Ralph Nader stopped by a few months ago to give a talk in which he asked the audience, “How many of you know how to file a freedom of information act request?” I couldn’t say that I did.
Quite a few agencies have available the most requested information:
CIA – Che Guevara
FBI – John Lennon, MLK, Edward Said, Tesla, the KKK, Wernher von Braun, Malcolm X
NSA (so secretive it used to be referred to as ‘no such agency’) – attack on the USS Liberty
NRO
There’s a new documentary out about Nader, “An Unreasonable Man“:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” -George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
It describes how he got trashed by the Democrats for “spoiling” the election for Gore, when in fact every third-party candidate got more than the 537 votes in Florida that made the difference. Harvard prof Barry Burden even analyzed his campaign strategy and found no evidence that he had intended to mess with the Democrats (see paper). Nader’s campaign contends that he was made a scapegoat, when citizens should really be asking why 10 million registered Democrats voted for Bush. Nader was harshly criticized for saying there was no difference between the two parties, that they were two heads of the same corporate entity – but in the end, the Democrats proved him correct by backing down on every issue in Congress and not opposing the war. The influential presidential debates are run by the Commission on Presidential Debates, which describes itself as a “nonprofit, nonpartisan corporation” and is led by the former chairmen of the two parties; funded by corporations, it has denied both Ross Perot and Ralph Nader the opportunity to participate in ’96 and ’00, respectively – so far attempts to reform the system have not made much headway.
Another case in point: John Houbolt, a former NASA engineer who went on a crusade in the ’60s to ensure they used lunar orbit rendezvous for the Apollo missions to the moon. He was a lowly engineer at the time and faced fierce resistance from within the administration to his radical idea; he bypassed regular channels and wrote directly to the second-in-command, was promptly written off by the bigwig (page 4), and opened his response (page 5) with a classic:
“Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness, I would like to pass on a few thoughts on matters that have been of deep concern to me over recent months.” He ultimately prevailed. Document courtesy NASA.
