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The Bush administration's double top-secret trade deal

Journalist and blogger Ed Brayton (left) was a little curious after the U.S. government struck a deal with the European Union and other countries that compensates them in exchange for the U.S. passing online gambling laws that interfere with international trade as governed by the World Trade Organization. Brayton, who also happens to be an online poker player, wanted to know what exactly the U.S. was giving up in exchange. You should too, since it is rumored that the compensation could be worth billions of dollars. The only problem is that the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative refused to release details of the compensation agreement to Brayton, claiming it was a matter of national security. I’m not sure whether they did this with a straight face. Brayton, who is represented by Public Citizen, filed suit this week. The suit contends the Bush administration is illegally withholding the details of the compensation deal.

Brayton has written about the government’s ludicrous contention on his blog, Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

Yes, they are actually claiming that this document, which has nothing even remotely do to with anything that could conceivably, in Dick Cheney’s wildest imagination, have anything to do with national security, has been properly classified. Americans, according to this administration, have no right to know how many billions of our tax dollars they’ve spent with no legislative authorization whatsoever in order to buy the cooperation of other nations and allow them to continue to violate the rights of American adults by preventing them from gambling in the privacy of their own home.

And here’s what Public Citizen attorney Bonnie I. Robin-Vergeer said about the secret deal:

Americans have a right to know what kinds of trade concessions the U.S. government is granting other countries, especially when those deals have a significant impact on domestic policy and may be worth billions of dollars. The Bush administration’s decision to withhold the agreement under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has more to do with its desire to prevent public and congressional scrutiny of the settlement before it is enshrined in a new WTO schedule than it does with national security. FOIA requires the agreement’s release.

You can read the complaint here.