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 [1] 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the administration three days to produce evidence about what happened to millions of e-mails that were supposed to have been archived 2003 to 2005, during the start of the war in Iraq all the way through the response to Hurricane Katrina.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.