At What Cost? - Hartford Business Editorial

At What Cost?

Today

 

In 1975, on the heels of the Watergate scandal, Connecticut adopted one of the most sweeping state Freedom of Information laws in the nation. It was a time for lawmakers and Connecticut residents to be proud, opening the doors of government meetings and town hall file cabinets to the public.

The law didn't come about overnight. For nearly 20 years, right-to-know advocates worked hard to get lawmakers to adopt such a sweeping bill — to no avail. But the turbulent 1970s set the stage for its passage. It was a time in our nation's history, following years of opposition to the Vietnam War, when the public increasingly perceived the federal government as an entity that could not to be trusted. The Watergate scandal clearly exacerbated that perception.

Connecticut lawmakers understood that they needed to do something quickly to reinstate the general public's lack of faith in government. Standing up to the federal government's pattern of secrecy, Gov. Ella Grasso and a group of open government advocates pushed forward the state's Freedom of Information law, providing broad public access to government meetings and documents, with few exemptions.

Although the exemptions have increased significantly over the past 33 years, the FOI law continues to be an important tool that provides Connecticut residents with an opportunity to file a complaint and be heard when access is denied. And notably, it is a watchdog mechanism that provides oversight of local and state governments to safeguard against abuses.

Considering Connecticut's historic opposition to government secrecy, it is shameful that state officials have agreed to secretly incarcerate federal detainees and defend this secret practice.

While it is public knowledge that federal officials keep detainees in covert prisons around the world — the most infamous being Guantanamo Bay — it comes as a surprise, even to some state officials, that federal detainees are also held, secretly, right here in Connecticut.

Based on a 1995 contract between state and federal authorities, federal detainees can be housed in the state's jails and prisons. They are held among the general prison population in exchange for a per-inmate fee. Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, new federal regulations clamped down on the disclosure of information about those prisoners.

This contract came to light, thanks to a complaint filed by a former University of Connecticut researcher who had lived in Hartford for 10 years. He had been hauled away and detained for two months before being deported to his native country. Never formally charged, he now wants to know on what grounds he had been detained. His attorneys from Yale University's Allard K. Lowenstein Human Rights Clinic National Litigation Project did uncover that he was held on the vague grounds of civil immigration violations.

Such an action is reminiscent of other, shameful practices the federal government adopted during times of war and in the name of national security.

As a nation, we should be ashamed. As a state, we should be mortified for having condoned such a practice.

While the state Freedom of Information Commission is standing up to the federal government's practice of secrecy, state officials, lawmakers and taxpayers must join in and renounce this practice, demanding that the state terminate its 1995 contract with the feds.

With the growing mistrust of the federal government and its reasons for entering the Iraq war, the time is right once again for Connecticut to take a stand against government secrecy. The contract that permits federal detainees to be held secretly in Connecticut prisons goes against everything Gov. Grasso and the lawmakers who adopted the state's sweeping Freedom of Information laws wanted to achieve. We need to ask ourselves: What cost is Connecticut paying to permit such a contract to continue?

 
 

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