News Leakers Ferreted Out, Group Charges

Despite the end of the Cold War, the Bush Administration is “obsessed” with manipulating government informaton and exposing those who make unauthorized disclosures, a media group charged Monday in its annual report on government disclosure policies.

“This Administration continues to be obsessed with ferreting out leakers, dictating standards for expressive activities and manipulating the presentation of government information,” said Jane E. Kirtley, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.

Issuing its third annual compilation of what it described as Administration actions aimed at stifling editorial freedom and limiting public oversight of government, the committee cited more than 100 instances of such practices over the last year. Kirtley termed “particularly egregious” the Census Bureau’s recent move to fire a demographer who gave a reporter her estimate of Iraqi dead in the Persian Gulf War. The demographer, Beth Osborne Daponte, provided the estimate to an Associated Press reporter in January.

On March 4, Daponte was notified by her superior that the Census Bureau had initiated steps to fire her on grounds that her report included “false information” and showed “untrustworthiness or unreliability.”

The Administration has directed government analysts and military officers not to make estimates of Iraqi casualties.

Daponte estimated total Iraqi dead at 158,000, including 40,000 military deaths, 13,000 civilian deaths, 35,000 postwar deaths during the Shiite and Kurdish rebellions and 70,000 deaths from health causes related to damage to electricity and sewage treatment plants during the conflict.

Census Bureau officials subsequently rewrote Daponte’s report, lowering the wartime civilian deaths from 13,000 to 5,000.