealed by the CIA in an unclassified letter and are available in both the Congressional Record and on the Internet. However, a federal judge denied her request to publish the information, and the case has been appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

The AAP brief argues that the CIA's refusal to allow Wilson to publish information in the public domain is "perverse" and violates the First Amendment, which bars prior restraints in most circumstances. It also notes the irony that the case "involves the government's efforts to censor purportedly classified public-domain information from a book that describes the wrongful disclosure to the media of classified information by senior government officials."

On Thursday, ABFFE joined 30 civil liberties and open government groups in urging Congress to reject President Bush's effort to undermine the OPEN Government Act, a bill Bush signed into law in December that is intended to improve the government's response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act. One of the key reforms in the law is the creation of an ombudsman's office in the National Archives and Records Administration, a nonpartisan agency charged with responsibility for making government documents available to the public. In the budget bill he has submitted to Congress, the president has called for moving the ombudsman's office from NARA to the Department of Justice, which often defends government officials when they oppose FOIA requests.

In a letter delivered to the House and Senate committees reviewing the budget bill, ABFFE and its allies charge that there is an obvious conflict of interest in giving the Justice Department control over an official whose job is to facilitate the release of government information.