“Now in making this appearance, I should point out that I am taking into consideration a very profound belief, that I have expressed publicly on many occasions, in the vital necessity for the confidentiality of presidential communications,” Nixon said in an opening statement. “It seems to me today that when we pick up the papers, and particularly in recent weeks, and read of former presidents, President Kennedy, for example, President Johnson, even President Eisenhower, being accused of approving or participating in discussions in which there was approval of assassination of other people is very much not in the national interest, and probably it is, of course, not true.”

There were no drones back then targeting untried suspected enemies of the U.S., but there were approved assassination attempts, as Nixon well knew.

Nixon expands on the need for secrecy:

“Nevertheless it makes the point very strongly that I am going to make right now, and that is that in the Office of the Presidency of the United States, the nation, which is, not by choice, but by the destiny of history, the most powerful in the free world and the only guarantee of peace and freedom in the world, it is necessary for the president to have no- holds-barred conversations with his advisers.

It is necessary for his advisers to believe that they can give him their unvarnished opinions without regard and without fear of the possibility that those opinions are going to be spread in the public print. It is necessary for them to feel, in other words, that they are talking to the President and that they are not going to the press and that is the reason why confidentiality, which I know, not perhaps you gentlemen, but some of the members of your staff, and certainly some of the members of the House and Senate, and most of the members of the press think is not important. That is why it is important and, in my opinion, absolutely vital. That is the reason why I have resisted in the courts, unsuccessfully up to this point, attempts to impinge upon the privileged status of such conversations.”

The transcripts are available for Scribd perusing or download here.

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Davis is the former chief military prosecutor for the Bush administration’s military commissions who resigned in October 2007 rather than use evidence acquired through torture in commission cases. For months afterward, he publicly criticized the commissions — in articles, speeches and testimony to Congress, becoming something of a hero to civil rights advocates and others who believed the commissions were fundamentally flawed.

In December 2008 he went to work for the Congressional Research Service. But when he spoke out in November of this year against the continued use of the commissions in an editorial in The Wall Street Journal and a letter to The Washington Post, Davis was promptly fired. His writing violated CRS policy, he was told, and interfered with the agency’s duty to remain nonpartisan. Davis had expressed the criticisms as his own, however, rather than on behalf of the agency. The American Civil Liberties Union has threatened to sue on Morris’s behalf.

So when does a government agency’s requirement that its employees not speak publicly on political issues violate the First Amendment?

The government does have the right to restrict what its employees say when they’re speaking in their official capacity, as part of their job. But when they’re speaking as private citizens, public employees have more room to maneuver, particularly when they’re speaking about things unrelated to their jobs duties.

CRS, however, prides itself on both objectivity and secrecy, and apparently claimed that Morris’s public statements compromised both. Still, those values may well run up against the right to free speech in this conflict.

The new directive, from Peter Orszag at the Office of Management and Budget, requires executive departments and agencies, within specific deadlines of not more than two months, to publish more information about their work online in an open format that can be retrieved and searched easily.

The progress report recounts what the administration has done so far to improve transparency, including writing new ethics rules to (mostly) prevent lobbyists from coming to work in government or sitting on its advisory boards; publishing the names of White House visitors; creating Websites that track how the government spends taxpayer money; reversing a Bush administration executive order that limited access to presidential records; and adopted a new state secrets policy. (The report neglects to mention ongoing criticism about the effectiveness of some of these measures.)

The latest transparency directive, while welcomed by open-government advocates, also highlights the fact that the sort of opennness Obama called for on his first day in office still has not taken place inside many executive agencies.

As Meredith Fuchs, General Counsel of the National Security Archive put it in a statement released after the White House announcement:

The Administration appears to realize that even eloquent statements of principle will not shift the bureaucracy’s natural and political tendency towards secrecy.

As for OMB’s new timetables to require more openness, she said:

The only thing missing is a clear enforcement regime, but if the White House, OMB, and the heads of the agencies are serious, then they will use their authority to make these changes real. In some ways that is the test of how serious the Obama Administration is about transparency.

Update: Steven Aftergood at Secrecy News notes that the new directive “does not extend to classified national security information or controlled unclassified information, both of which are to be addressed in other pending executive orders. But it does direct agencies to reduce any backlogs in Freedom of Information Act requests “by ten percent each year.”

Here’s what Jameel Jaffer, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project, which has been fighting for release of those photos, had to say about the vote:

We are deeply disappointed that the House voted to give the Defense Department the authority to hide evidence of its own misconduct, and we hope the Senate will not follow suit. If this bill does become law, the Secretary of Defense should not invoke it. Instead, Secretary Gates should be guided by the importance of transparency to the democratic process, the extraordinary importance of these photos to the ongoing debate about the treatment of prisoners and the likelihood that the suppression of these photos will ultimately be far more damaging to national security than their disclosure would be. The last administration’s decision to endorse torture undermined the United States’ moral authority and compromised its security. The failure of the current administration to fully confront the abuses of the last administration will only compound these harms.

You can find the roll call here.

After the jump, Slaughter’s full remarks made this morning on the House floor about why FOIA should not be amended and the photos should not be concealed. 

There are few things that say more about our country and our trust in the public’s right to know than the Freedom of Information Act.

It’s one of the most powerful statements of openness and transparency we have. It affords ordinary people the ability to peer behind the curtains of power and see inside the many bureaucracies that define the federal, state and local governments in this country.

It’s a symbol for all that despite anything else that our government does in the name of the people, there should be no secrets.

Over the years, FOIA laws have been used for a wide range of purposes. FOIA helped us discover the ugly truth about the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia during the 1960′s. And FOIA was also used to uncover data showing that Ford Pintos were built with serious fuel

system defects that made them more prone to fire and explosions.

In some ways, FOIA is simply a reminder to the public that there is an avenue to pursue if they believe the government is keeping secrets. At the heart of FOIA is the concept that the people’s right to know is more important than the government’s desire to keep things secret.

The FOIA laws in this country have enabled reporters and citizens from all spectrums access to information that otherwise might never see the light of day.

Signed into law by President Johnson in 1966, FOIA laws allow for the full or partial disclosure of information and documents with only a narrow list of exemptions.

So it was with some dismay when we learned recently that the House and Senate conferees on the Homeland Security appropriations bill had slipped in a provision that gives the government the option of making old photos of detainee abuse exempt from FOIA laws.

This case has already followed a lengthy path, beginning with a lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the Pentagon. Last spring, when it appeared that the lawsuit might go against the government, this Administration responded by asking some members of the House and Senate to insert language into legislation to make sure the photos stay secret.

Joining the ACLU against the Pentagon was the American Society of News Editors, The Associated Press, Cable News Network, Inc., the E.W. Scripps Company, Gannett Co., Inc., the Hearst Corporation, Military Reporters and Editors, the National Press Club, NBC Universal, Inc., the New York Times Company, the Newspaper Association of America, the Newspaper Guild-CWA, the Radio-Television News Directors Association, the Society of Professional Journalists and The Washington Post.

Never mind that the photos in question likely have very little value, given that a similar set of photos showing abuse were released under the Bush Administration. Despite some complaints that releasing the photos would put servicemen and women in danger, the fact is there was absolutely no increase in violence or attacks after the previous detainee photos were released. My guess is that if we were to release new photos the result would be the same.

And many observers argue that releasing the photos was actually a clear break from the abuses of the past – and a signal to our allies and everyone else that the days of this type of detainee mistreatment were over and that the United States is willing to come to terms with its past practices.

In June, I and other House leaders prevailed and the FOIA exemption was dropped from legislation.

However, the conferees – apparently under direct orders from the Administration – quietly put it back into the bill this month.

It’s hard for me to express how disappointed I am with that decision. I am sorry because I believe that we had turned a page from the cloud of suspicion and secrecy that marked the previous Administration. It runs so counter to our principals and stated desire to reject the abuses of the past. The FOIA laws in this country form a pillar of our First Amendment principals.

It’s unfortunate given that this Administration promised that openness and transparency would be the norm. We should never do anything to circumvent FOIA and I believe that our country would gain more by coming to terms with the past than we would by covering it up. I hope that the President will follow judicial rulings and consider voluntarily releasing these photos so we can put this chapter in history behind us.

Update: C-SPAN has video of Slaughter’s remarks, which begin shortly after the 50-minute mark here.

2nd Update: Here‘s the video.

Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA conduct “extraordinary renditions” of terror suspects to foreign countries to be tortured. As I reported back in June, the Obama Justice Department has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear the case after the court ordered that it can continue, despite the administration’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege.”

Most recently, the Chronicle notes, a British government lawyer told the U.K. High Court of Justice last month “that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of Mohamed’s treatment in Guantanamo.”

A transcript of the British court’s July 29 hearing reveals that Lord Justice John Thomas rejected that argument, saying there was “nothing in the paragraphs (about the U.S. government’s treatment of Mohamed) that could conceivably identify anything that is of a national security interest.”

Put aside whatever you may feel about AIPAC. The case amounted to the criminalization of extremely routine practices in Washington: acquiring and distributing information that’s overclassified.

Technically, I published classified information last Monday when I reported that there was an undisclosed classified Office of Legal Counsel memorandum on torture from 2007. There’s a widespread recognition that way too much information is needlessly classified. Indeed, “Ninety-five percent of what we do shouldn’t be classified at all, or it should be a much lower level of classification,” Joan Dempsey, a former senior CIA and Pentagon official, recently estimated, according to Secrecy News. Neither Steve Rosen nor Keith Weissman, the AIPAC lobbyists in question, were government employees. Even if we’re to take the Justice Department’s former line that the leak itself was felonious, they were never accused of being the sources of it, since they couldn’t have been. (That was a guy named Larry Franklin.)

During the Chas Freeman affair, when Steve Rosen was leading the charge against Freeman’s appointment to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council for alleged hostility to Israel, alleged disinterest in human rights, and insinuated nefarious loyalties to China and Saudi Arabia, I remarked that Rosen shouldn’t have gone after another pro-Israel lobbyist with whom he disagreed over Freeman while being wrapped up in the case. I shouldn’t have said that Rosen was under indictment for spying for Israel, since that was a misstatement of the case. The point that I should have made is that someone who was railroaded in this case, with its intimations of dual loyalty, should be circumspect about flinging such charges against other people. Maybe we can all take a deep breath here — doubtful, but maybe — and reflect that it’s good for everyone who desires openness in government that the flimsy charges against Weissman and Rosen are on their way out, regardless of the politics of the accused.

Well, what exactly does that mean?  What is “properly privileged or otherwise confidential”?

Yesterday, a coalition of good-government groups wrote to President Obama asking him to clarify, saying that his statement could be read as a warning to federal workers against acting as whistleblowers by communicating unclassified information to Congress. And that would contradict their legal rights.

The coalition, which includes such groups as the ACLU, American Federation of Government Employees, and Government Accountability Project, asked Obama to endorse legislation that would protect from retaliation federal employees who expose waste, fraud, abuse, suppression of federal research, and threats to public health and safety, and give them the right to a jury trial. The groups also asked that the president direct federal agency heads to institute “no-retaliation” policies for employees.

As I’ve written before, the stimulus bill, despite its many attempts at transparency at accountability, strangely neglected to fully protect federal employee whistleblowers. Watchdog groups hoped those protections would be passed in some other legislation, but so far they haven’t, and the president’s signing statement appeared to weaken the minimal protections that federal employees already have.

In their letter, the coalition — which otherwise praises Obama for saying during the presidential campaign that he’d support whistleblowers and for his executive orders and memoranda concerning open government and the Freedom of Information Act — asked the president to make clear that pulling the rug out from under federal employee whistleblowers is not really what he meant to do.

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They also wanted Mohamed, an Ethiopian citizen, to plead guilty — even though he was never charged with a crime.

Given the rising number of lawsuits being filed against the United States charging unlawful detention, torture and abuse in violation of U.S. and international law, the U.S. government’s attempt to get Mohamed to sign a release isn’t all that surprising. And the U.S. government’s pressure to keep the details of Mohamed’s ordeal secret is consistent with its previous pressure on the U.K. court not to release even a summary of his claims of torture.

But it raises the question: how many more former detainees have promised not to talk, or sue, or seek justice of any kind, in order to secure their release?

Reading from the contracts — which still appear not to be publicly available, though I’m trying to get them — Frank notes that the contracts effectively insulated the managers from the company’s losses: heads – I win; tails – I don’t lose, either.

“We should bring lawsuits, as the owners, to say these people performed so badly that we’re justified in rescinding the contracts,” said Frank.  He added that the contracts even appear to have been written and signed in comtemplation of serious losses, suggesting the fraud that New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has said he’s investigating.

I still think the first step ought to be making those contracts public, and seeing what exactly the AIG employees were expected to do to fulfill their end of the bargain. And if there’s a real case to be made that they didn’t fulfill their obligations (as there sure seems to be, given the state of the company), then by all means — sue the bastards.

Update: The AIG contracts are now up on the House Financial Services Committee Website (PDF).