A Fantastic Year p.

By: Debra Gersh

Former hostage Terry Anderson has been busy since his release
IT HAS BEEN a "fantastic" year since Terry Anderson first addressed Associated Press members.
At last year's AP members meeting in New York, Anderson made his first public appearance after being released as a hostage in Lebanon.
Since then, Anderson, who was chief Middle East correspondent at the time of his abduction in 1985, resigned from the wire service but said he did so only because he wanted to get involved in politics. He lent his support to the Clinton-Gore campaign.
At this year's AP meeting in Boston, Anderson updated his bio.
He recently married his longtime fianc?e, Madeline Bassil. They have bought a house in New York state, where they will raise their 7-year-old daughter, Sulome, who was born shortly after her father was kidnapped.
Anderson also has completed a book about his captivity, Den of Lions, which is slated for publication later this year.
"In the course of writing my book, I've had occasion to make use of what is loosely called the Freedom of Information Act, or at least to try to make use of it," Anderson told a luncheon audience at the National Press Club earlier this year.
Anderson explained that he planned to send off his FoIA requests prior to starting the fellowship in June so that the information would be waiting for him when he was ready to start.
Included in the five FoIA letters to "nine or 10 different federal agencies" were requests for his own file, any file on his then-fianc?e Bassil, information on two other hostages, files on Hezbollah Islamic Jihad and specific people associated with that terrorist group.
"The responses began to trickle in late in the summer," Anderson said. "Almost all of them began with what I call the go-ahead-sue-me response. FoIA requires that they answer within 10 days. Their answer was, 'We cannot answer within 10 days. You may appeal if you wish.' That's great. What am I going to appeal? I haven't even started yet."
Other responses were categorized by Anderson as: "Why are you giving me this?" "Kill them with kindness" and, his favorite, "You've got to be kidding."
"I got, for instance, a 700-page stack of reports from FBIS, the Foreign Broadcast Information Service. It's the agency that monitors foreign newscasts. It makes a summary and passes it around to other government agencies, which often, frequently, immediately classify them," he recalled.
Another, he said, from the Defense Information Agency, which told him it had files on him?400,000 documents, in fact?but the index to the documents was classified.
"We got 60 pages from one government agency," Anderson continued. "One of the first responses. I was very happy to get this envelope back, a big, thick envelope. Finally I got something. It was 60 pages, of which 30 were absolutely blank, 20 had only the routing information on the top, everything else, the whole text was redacted, six pages were news reports about me from newspapers, clippings, and the others were reports on terrorism in El Salvador, Spain and Turkey.
"My favorite, though, [is] the one that falls under the heading of 'You've got to be kidding,' " he said. "It's from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This is the one concerning my request on Islamic Jihad and nine named individuals.
"The response said, 'Your request for information about the following individuals will not be processed by the FBI without either proof of death or a notarized authorization of a privacy waiver from that person."
Anderson commented, "God forbid we should invade the privacy of the terrorists."
Over about eight months, Anderson collected a stack of documents, "a good many of which consist of correspondence between individual agencies and myself discussing what it is I am not going to be allowed to have.
"In all that documentation, I don't think I have found one single usable fact yet, anything that I could use for my book," he said. "I haven't received a single paper from my own personal file. If anybody's justified in asking for their file, I am."
Although he has "more or less given up on getting any usable information in time" for his book deadline, Anderson said he is "not going to give up on the FoIA requests.
"I'm going to pursue every single one of them," he said. "I'm going to appeal every single one of them because I think that's what the Freedom of Information Act is about. It is supposed to tell the government that we have a right to the information in their files unless they can come up with a damn good reason why we shouldn't have it.
"That's not the way it works. My case is not at all unusual. Everybody tells me that this is the normal game that they play when you file for FoIA information," Anderson noted.
"An act that was designed to open up government has become a game in which the government bureaucrats who administer the act lose if they have to give you anything and they win if they can deny it to you. It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter what's in the files. That's the game: You can't have it, it's classified, go away."
Frustrated by the official route to information, Anderson said he planned to try other avenues, including approaching President Clinton with the idea of signing an executive order that would "fill in some of the loopholes.
"I think we all need to push forward in an effort to make sure that part of the change that the new administration is bringing is an attempt to bring the Freedom of Information Act back to what it was supposed to be: A way to open up the files of the government," Anderson said.