Bush admin. policy on information: "They hid it, they denied it, and then they threw it away."
As we enter the final months of the Bush administration, secrecy has been a dominant and consistent theme. CREW knows that firsthand. We've been trying for years to pry information that should be public from the Bush administration. The Political Animal at the Baltimore City Paper expounds on the subject:
Lawsuits by the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington forced the disclosure of a letter from a lawyer for Vice President Dick Cheney that instructed the Secret Service to destroy any evidence of lists of people who visited Cheney at his residence next to the Naval Observatory. At the same time, reporters who attempted to find out when and how many times now-convicted felon Jack Abramoff visited the White House were stonewalled with vague and general answers, first denying the lobbyist visited, then claiming he was just one of many people the president saw, and then maintaining a concerted effort to hide any photographic evidence that the president ever met with the influence peddler. By the time photographs leaked out, the news media's attention had since moved on to other things, and the outrage that might have come out of it was muted.
The Bushies again unveiled this tactic, to gum a story to death, last week, after a federal judge gave the administration three days to produce evidence about what happened to millions of e-mails that were supposed to have been archived 2003 to 2005, during the start of the war in Iraq all the way through the response to Hurricane Katrina. Last Friday, the administration, in a sworn declaration, said that old hard drives are thrown away, and that some but not all of the information on them is moved over to new computer storage.
When the final book is written on the Bush administration, its policy on information could be summed up like this: They hid it, they denied it, and then they threw it away.
Enablers Deserve Credit
Don't put all the responsibility on the GOP: "They hid it, they denied it, and then they threw it away." The DNC enabled this ongoing GOP-WH defiance.
Independent Data Preservation, Auditing
I'd like to see some discussion on what will ensure this doesn't happen again. Paper warrants, as the framers intended, were in the days before electronics. Discovery examined documents. Today, we have electronics. At this juncture, we have two issues: First, the access to the data; and second, even if given access, whether that data is retained. There should be no question on the latter, as the law requires.
Separate from a secure data-archiving system outside the President's ability to affect, could there not be a special system that would separate information and power, and ensure that the President and others could not destroy data? For example, why isn't a copy of data automatically collected by Congress, retained in secure vaults, and access to that overseen by the Judiciary? Congress could go to the Judiciary, ask to have access to the secure vault, and the Judiciary would hear the President's arguments for or against the Congressional claims.
As another approach, could Congress not be given an independent technology to randomly audit without notice, the electronic data of the President to ensure his data retention practices are meeting the requirements Congress imposed through ARticle 1 Section 8, rule making?
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The American History Easter Hunt
Asset inventory and accounting records will show the history and current status of any White House computers or hard drives by serial number, their current location and/or disposition.
When you have the serial numbers, if you don't have the corresponding hardware, you might want to post the hardware types and serial numbers on the Internet. Items designated for destruction have a way of ending up in the hands of someone for whom they were not intended.
You might call it The American History Easter Hunt and award prizes for the best finds.