‘Bone-chilling reminder’
‘Supersealing’ expose earns Brechner Center annual FOI award
Dan Christensen
By Kelly-Anne Suarez
The Brechner Center for Freedom of Information gave its 19th annual Freedom of Information Award and $3,000 to Florida Daily Business Review federal court reporter Dan Christensen for his series on “supersealing,” a practice that shrouds cases from public view.
The Review joined the elite ranks of past winners, including The Dallas Morning News, The St. Petersburg Times and The Washington Post.
One morning while perusing a reissue of a court docket, Christensen noticed a case missing. After some investigation, the University of Miami graduate unearthed the plight of Mohamed Kamel Bellahouel, a waiter in a restaurant frequented by 9/11 hijackers. The authorities imprisoned and detained the young Arab man for five months shortly after the attacks. They never charged him.
“Whereas the ordinary reporter follows smoke to the fire, Christensen looked where smoke was suspiciously lacking and uncovered a deplorable abuse of governmental power hidden from public view,” wrote FOI Award judge Rick Peltz, an Arkansas College of Law media law professor.
“Christensen’s articles ... are a bone-chilling reminder of what happens when we sacrifice our civil liberties and our right to oversee our government’s activities,” Brechner Center Executive Director Sandra Chance said. “Supersealing should scare every American, and he exposed the practice for the first time.”
In his 25 years as a reporter, Christensen has never encountered anything that boasted this “unusual brand of secrecy,” he said. His coverage sparked a coalition of 23 media, legal and labor organizations that sought to protect public access to court proceedings. Have state courts heeded his cries? No one knows, he said. It’s impossible to find out, due to the custom’s “insidious nature.”
