United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

A 42-year-old man died in 2006 at the Northwest Detention Center in what is believed to have been one of some thirty preventable deaths of persons in the custody of the Dept. of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the web site of the Seattle Weekly reported today. -- "We never heard about it" at the time, Rick Anderson noted. -- But recently released documents showing how many detainees have died in U.S. immigration prisons were described last week by the New York Times and the Washington Post. -- On May 5, the Times published news of 66 names "on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007 . . . compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act."[2] -- Nina Bernstein called the list "the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration." -- In the case of one death, Bernstein described how the Corrections Corporation of America (which built Tacoma's Northwest Detention Center and then sold it to Geo, the present operator) labeled as "proprietary information — not for distribution” a report that described how a detainee who "fell" and injured his head was "shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth." -- He later died. -- At present, "[n]o government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance." -- On Tuesday, the chair of a congressional subcommittee said she was introducing legislation "to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress."[3] -- “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization,” said Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California. -- Without the Freedom of Information Act this story would never have come to light, but the "public editor" of the New York Times, Clark Hoyt, wrote on Sunday that "it is increasingly difficult to pry records that should be open out of federal agencies."[4] ...

Mexico-born Jose J. Cervantes-Corona was 42 when he died at the Northwest Detention Center 21 months ago. We never heard about it, but his death at the Tacoma tideflats facility is now suspected of having been preventable.

Cervantes-Corona is named in recently released and published documents showing how many "detainees" have died in U.S. immigration prisons: The New York Times last week reported that 66 names are listed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) data from 2004 to 2007, while the Washington Post this week reported 83 have died between 2003 and 2008.

Both papers refer to Cervantes-Corona as Jesus, and his death as Nov. 18, 2006, but a Pierce County death index lists him as Jose J. and his death a day later. The Post, in the ongoing series, has not yet explained why his death may have been avoided, but the New York Times/ICE document shows Cervantes-Corona died from coronary artery disease at 42. In addition, the Post has a copy of an Immigration Health Service list showing how much money the government saved by refusing to give potential life-threatening treatment for a litany of ailments including chest pain.

Altogether, denying treatment in 329 cases over one year, the government saved $1.3 million. The government's data does not reveal how many of those denials led to deaths. But the Post lists Carvantes-Corona's death as one of 30 thought to have been preventable.

Word spread quickly inside the windowless walls of the Elizabeth Detention Center, an immigration jail in New Jersey: A detainee had fallen, injured his head, and become incoherent. Guards had put him in solitary confinement, and late that night, an ambulance had taken him away more dead than alive.

But outside, for five days, no official notified the family of the detainee, Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea who had overstayed a tourist visa. When frantic relatives located him at University Hospital in Newark on Feb. 5, 2007, he was in a coma after emergency surgery for a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages. He died there four months later without ever waking up, leaving family members on two continents trying to find out why.

Mr. Bah’s name is one of 66 on a government list of deaths that occurred in immigration custody from January 2004 to November 2007, when nearly a million people passed through.

The list, compiled by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after Congress demanded the information, and obtained by the New York Times under the Freedom of Information Act, is the fullest accounting to date of deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of federal centers, county jails and privately run prisons that has become the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration.

The list has few details, and they are often unreliable, but it serves as a rough road map to previously unreported cases like Mr. Bah’s. And it reflects a reality that haunts grieving families like his: the difficulty of getting information about the fate of people taken into immigration custody, even when they die.

Mr. Bah’s relatives never saw the internal records labeled “proprietary information -- not for distribution” by the Corrections Corporation of America, which runs the New Jersey detention center for the federal government. The documents detail how he was treated by guards and government employees: shackled and pinned to the floor of the medical unit as he moaned and vomited, then left in a disciplinary cell for more than 13 hours, despite repeated notations that he was unresponsive and intermittently foaming at the mouth.

Mr. Bah had lived in New York for a decade, surrounded by a large circle of friends and relatives. The extravagant gowns he sewed to support his wife and children in West Africa were on display in a Manhattan boutique.

But he died in a sequestered system where questions about what had happened to him, or even his whereabouts, were met with silence.

As the country debates stricter enforcement of immigration laws, thousands of people who are not American citizens are being locked up for days, months, or years while the government decides whether to deport them. Some have no valid visa; some are legal residents, but have past criminal convictions; others are seeking asylum from persecution.

Death is a reality in any jail, and the medical neglect of inmates is a perennial issue. But far more than in the criminal justice system, immigration detainees and their families lack basic ways to get answers when things go wrong.

No government body is required to keep track of deaths and publicly report them. No independent inquiry is mandated. And often relatives who try to investigate the treatment of those who died say they are stymied by fear of immigration authorities, lack of access to lawyers, or sheer distance.

Federal officials say deaths are reviewed internally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which reports them to its inspector general and decides which ones warrant investigation. Officials say they notify the detainee’s next of kin or consulate, and report the deaths to local medical authorities, who may conduct autopsies. In Mr. Bah’s case, a review before his death found no evidence of foul play, an immigration spokesman said, though after later inquiries from the Times, he said a full review of the death was under way.

But critics, including many in Congress, say this piecemeal process leaves too much to the agency’s discretion, allowing some deaths to be swept under the rug while potential witnesses are transferred or deported. They say it also obscures underlying complaints about medical care, abusive conditions, or inadequate suicide prevention.

In January, the House passed a bill that would require states that receive certain federal money to report deaths in custody to their attorneys general. But the bill is stalled in the Senate, and it does not cover federal facilities.

The only tangible result of Congressional concern has been the list of 66 deaths, which names Mr. Bah and many other detainees for the first time, but raises as many questions as it answers.

For Mr. Bah’s survivors, the mystery of his death is hard to bear. In Guinea, his first wife, Dalanda, wept as she spoke about the contradictory accounts that had reached her and her two teenage sons through other detainees, including some who speculated that Mr. Bah had been beaten.

In New York, a cousin who is an American citizen, Khadidiatou Bah, 38, said she was unable to bring a lawsuit, in part because other relatives were afraid of antagonizing the authorities.

“They don’t want to push the case, or maybe they will be sent home,” she said. “This guy was killed, and we don’t know what happened.”

The list of deaths where Mr. Bah’s name surfaced is often cryptic. Along with 13 deaths cited as suicides and 14 as the result of cardiac ailments, it offers such causes as “undetermined” and “unwitnessed arrest, epilepsy.” No one’s nationality is given, some places of detention are omitted, and some names and birth dates seem garbled. As a result, many families could not be tracked down for this article.

In California, relatives of Walter Rodriguez-Castro, 28, said they were rebuffed when they tried to find out why his calls had stopped coming from the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield in April 2006. Then in June, his wife went to his scheduled hearing in San Francisco’s immigration court and learned that he had been dead for many weeks, his body unclaimed in the county morgue.

The coroner found that Mr. Rodriguez-Castro, a mover from El Salvador in the country illegally, had died of undiagnosed meningitis and H.I.V., after days complaining of fever, stiff neck, and vomiting. The cause of death on the government’s list: “unresponsive.”

Immigration authorities said on Friday that the case was now under review, but would not answer questions about it or other deaths on the list. Sgt. Ed Komin, a spokesman for the jail, said the death had been promptly reported to immigration officials, who were responsible for notifying families.

Four sons in another family, in Sacramento, described trying for days to get medical care for their father, Maya Nand, a 56-year-old legal immigrant from Fiji, at a detention center run by the Corrections Corporation in Eloy, Ariz. Mr. Nand, an architectural draftsman, had been ailing when he was taken into custody on Jan. 13, 2005, apparently because his application for citizenship had been rejected, based on an earlier conviction for misdemeanor domestic violence. In collect calls, the sons said, he told them that despite his chest pains and breathing problems, doctors at the detention center did not take his condition seriously.

The Corrections Corporation said he had been seen and treated “multiple times.” But a letter to the family from an immigration official said his treatment was for a respiratory infection. The letter said that Mr. Nand was taken to an emergency room on Jan. 25, where congestive heart failure was diagnosed, and that he “suffered an apparent heart attack while at the hospital.” He died on Feb. 2, 2005, shackled to a hospital bed in Tucson.

Boubacar Bah had more going for him than many detainees. He had a lawyer and many friends and relatives in the United States, and his detention center in New Jersey was one of the few frequented by immigrant advocates.

But three days after he suffered a head injury in detention last year, no one in his New York circle knew that he was lying comatose in a Newark hospital, where he had already been identified as a possible organ donor.

“Thank you for the referral,” an organ-sharing network wrote on Feb. 3, 2007, according to hospital records. “This patient is a potential candidate for organ donation once brain death criteria is met.”

Four days after the fall, tipped off by a detainee who called Mr. Bah’s roommate in Brooklyn, relatives rushed to the detention center to ask Corrections Corporation employees where he was.

“They wouldn’t give us any information,” said Lamine Dieng, an American citizen who teaches physics at Bronx Community College and is married to Mr. Bah’s cousin Khadidiatou.

On the fifth day, they said, a detention official called them with the name of the hospital. There they found Mr. Bah on life support, still in custody, with a detention guard around the clock.

“There was one guard who knew Boubacar,” Ms. Bah said. “He told me on the down-low: ‘This guy, you have to fight for him. This guy was neglected.’ ”

Within the week, word of the case reached a reporter at the *Times*, through an immigration lawyer who had received separate calls from two detainees; they were upset about a badly injured man -- named “something like Aboubakar” -- left in an isolation cell and later found near death.

But advocacy groups said they were unaware of the case. And Michael Gilhooly, the spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that without the man’s full name and eight-digit alien registration number, he could not check the information.

For those who knew Mr. Bah, it was hard to understand how such a man could lie dying without explanations.

“Everybody liked Boubacar,” said Sadio Diallo, 48, who has a tailor shop in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where he and Mr. Bah had shared an apartment with fellow immigrants since arriving in 1998. “He’s a very, very, very good man.”

For six years, Mr. Bah had worked for L’Impasse, a clothing store in the West Village, sewing dresses that sold for up to $2,000 with what a former manager, Abdul Sall, called his “magic hands.” Mr. Bah often spent Sundays at the Bronx townhouse his cousins had inherited from the family’s first American citizen, a seaman who arrived in 1943.

In Africa, Mr. Bah’s earnings not only supported his first wife, sons, and ailing mother, but in Guinean tradition, allowed him to wed a second wife, long distance. It was his longing to see them all again after eight years that landed him in detention. When he returned from a three-month visit to Guinea in May 2006, immigration authorities at Kennedy Airport told him that his green card application had been denied while he was away, automatically revoking his permission to re-enter the United States. An immigration lawyer hired by his friends was unable to reopen the application while Mr. Bah waited for nine months in detention, records showed.

Mr. Bah died on May 30, 2007, after four months in a coma. His lawyer, Theodore Vialet, requested detention reports and hospital records under the Freedom of Information Act. But by the time the records arrived last autumn, the idea of a lawsuit had been dropped.

So Mr. Vialet just filed the records away -- until a reporter’s call about a name on the list of dead detainees prompted him to dig them out.

There are 57 pages of documents, some neatly typed by medics, some scrawled by guards. Some quote detainees who said Mr. Bah was ailing for two days before his fall on Feb. 1, and asked in vain to see a doctor.

The records leave unclear exactly when or how Mr. Bah was injured in detention. But they leave no doubt that guards, supervisors, government medical employees, and federal immigration officers played a role in leaving him untreated, hour after hour, as he lapsed into a stupor.

It began about 8 a.m., according to the earliest report. Guards called a medical emergency after a detainee saw Mr. Bah collapse near a toilet, hitting the back of his head on the floor.

When he regained consciousness, Mr. Bah was taken to the medical unit, which is run by the federal Public Health Service. He became incoherent and agitated, reports said, pulling away from the doctor and grabbing at the unit staff. Physicians consulted later by the Times called this a textbook symptom of intracranial bleeding, but apparently no one recognized that at the time.

He was handcuffed and placed in leg restraints on the floor with medical approval, “to prevent injury,” a guard reported. “While on the floor the detainee began to yell in a foreign language and turn from side to side,” the guard wrote, and the medical staff deemed that “the screaming and resisting is behavior problems.”

Mr. Bah was ordered to calm down. Instead, he kept crying out, then “began to regurgitate on the floor of medical,” the report said. So Mr. Bah was written up for disobeying orders. And with the approval of a physician assistant, Michael Chuley, who wrote that Mr. Bah’s fall was unwitnessed and “questionable,” the tailor was taken in shackles to a solitary confinement cell with instructions that he be monitored.

Under detention protocols, an officer videotaped Mr. Bah as he lay vomiting in the medical unit, but the camera’s battery failed, guards wrote, when they tried to tape his trip to cell No. 7.

Inside the cell, a supervisor removed Mr. Bah’s restraints. He was unresponsive to questions asked by the Public Health Service officer on duty, a report said, adding: “The detainee set up in his bed and moan and he fell to his left side and hit his head on the bed rail.”

About 9 a.m., with the approval of the health officer and a federal immigration agent, the cell was locked.

The watching began. As guards checked hourly, Mr. Bah appeared to be asleep on the concrete floor, snoring. But he could not be roused to eat lunch or dinner, and at 7:10 p.m., “he began to breathe heavily and started foaming slightly at the mouth,” a guard wrote. “I notified medical at this time.”

However, the nurse on duty rejected the guard’s request to come check, according to reports. And at 8 p.m., when the warden went to the medical unit to describe Mr. Bah’s condition, the nurse, Raymund Dela Pena, was not alarmed. “Detainee is likely exhibiting the same behavior as earlier in the day,” he wrote, adding that Mr. Bah would get a mental health exam in the morning.

About 10:30 p.m., more than 14 hours after Mr. Bah’s fall, the same nurse, on rounds, recognized the gravity of his condition: “unresponsive on the floor incontinent with foamy brown vomitus noted around mouth.” Smelling salts were tried. Mr. Bah was carried back to the medical unit on a stretcher.

When an ambulance left Mr. Bah at the hospital, brain scans showed he had a fractured skull and hemorrhages at all sides of his swelling brain. He was rushed to surgery, and the detention center was informed of the findings.

But in a report to their supervisors the next day, immigration officials at the center described Mr. Bah’s ailment as “brain aneurysms” -- a diagnosis they corrected a week later to “hemorrhages,” without mentioning the skull fracture. After Mr. Bah’s death, they wrote that his hospitalization was “subsequent to a fall in the shower.”

The nurse, Mr. Dela Pena, and the physician assistant, Mr. Chuley, said that only their superiors could discuss the case. The Public Health Service did not respond to questions, and the Corrections Corporation said medical decisions were the responsibility of the Public Health Service.

Mr. Bah’s cousins demanded an autopsy, but the Union County medical examiner’s confidential report was not completed until Dec. 6. It was sent to the county prosecutor’s office only as a matter of routine, because the matter had been classified as an “unattended accident resulting in death.”

Prosecutors said they did not investigate. “According to the report, Bah suffered a fall in the shower,” Eileen Walsh, a spokeswoman for the prosecutors, said in an e-mail message. “We are not privy to any other bits of information.”

In the home movies Mr. Bah made of his last journey home, he is only a fleeting presence: a slim man with a shy smile. But without his support, relatives in Africa say they have little money for food and none for his sons’ schooling.

“I stayed here seven years, waiting for him,” his second wife, Mariama, said in French, recalling their long separation and the brief reunion that led to the birth of their son, now a toddler, while Mr. Bah was in detention.

“I wanted them to open the casket,” she added, “to know if it was him inside. Until today, I cry for him.”

BETTER HEALTH CARE SOUGHT FOR DETAINED IMMIGRANTS
By Nina Bernstein and Julia Preston

The head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate medical care in immigration detention announced on Tuesday that she had introduced legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress.

“This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,” the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill, which she introduced late last week. “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.”

The need for the bill, she said, was underscored by an article in the *New York Times* on Monday about the 2007 death of Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea. His name was one of 66 on a government list of detention deaths obtained from Immigration and Customs Enforcement by the Times under the Freedom of Information Act.

Records show that Mr. Bah, who suffered a skull fracture and multiple brain hemorrhages in the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey, was left in an isolation cell there without treatment for more than 14 hours.

Ms. Lofgren’s legislation would require the federal government to establish mandatory standards for medical and mental health care, replacing the voluntary standards that apply now in the network of more than 300 publicly and privately run jails where the government holds people while it decides whether to deport them.

The bill would also require the secretary of the Homeland Security Department to report all deaths in immigration detention within 48 hours to the Justice Department’s inspector general as well as its own. Immigration officials would be required to submit a detailed report on such deaths to Congress every year.

“We are not talking about Cadillac health care here,” Ms. Lofgren said, “but the government is obligated to provide basic care. Many of those in immigration custody are there for minor violations, many for administrative and paperwork-related mistakes. Their detention should not be a death sentence.”

Officials of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said they would not comment on Ms. Lofgren’s proposal because they did not discuss pending legislation.

But officials said that while the number of immigrants detained had increased by 34 percent from 2004 through last year, the numbers of deaths in its detention centers had declined each year.

“While a single death of an ICE detainee is a serious matter, we strive to maintain safe, secure, and human [sic] detention conditions and to ensure that all detainees receive quality health care,” said Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the agency.

According to figures the agency provided on Tuesday, from January 2004 until last Friday it recorded 71 deaths of immigrants in its custody, including 5 since the list was released to the Times, 4 of them this year. Ms. Nantel did not provide details of those cases.

In the 2004 fiscal year, according to the figures, the agency detained 231,804 immigrants, and about one out of every 9,200 died. In fiscal 2007, when the agency detained a total of 311,213 immigrants, roughly one out of every 28,000 died. Immigration officials said the agency spent $91.6 million last year on health care for its detention centers, an 82 percent increase since 2004.

Ms. Lofgren said the agency’s count of deaths could understate the problem, because detainees who were denied critical treatment could die after they were released or deported.

She cited the case of Francisco Castaneda, a Salvadoran who testified at the hearing last fall that he was denied a biopsy for a painful lesion on his penis for 11 months while he was in detention as an illegal immigrant, despite his pleas and doctors’ recommendations. By the time he received the treatment he had been seeking, in February 2007, he was found to have metastasized penile cancer, records show; his penis had to be amputated.

He was released from detention after a diagnosis of terminal cancer, and died on Feb. 16 this year at age 36, leaving behind a 14-year-old daughter.

In March, a federal judge ruled that the government could be held liable in a lawsuit his family is pursuing. The federal government admitted medical negligence in the case last month.

Nina Bernstein, a Times reporter, wrote a front-page article last June about the deaths of prisoners in the fastest-growing form of incarceration in America, immigration detention.

Civil rights attorneys believed that, since the start of 2004, about 20 people had died while in custody facing possible deportation, but a spokeswoman for the federal immigration agency told Bernstein a surprising fact: the number was 62. Bernstein asked for details, like who they were and how they died. The spokeswoman refused, so Bernstein did what reporters often do -- she filed a request under the federal Freedom of Information Act, known as FOIA, for what she believed should be public records. Although the law required the agency to answer such a simple request within 20 business days, Immigration and Customs Enforcement initially responded the way many agencies do -- with silence.

Bernstein, who has a busy beat, immigration in the New York area, wrote her article without the details and moved on. But months later, right around Thanksgiving, she received an envelope containing a chart listing the people who had died in immigration detention -- now 66 of them -- with their dates of birth and death, the locations where they had been held, where they had died and the causes of death. Her FOIA request had been granted. That led Bernstein to a front-page article published last Monday about Boubacar Bah, a 52-year-old tailor from Guinea, who fell while in detention, received no medical care for 15 hours and died of severe head injuries.

Times reporters use FOIA aggressively, and it has been central to two major stories in just the last three weeks -- Bernstein’s and an article by David Barstow on April 20 about a Pentagon program to cozy up to military analysts on television and radio in hopes of generating favorable coverage of the administration’s war on terror. But it is increasingly difficult to pry records that should be open out of federal agencies. A study last year by the Coalition of Journalists for Open Government found that FOIA requests were becoming more backlogged, waits for information were getting longer and agencies were saying “no” more often, using one of nine exemptions in the law for such considerations as national security or privacy.

Though late, at least Bernstein got records without having to go to court. The Times was not so fortunate in Barstow’s case, which seemed to show that an agency that does not want to obey the law can find a million creative ways to delay coughing up information that the public has a clear right to know.

Barstow first asked more than two years ago, on April 28, 2006, for records describing the Defense Department’s involvement with the analysts, most of them retired officers, many with business dealings with the Pentagon. He said he wanted transcripts of briefings and conference calls, records of trips, and any documents describing the Pentagon’s strategy and objectives in what turned out to be a carefully planned program to try to, as Barstow’s article said, “transform the analysts into a kind of media Trojan horse.”

As the law provides, he asked for expedited handling of his request. He was turned down, though he said the Pentagon did not tell him for a month after the decision. It said the information he wanted did not deal with “a breaking news story of public interest.”

Barstow appealed, arguing that the war on terror was by definition a breaking news story and certainly of public interest. The appeal was denied on Aug. 20, 2006, with bizarre reasoning familiar to anyone who has tried to wrest public information from a federal agency that does not want it released. “Your request is not for information on the war on terror,” the denial said. “It is for Department of Defense interactions with military and security analysts who discuss the war on terror. Therefore, you did not establish a compelling need for the information you requested.”

Barstow kept pressing and two months later received 687 pages of documents, mostly, he said, talking points and other briefing documents representing only a small portion of what he had requested.

A long succession of phone calls and written appeals, some from David McCraw, a vice president and assistant general counsel for The New York Times Company, prompted a trickle of additional material. Last summer, the Pentagon gave Barstow transcripts of briefings received by the analysts, with large portions blacked out. Barstow appealed the deletions, saying it was “ludicrous” to withhold material disclosed to selected representatives of the news media in a briefing. Two months later, the Pentagon relented -- and on the same day gave Barstow another transcript, of a briefing with Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, with more deletions.

The Times, committed to spending resources on important FOIA matters even during a time of economic stress for newspapers, took the Pentagon to court last fall. Under the supervision of a federal district judge, Richard J. Sullivan, the Times and an assistant United States attorney representing the Pentagon agreed to deadlines for producing the records Barstow wanted. The Pentagon kept missing the deadlines.

At a hearing in February, Sullivan said the Pentagon was playing “cute” and refused to give any more extensions. “Two years is a long time,” he said. But in April, the parties were back in his courtroom, with the Pentagon pleading for more time. Sullivan was having none of it. “My orders have been issued since November,” he said. “I am not used to having to do this five or six times.” The judge threatened to bring Pentagon officials into court “to explain the delay and why they shouldn’t be held in contempt.”

With the records it had already obtained, the Times published Barstow’s article the following Sunday. Three days later, the Pentagon gave Barstow 2,800 more pages. His reporting continues. FOIA, he told me, has become “a cruel joke.”

Late last year, Congress passed the Open Government Act of 2007, with the intention of forcing better compliance with FOIA and heading off situations like Bernstein’s and Barstow’s. (Full disclosure: I testified in favor of the law as a representative of the Sunshine in Government Initiative, a coalition of 10 news organizations.) President Bush signed it on the last day of the year, but his administration quickly set about trying to dismantle one of its key features, an independent ombudsman who could mediate FOIA disputes before they turn into expensive lawsuits, like the one the *Times* is still pursuing.

The administration proposed no financing for the new office and tried to move its responsibilities to the Justice Department, which defends agencies trying to withhold information. Senators Patrick Leahy of Vermont and John Cornyn of Texas wrote to the White House last week to protest the transfer of the ombudsman, saying it would violate the law.

Leahy is a liberal Democrat and Cornyn is a conservative Republican, and while they do not agree on a lot of issues, they agree that bad things can happen when a government tries to hide the records of its actions.