New CRS Report on Senate Holds
We've written about how secret Senate holds have blocked transparency legislation that had wide bipartisan support. Last month the Congressional Research Service came out with this report on the subject of holds:
RL34255
Senate Policy on "Holds": Action in the 110th Congress
November 20, 2007
"When the Honest Leadership and Open Government Act (S. 1, 110th Congress) was signed into law on September 14, 2007, Section 512 of that statute specifically addressed the issue of secret "holds." Holds are a longstanding custom of the Senate that enabled Members to provide notice to their party leader of their intent to object on the floor to taking up or passing a measure or matter. Their potency as a blocking, delaying, or bargaining device is linked to Senators' ability to conduct filibusters or object to unanimous consent agreements or requests. The new holds process outlined in Section 512 is designed to constrain the frequency of anonymous holds and promote more openness and transparency with respect to their use. Ultimately, it is up to the majority leader of the Senate -- who sets the chamber's agenda after consulting various people -- to decide whether, or for how long, he will honor a colleague's hold. This report will be updated if circumstances warrant a revision."
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So the next time there is a secret hold, the main chap to complain to will be:
Reid, Harry- (D - NV)
528 HART SENATE OFFICE BUILDING WASHINGTON DC 20510
(202) 224-3542
Web Form: reid.senate.gov/contact/email_form.cfm
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Thanks to the Open CRS project at http://opencrs.com for getting ahold of this report and making it available to the public. Their work is very important because Congress has prevented its research arm from making CRS reports available to the public, even though they are in the public domain and unclassified. Most of the arguments we've heard not releasing CRS reports apply equally well to the Government Accountability Office, which has released all of its non-classified information products for many years.
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Comparing the presidential candidates
The ONE Campaign has put together a nice little tool to compare the statements of all the presidential candidates:
Tens of thousands of ONE members asked the candidates to go "On The Record" with their plans to combat extreme poverty and global disease. “On the Record” is a project of ONE Action and provides information to help evaluate the candidates on ONE’s issues.
Learn more about the campaign.
Continue readingWhat’s worse than 18 1/2 minutes of deleted audio?
What could be worse for a President than 18 1/2 minutes of missing tape (Listen to Nixon's Watergate Tapes here)? How about 10 MILLION deleted emails? Yup, that's right, White House email from March of 2003 to October 2005 (which would include the start of the Iraq War right up through the aftermath of Katrina) have "mysteriously" gone missing. The National Security Archive filed a motion back in October to find out what e-mails are missing from the White House e-mail system or backup tapes. This could be huge because the Presidential Records Act of 1978 mandates that White House communications be preserved.
Continue readingGet Hearings Fast!
Getting a hearing quickly is difficult if not impossible -- unless you have money. Now, without fanfair, one committee is making it easier. See a list here, and read more about it in Dan Froomkin's article, Citizen Journalists, Start Your Engines! (December 4, 2007).
Continue readingMajor hearings are often transcribed in real-time by CQ Transcripts and the Federal News Service, but those are copyrighted works that are only available to those who pay for them or have a subscription to Nexis.
Up until now, it took more than six months for public-domain transcripts of most hearings to become available. They had to work their way through an arduous proofing and approval process before finally being published by the Government Printing Office.
But now, without any formal announcement, the House Oversight Committee has started Web-publishing the preliminary transcripts prepared by official stenographers as soon as they are available -- typically within a few days of the hearing. In other words, while the news is still fresh.
Let's hope other committees follow its lead.
Wikileaks puts another Gitmo document online
A couple of weeks ago, we posted about Wikileaks releasing a sensitive Guantanamo Standard Operating Procedures manual. They've just posted a second leaked manual -- Detainee Operations in a Joint Environment (available for download below) -- that provides detailed instructions about how guards at Guantanamo’s Camp Delta were instructed to treat detainees at the military prison in 2004. Like the 2003 Gitmo manual, this document is unclassified but still contains significant information about the isolation of prisoners, the use of dogs at Guantanamo, and forms of punishment for detainees. Wikileaks editor Julian Assange has put together a handy side-by-side comparison showing changes between the 2003 and 2004 documents. Continue reading