Door 6. Blogger Q&A

An E-mail Q&A With Thad Anderson, the Blogger Who Exposed the Rumsfeld Notes

Geanne:  I’m interested in hearing from you how you decided to file a Freedom of Information request.  What specifically made you interested in taking that approach, what were your intentions, what did you expect to get and were you surprised by the outcome?

Thad:  Growing up, I always was intrigued when a documentary would show documents someone had obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.  But it wasn’t until around the time that I started my blog, outragedmoderates.org, that I got deeply interested in government documents and access to information.  One of the things that motivated me to start the blog was the fact that there were all of these stories where the Washington Post and New York Times would cite documents that had been released (like the “if you were King” e-mail from an Energy Department official to an energy lobbyist) but wouldn’t provide an actual image of the document or a link to it.  It was kind of like they were playing this game of “this is according to a document we’ve seen, but you won’t get to see.”  So I created a Government Document Library as part of my blog, which was just links to hard-to-find documents that had been released, and used peer-to-peer networks as one way to distribute documents.  In the years since then, the media has gotten a lot better about providing an image of an important document — and I think it’s probably partially in response to bloggers’ putting an emphasis on having the hard document whenever possible.

As for the Rumsfeld notes from 9/11, I was shocked when I first read the CBS article that broke the story in 2002.  They were already trying to link 9/11 to Iraq that very day?  But no one else in the mainstream media really picked up on the story, and even Bob Woodward didn’t mention it in “Plan of Attack,” which was pretty exhaustive.  There was a discussion of the conversation in the 9/11 Commission Report, but it was not as specific or as controversial as the CBS version.  After the CBS Rathergate fiasco, I started wondering if the CBS version of the story was legitimate.  So I made the FOIA request in part because I wanted to see if the CBS report was true, and in part because, if it was true, I thought it should be a bigger deal, and I thought the document would draw attention to the story.  To me it seemed like one of the telling moments of the decision to go to war — a story that could be told in the opening paragraph of the first chapter of a book about the Iraq war (and they were used in the first part of the recent PBS documentary “Bush’s War.”)

Geanne:  Did you consult with anyone, or was this something you became interested in on your own? 

Thad:  I did not consult anyone about how to submit a FOIA request, but I did find a couple of how-to guides online and tried to take their advice.  Probably the most important thing I have learned about FOIA is that, in addition to making your request for a very specific document, you need to pinpoint a specific person who had the document, and a specific time period when they had it.  We’re all spoiled by searching for things on the Internet or on databases like Lexis-Nexis now, where we have access to all of these different sources of information just by typing in a search topic.  FOIA is the opposite: The document you are looking for might be sitting in someone’s file cabinet, or it might have even been boxed up and put into storage under that person’s name (or in the case of electronic files, burned from someone’s e-mail account or computer onto a CD-R and put into storage under their name).  That means that the first, and most important, step to successfully requesting a document is figuring out whose files to target.

In the case of the Rumsfeld document, I requested a search in the files of Steven Cambone, a DoD staffer who jotted down the orders Rumsfeld gave at 2:40 p.m. on 9/11.  CBS did not mention Cambone’s name in their report, but I found it in the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission Report, which had relied heavily on his notes from the day to reconstruct what happened at the Pentagon.  I figured his notes might have been the basis of the CBS report, too, and the hunch turned out to be right.

Geanne:  Your story seems like the most interesting to me of a blogger who used FOI law to access newsworthy info.

Thad: There have been some great examples of bloggers/individual researchers getting important documents under FOIA.  The Memory Hole has gotten a lot of different documents, including the State Department’s pre-Iraq planning documents, which predicted many of the things that went wrong — but were ignored by the rest of the government.  Kevin Fenton, a translator from the Czech Republic, got the FBI timeline used by the 9/11 Commission (http://rawstory.com/news/2008/FBI_documents_contradict_Sept._11_Commission_0228.html).

Take a look at Thad’s freedom of information request and confirmation upon receipt by the Department of Defense.

With all the cuts in investigative reporting staffs at the major newspapers, I would actually argue that bloggers are going to have pick up some of the slack and submit more FOIA requests.  There have been some indications that bloggers may be able to qualify for the FOIA fee waiver for journalists, and I am actually in the process of appealing a fee waiver rejection right now, for another FOIA request I submitted to the DoD this year.  I think I’m going to have a pretty good argument, because the gist of their argument is that a blog like mine isn’t capable of getting a story out there, and I have the Rumsfeld notes as a specific example to disprove it.

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2006/feb/24/freedomofinformation.september11)
(http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2006/02/an_army_of_davi.html)
(http://www.outragedmoderates.org/2006/02/dod-staffers-notes-from-911-obtained.html)
(http://flickr.com/photos/66726692@N00/sets/72057594065491946/)

Next: Door 7. Access to Meetings