by Harry Hammitt

Every so often a story comes along involving FOIA that serves to remind us why the statute is so important in our democracy. Sometimes, with little or no warning, a piece of information works its way out of the system that either astonishes us because of its substantive quality or because we had come to expect that the piece of information would never be made public short of an extra-legal leak.

That moment occurred again recently when website archivist Russ Kick was given a CD-worth of photos of coffins being processed through Dover Air Force Base, photos that many in the press thought would never come out solely because the Defense Department said they just were not going to disclose them based on a one-paragraph policy developed at the time of the Persian Gulf War. Fortunately, Kick had the audacity to believe that one could actually request information under FOIA and receive it back in return, and one of the most astounding side-bars to this episode was that no one before Kick had apparently thought of requesting them.

No matter how tight the government’s restrictions on access to information may be at any given time, in our democracy information that was not supposed to become public has a way of seeking the sunshine. Kick’s experience with FOIA shows that the statute still works. And the photos of prison abuse remind us that when enough people on the inside have access to information some of it is bound to leak to the outside. While the images are gruesome and repulsive in many respects, disclosure of such information is part and parcel of what makes our country free — that in a free democratic society it is up to the public to make its own judgments concerning government conduct, an exercise that requires access to all forms of information, not just those the government wants the public to see.

— Excerpted from Access Reports. Hammitt, a VCOG director, lives in Lynchburg.