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Reporter's Notebook When NOW's management team decided to put
together an hour long special on government secrecy and asked me to be
the correspondent, I was elated. That's what I love about my work here
at NOW. Every new assignment is filled with intellectual stimulation
and the knowledge that not only am I going to learn something new but
I get to inform the American public about things they don't know about
but should.
The mandate was clear. Get stories from people on the frontlines of
the battle over government secrecy. My producer Peter Meryash and his
team had already been researching the issue for several weeks but I
dove in and started making calls. Within a few hours I was on the
phone with a woman from New Jersey.
In a wonderfully thick New Jersey-Brooklynite accent she told me her
story.
"Hey, I am a former disco queen who never even read the editorial page
of my paper but now I am a one woman powerhouse in my town fighting
for open government!" Another call to the ACLU. Anthony Romero who
heads the organization told me, "We have dozens of cases of people and
institutions who are battling with the government to get access to
information...which lawsuit would you like to hear about..." And
Victoria Toensing, a former Reagan staffer in the Republican White
House, would later tell me emphatically, "I hope the government is
doing things I don't know about! Frankly, the American people don't
have the right to know what the war plan is!"
I immediately felt enthused and inspired. Across party lines people
were engaged and thinking about issues of open government. And it
always makes me feel better when I know people are acting on their
issues in a true expression of democracy. I never got the former disco
queen on the air with her story (and she is a fierce independent in
terms of her political affiliations) but just knowing that she is out
there making open government HER issue makes me feel good about the
state of our democracy.
The highlights of working on this hour long special? There are many of
them. My first interview in Washington was with Tom Blanton, the head
of the National Security Archive. Every working journalist in America
knows about the National Security Archive. They are on the forefront
of getting information out of the government that the public has a
right to know. Walking around the offices, seeing hundreds of boxes of
formerly classified information that was now at my fingertips,
including actual records of CIA testing of hallucinogenic drugs on
innocent people and paperwork revolving around the Vietnam war, was
an investigative journalist's heaven.
A few weeks later, I was in the offices of Republican Congresswoman
Heather Wilson who represents a district in New Mexico and is the
chairwoman for an intelligence subcommittee. Sitting in her office,
adorned with photographs of her kids who are just about the same ages
as mine, I was taken by the gravitas a Republican representative must
have to take on her own party and her own President. After she found
out about the warrantless eavesdropping program by reading it in the
newspaper, Wilson wrote a note to the President and his staff asking
to be briefed. She told me she waited quietly for a response for 7
weeks and only then did she speak out publicly, demanding they answer
her. "The White House was stonewalling me," she told me. "And I have a
job to do in congress. It's called oversight. And for that I need the
facts."
But perhaps what was most meaningful for me was to meet Karen Meredith
and Peggy Buryj. Both are moms who have lost sons in the Iraq war.
Both have had to fight the military in order to find out exactly how
their sons lost their lives. But that is where the similarity ends.
Karen Meredith doesn't support the war or President Bush. Peggy Buryj
supports the war and this president. In the end, Meredith is the one
who now, after more than a year of taking on the army, believes she
has gotten the truth from them about her son Ken Ballard. But Buryj,
who believes President Bush is a good man, and now wishes she had
never had a military funeral for her son says, "Rank is just something
that smells bad to me." She worries she may never get the secrets
about her son Jesse's death from the military and what's worse,
worries she may never believe them.
Across America, across political lines, Americans are asking to let
the sunshine in. I am glad to have been a tiny part in just telling
their stories.
"The Sunshine Gang" was made possible in part by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
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