Dear Editor,
It’s funny that a Commissioner of Information himself uses such fancy language, that makes it so hard to understand his meaning. What I think he means is that the government didn’t give his office enough money to do its job or to find premises except in the Office of the President.
It seems his letter in your paper of May 20 (‘The Commissioner of Information is independent of any administration’) objects to your hoping, in your editorial of May 18, that the new administration will use his office to be more open with the people they represent.
I believe both those views of Freedom of Information are beside the point. We don’t need to spend public money on either a warehouse or a clearing house for facts that belong to the people. What we need is to remind all public servants, elected or appointed, that their work is for us all, and it’s our right to know the details of it. Directly. As part of accountability.
What’s the use of an office where news of our government’s performance has to be filtered and given out in language that takes too much time to write, too much education to read and too much effort to understand? It looks − well, it looked − like intentional secrecy. Which is poisonous to efficiency and to what you call “the full cooperation of the citizenry.” There has to be a better way, and we don’t need the government’s approval to demand one.
Yours faithfully,
Gordon Forte
