If it acts in haste to gut public-records protections that took generations to put in place, the Legislature will be chipping away at the foundation of our democracy.

It was in 1909, when Florida was still largely unsettled, that the Legislature declared government records to be public records, available for all citizens to see. The right to copy them was established in 1967, and both principles were secured by a 1992 constitutional amendment requiring the Legislature to specifically justify any exemption.

Count the years: four generations.

But with barely two hours' notice, a Senate committee this week took up and approved five official secrecy bills under the pretext of protecting Floridians from terrorism. Normally, prospective opponents have at least two days to be warned and to prepare. Special sessions are different, says Senate President John McKay, cleverly begging the question of why they should be.

Two of these bills are truly monstrous:

Senate Bill 20C makes secret any information pertaining to the type or amount of pharmaceutical stockpiles, along with any information that might reveal where they're kept. If there are good reasons for the locations to be unknown to potential terrorists, sponsors have offered none for the rest of it beyond that "the hospitals want it," and that's not a good reason at all. It's an invitation to waste, fraud and abuse. Worse, the government could stock the wrong drugs or not enough of the right ones, and who would know? Supposedly only the governor would, but though the bill says that his certification would be a public record, there is no law requiring him to certify anything to begin with.

Senate Bill 28C would empower the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to temporarily block the release of any public record that it contends relates to a terrorism investigation. A judge could extend the hold for a total of seven days, and for 14 more on the department's application.

It applies not just to the FDLE's records, but any records. The judges would hear the cases in secret, with no notice to the citizens who are trying to obtain the records.

Nothing justifies this. Active crime investigations are already exempt. So are intelligence files. The proposal aims instead at such innocuous records as the driver's license files that were unlawfully withheld after the Sept. 11 attacks. In doing that, the state was hardly keeping anything from the terrorists. Rather, it was concealing the embarrassing fact that some of the terrorists had obtained licenses on the basis of immigration visas that were soon to expire.

There's a fundamental problem with this bill. Though the state Constitution allows the Legislature to create public records exceptions, it does not permit the power to be delegated: not even to judges, and certainly not to the FDLE. ". . . It could be argued," explains a Senate staff report, "that delaying access is a denial of access to a public record and that the denial of access is equivalent to an exemption. By authorizing the executive director of an executive branch agency to temporarily delay the ability of the public to inspect or copy a public record, even upon court order, it could be argued that an invalid delegation of legislative authority has been made to the executive and to the judicial branches."

Sponsors contend a 21-day delay is reasonable. We disagree.

When people say that truth is the first casualty of war, it is usually the propaganda factor that they have in mind. But truth is just as effectively destroyed when it is suppressed. Truth is the lifeblood of a democracy, so to suppress truth for anything but the most urgent reason is to kill democracy -- an inch here, an inch there, until nothing is left. What an ironic way for Osama bin Laden to get what he wishes for.

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