AL KAMEN IS PRETTY COOL

Who Gets the Not-So-Coveted Rosemary?
By Al Kamen
Monday, March 13, 2006;
Page A13

The Pulitzer Prizes will be announced next month. The next most esteemed prize is the National Security Archive's Rosemary Award, to be announced today to kick off "Sunshine Week," so designated by advocates for more government openness.

The Rosemary honors President Richard M. Nixon 's secretary, Rose Mary Woods , whose contortionist stretch at her desk caused her to "accidentally" erase 18 1/2 minutes of the tape of a key Watergate conversation.

And the winner of the hotly contested second annual Rosemary? The Central Intelligence Agency, which archive director Thomas S. Blanton hailed for "the most dramatic one-year drop-off in professionalism and responsiveness to the public" in 20 years of monitoring compliance the Freedom of Information Act. The CIA's "performance markers that clinched the 2006 Rosemary," he said, include:

· Although the agency handles only 0.08 percent of FOIA requests of federal information, it has four of the 10 oldest pending requests. Some are so old they could get drivers' licenses.

· After stalling for 15 years on a request from a small Pennsylvania newspaper for records on a convicted arms dealer with ties to the intelligence community, the agency responded last year that it had "no records" on the matter.

· "More creatively," the archive said, the CIA said it could "neither confirm nor deny" the existence of records on the relationship between Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden , even though hundreds of such documents have been released by other agencies.