MANCHESTER, Conn.

ON SEPT. 11, 2001, about 3,000 Americans were killed as the United States was attacked by terrorists, many of them aliens long known by the government to have been in the country illegally. That attack prompted all sorts of national and state legislation in the name of what is called “homeland security,” including legislation in Connecticut. But the other day on a vote of 3 to 1, Connecticut’s Freedom of Information Commission construed the state’s “homeland-security” law to require secrecy for the New Haven city government program that issues city identification cards to illegal aliens — the sort of people whose attack on the country prompted the law.

Connecticut’s commissioner of emergency management and homeland security, James Thomas, was the first to order secrecy for the New Haven ID-card program. He testified to the FOI commission that he acted at the request of city officials without holding any hearing or discussion with anyone else and without making any independent inquiries of his own. Thomas acknowledged that the arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden himself already could have obtained a New Haven city ID card and Connecticut’s homeland-security department would not know about it, and his position was that the public should not be able to know about it either. It was, Thomas and New Haven’s city administration said, a matter of protecting holders of the city ID cards against people who might assault them out of a resentment of illegal immigration.

Indeed, there has been much angry and even some threatening talk about the ID-card program. But New Haven’s police chief acknowledged to the FOI commission that attacks on immigrants in the city, legal and illegal, have been ordinary assaults and robberies, not hate crimes, and that no one has ever been arrested for threatening in connection with the ID-card controversy. And of course government in Connecticut is full of other personally identifying public documents that could be useful to anyone seeking to do harm. Perhaps foremost among those documents is the state’s sex-offender registry, about which, fortunately, Commissioner Thomas has not yet been requested to make a “homeland-security” judgment. For if people might be tempted to beat up illegal aliens, rather than just to report them to the immigration authorities, how much more tempted might they be to beat up sex offenders?

Connecticut’s “homeland-security” law cites government and utility facilities and protects their blueprints, security manuals and such against disclosure. The homeland-security commissioner and the FOI commission now have construed that law to authorize the withholding of any public record anywhere in the state when anyone feels threatened, even if that someone feels threatened by exposure of his own wrongdoing. The chairman of the FOI commission acknowledges that with its ruling in the New Haven ID card case the commission has contradicted the interpretation it gave to the “homeland-security” law in another case two years ago.

Since someone almost always can be found to claim to feel threatened by disclosure of any public record, this interpretation is bound to eviscerate freedom of information over the long term and to transfer jurisdiction for it away from the FOI commission itself to the Homeland Security Department, even as the homeland-security commissioner is not at all bothered that one city in the state is using secrecy to facilitate illegal immigration. Indeed, the “homeland security” commissioner is eager to help.

So much for “homeland security.”

But this tortuous construction of the law may be of interest mainly to lawyers and courts handling appeals of the FOI commission’s rulings. Far more important are the questions about public policy.

Did the General Assembly and the governor really mean Connecticut’s “homeland-security” law to require secrecy for identification documents issued to illegal aliens?

Did the General Assembly and Gov. Jody Rell really mean to supplant the Freedom of Information Commission with the Department of Emergency Management and Homeland Security in matters having nothing to do with government and utility facilities?

Is the growing security apparatus really going to scare Connecticut out of its liberties and the accountability of its government?

Should the most politically correct municipality in the state be permitted to undermine the nation itself?

If all that is not what the legislature and the governor intended, they easily could correct those misinterpretations by putting just a few words of clarification in the law.

Chris Powell, a frequent contributor, is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester, Conn.