... the Rosemary Award is named after President Nixon's secretary Rosemary Woods and the backwards-leaning stretch which she testified resulted in her erasing eighteen-and-a-half minutes from a key Watergate conversation on the White House tapes.
Today’s Rosemary Award citation quotes the U.S. District Court finding in 2006 that the *Air Force had “failed miserably” to meet FOIA deadlines. The Award also cites Air Force’s status as an “E-Delinquent” in the latest National Security Archive audit of agency compliance with the Electronic FOIA, which found 139 broken links on the Air Force FOIA Web sites. Air Force performance over the last year has also included losing records while ostensibly processing FOIA requests, and featuring a FOIA contact fax number that actually rang in a patient’s room at the hospital at Wright-Patterson Air Base in Ohio. *
*The 2006 Rosemary Award *was presented to the Central Intelligence Agency for “the most dramatic one-year drop-off in professionalism and responsiveness to the public we have seen in 20 years of monitoring federal government compliance with the freedom of information law.” After this poor performance, however, the CIA received high marks for its E-FOIA performance in the Archive’s latest audit, “File Not Found: 10 Years After E-FOIA, Most Federal Agencies Are Delinquent.”
