Welcome to the 2009 Danger Room tribute to Sunshine Week, the time of year when I pull out my past year’s stack of denials under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), gaze at them like break-up letters from ex-boyfriends, and curse the law that was supposed to help ensure the public’s access to government records.
Yes, Sunshine Week is all about celebrating openness in government, but for me, it’s just a bitter reminder of my unrequited love affair with a law that has done little more than to raise my blood pressure and drive me to the occasional drink. Why even torture myself every year? I have no idea, but my tribute to Sunshine Week is something of an annual tradition here on Danger Room, so I’m taking a break from academic bliss at MIT to re-read my FOIA rejections letters over a glass of red wine and wonder: Was it me, or was it them?
Definitely them.
By way of a recap: Two years ago, I wrote about my obsession with obtaining Hollywood doomsday scenarios commissioned by the U.S. Army after 9/11 (because why shell out $10 to watch Cloverfield, when the Pentagon can pay $2 million for a PowerPoint depicting a monster invasion?). Last year, I wanted to spread the pain a little, so I threw together a mishmash of failed FOIAs, ranging from document requests related to would-be mind control weapons to hypothetical anti-matter bombs. That was unsatisfying, however, because I really like to direct my bitterness in one direction.
This year, I redoubled my efforts, filing over two dozen requests in one last asthmatic gasp of hope that FOIA could actually prove itself to be more than a tool of self-flagellation. Like the girl who keeps going after the wrong sort of guy, I’ve never given up hope that FOIA officers maybe, just maybe, would stop rejecting me. Wrong.
These past 12 months, have, once again, been a rich year for rejection. Where do I start? There’s State Department, which took six months to even acknowledge my records request. Then there’s the Army Audit Agency, which claimed they never got the request I emailed to their designated FOIA account. I can’t forget the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which took over 18 months to release papers that were already published in the open scientific literature. And then there’s my personal favorite, the CIA, which said they can’t tell me if the records I want exist, but if they do exist, they are properly classified.
But all those rejections, dismissals, and delays pale against this year’s top FOIA blow-off: the Army’s Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation, and more specifically, the slightly esoteric subject of my request, the Threat Systems Management Office (TSMO), whose no-bid contracting, multiple aircraft crashes, and generally mysterious mission creep into foreign military sales makes it a prime target for my FOIA frustration.
By way of a reminder, last year, I wrote abouta no-bid sweetheart contract arranged by the U.S. Army for the purchase of 22 Mi-17 Russian helicopters for Iraq. Thanks to TSMO, which was responsible for the $322 million deal, Iraq is paying between two and three times the going price for Mi-17s, according to those familiar with the sales. Although there are over half a dozen U.S. companies with experience buying Russian helicopters, the contract was handed on a platter to the Carlyle-owned ARINC, a newcomer to the world of Russian helicopters. Also troubling, the contract required working with Rosoboronexport, the Russian export agency currently on a U.S. black list for violating U.S. nonproliferation laws (there is a waiver in place for the deal). I filed a FOIA request in July 2008 requesting a copy of the contract, and related documents.
Eight months later, here I sit, with my glass of wine, a pile of letters, and still no contract.
That the Army has failed over the course of eight months to release a redacted version of an unclassified contract, let alone supporting documents, demonstrates everything that is wrong with FOIA. It's fine if agencies want to release records, but completely useless if government officials know they have something they'd rather not have made public. Case in point: this no-bid contract.
Not only does FOIA in cases like this not provide transparency into government operations, the disclosure process itself is cloaked in secrecy and riddled with capricious decision-making. There's no mechanism, short of the courts, to ensure officials are acting in good faith. In this case, the Army hasn’t released the documents for one simple reason: the officials responsible for this contract don't want it to be released and no one is forcing them to release it.
The Army doesn’t want to release the contract because it would rather not explain why it sole-sourced a deal worth $322 million; why the Iraqi government is paying over twice the going rate for Russian helicopters; and why, over a year since the deal was signed, no helicopters have actually been delivered to Iraq under this contract. It comes as little surprise that both TSMO and ARINC, which both would like to keep details of this sale from seeing the light of day, would resist attempts to disclose records. As a tool for understanding how and why this contract came about, FOIA has proved useless.
Where does this leave me? On his first day in office, President Obama addressed FOIA, promising that “transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” Those are fine words, but they need to be translated into something tangible. Open government takes work by public officials tasked to release information, as well as by the public, which must ensure that promises of openness are followed by action. In other words, talk is cheap, and Russian helicopters are getting really expensive.
So, Danger Room readers, raise a big toast to Sunshine Week, or maybe just skip the wine, and in honor of TSMO’s overpriced Russian helicopters, join me in shot of Stoli. Trust me, it helps ease the sting of rejection.
'Til next year…
[Photo: Impawards]
