According to David Barstow, who wrote Sunday's story about Pentagon propaganda, the story was two years in the making because the Pentagon ignored Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (tip):

This article would have come sooner, but it took us two years to wrestle 8,000 pages of documents out of the Defense Department ... the Defense Department refused to produce many categories of documents in response to our requests under the federal Freedom of Information Act. We ultimately sued in federal court, yet even then the Pentagon failed to meet several court-ordered deadlines for producing documents. Last week, the judge overseeing our lawsuit threatened the Defense Department with sanctions if it continues to defy his deadlines for producing additional records.

This is only one instance of the Bush Administration's abuse of FOIA.

FOIA, which turned 40 last year, "came of age" during the Watergate era and gives citizens access to federal government documents.

The Bush Administration has been notorious in both dragging its collective feet in response to FOIA requests and increasing secrecy (making documents inaccessible). "In October 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft revoked former Attorney General Janet Reno's 1993 Freedom of Information directive, which encouraged agencies to make 'discretionary disclosures' of information whenever possible." More from a 2007 report from OpenTheGovernment.org:

• Since 2001, the "state secrets" privilege invoked by the executive branch power has been used a reported 39 times. The Bush Administration average of six times per year is more than double the average (2.46) of the previous 24 years.
• In 2006, we spent $8.2 billion securing classified information. We spent $185 maintaining secrets for every $1 spent declassifying documents. In 2000, the comparable ratio was only $17-to-$1.
• In 2006, there were 21,412,736 FOIA requests filed, an increase of 1,462,189 over 2006. According to a January 2007 audit by the National Security Archive, backlogs are significant. The oldest FOIA request in the federal government has now been pending for more than 20 years.
• The Coalition of Journalists for Open Government (CJOG) analyzed annual FOIA reports from 30 agencies and departments for the last nine years. According to their report, the number of FOIA requests processed had fallen 20%, the number of FOIA personnel dropped 10%, the backlog tripled, and cost of handling a FOI request increased 79%.
• Classified or “black” programs account for about $31.5 billion, or 18 percent, of the acquisition funding included in the fiscal year (FY) 2006 Department of Defense (DOD) budget.

In May 2006, the Bush Administration took the unprecedented step of declaring White House visitor logs "presidential records" instead of agency records. Right now, the Administration is challenging a court order -- initiated by a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) FOIA request -- to release visitor logs. The DOJ lawyers insist that the President has a "right to privacy" that would be infringed upon if the visitor logs were made public.

Rather than balancing the president's interest with the public's, [U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Judge David S. Tatel] said, the government was simply disregarding the Freedom of Information Act. He said the policy would allow the president to "draw a curtain around the White House."

But that's not all. In 2005, the Department of Justice for demanded almost $400,000 in advance in response to a FOI request relating to proceedings against immigrants immediately after the 9.11 attacks.

The 21st century has not been a poster child for transparency in government.

^{Related:
FOI - Freedom of Information Act
Agency Would Be Exempt From FOIA}