We'll Never Know: The Unprecedented Secrecy of the Bush Administration

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13719

We'll Never Know: The Unprecedented Secrecy of the Bush Administration
by Brian Morton | March 27, 2008



If you think about it, it's amazing how completely and thoroughly information has been "managed" over the last seven years of the Bush administration. E-mails have been mishandled and then lost, information that regularly was disseminated to Americans about the workings of their government has been cut off, questions that normally were answered have simply been ignored, and no effort is made to ever find out those answers.

By itself, this is a mildly impressive feat, until you realize that to accomplish this it required an almost top-to-bottom infestation of political will in the entire system--to manage every bit of federal apparatus to make sure that the president and his accomplices would never look bad, no matter how small the news or how astonishing the effort made to conceal it.

It is also becoming clear that the Bushies made an effort right at the start to make sure that information would never see the light of day. As soon as they took office, they scrapped the Clinton administration's custom-made computer archiving system that, according to news reports, was installed after a court order. It would be one thing if the system was replaced by something newer or better, yet the one the Bush people put in could hardly be called an archive, as it simply recorded over previously recorded information that was supposed to be preserved as part of the Presidential Records Act.

At every juncture, when administration officials are questioned about the apparent losses, they respond first with delays, then denials, and then excuses.

In 2001, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft created a new standard for dealing with requests under the Freedom of Information Act that told government agencies that if there was any way possible to deny FOIA requests, the agency should do so, and the Justice Department would back the agency if it was called on it in court. Of course, the administration publicly would say the exact opposite. At the time, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said, "The bottom line remains the president is dedicated to an open government, a responsive government, while he fully exercises the authority of the executive branch."

In 2003, the administration tried to create a gigantic computer system called "Total Information Awareness," under the aegis of the Pentagon, that would track people's movements, purchases, medical records, and nearly any other aspect where a person might come into contact with a computer system. In the end, Congress banned any funds from going to the project, and it presumably died on the vine, although even now the fight over the administration's warrantless wiretapping program still is choking its way through the court system.

snip//

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.
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[yourout]

1. You mean THEY DID IT, they hid it, they denied it, and then they threw it away

[cornermouse]

2. Hopefully there will be an addendum

"And then they were put on trial"

[RC]

3. Found guilty and put in jail.

[cornermouse]

4. He's the first president I would have not minded seeing behind bars.