WASHINGTON, April 25 (UPI) -- Anti-proliferation campaigners are suing the presidential commission on weapons of mass destruction intelligence, which they say is bound by federal law to publish transcripts of its meetings.
"The bottom line is we want some visibility into the process, some idea of how they came to the conclusions they did," Jules Zacher, special counsel to the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, told United Press International.
The Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction met entirely in closed session during its 14 months of existence. "Due to the sensitive nature of our work, which concerns highly classified matters of national security, these meetings are not open to the public," says a commission statement on its Web site.
"We nonetheless intend to keep the public informed of our work, and as we progress we welcome public input and comment," concludes the statement.
"They invited public participation, but it was a sham," said Zacher. "We couldn't even find out where they were meeting."
He said the center wrote to the commission asking how to submit evidence or testimony but never heard anything back.
The center's lawsuit, filed recently in the D.C. District Court, says that, according to the Federal Advisory Committee Act of 1972, "the records, reports transcripts, minutes appendices, working papers, drafts, studies agenda (and) other documents which were made available to or prepared for or by each advisory committee" should be available to the public.
The commission says the act doesn't apply to them. "Which arguments are made in court is up to the Justice Department," which will be defending the case, the commission's general counsel, Stewart Baker, told UPI.
The act has exemptions for work done that will provide advice to the CIA, said Baker, adding that there are also constitutional issues about whether Congress can so tightly regulate presidential advice.
Zacher accepts that, by its nature, much of the commission's work needed to stay secret, "But I find it hard to believe that everything they discussed, every word they spoke, is classified."
The case is the latest battlefront in a war of attrition between the Bush administration and open-government campaigners and highlights the contrast between the presidential commission -- which met entirely in secret -- and the highly publicized open hearings of the Sept. 11 inquiry.
Commission officials say they worked hard to get a plethora of historical detail about this most sensitive area of intelligence into the public domain in their final report.
"I think we did pretty well on that," said Baker, adding that conducting the work in public would have been all but impossible, and "in the end I don't think it would have helped the end product or made the public better informed."
Zacher says the arguments the government and commission are using are similar to those being used to defend against other public-interest lawsuits like those seeking the release of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy taskforce documents. "Essentially they are saying that no individual can bring a lawsuit to enforce (the act), that only Congress can enforce it. That would totally vitiate the law."
In its final report, published last month, the commission found that U.S. intelligence was "dead wrong" about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and made a set of recommendations for overhauling the nation's spy agencies.
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