Last Secrets of the Bush Administration-How to find out what we still don't know

[babylonsister]

Last Secrets of the Bush Administration

How to find out what we still don't know.

By Charles Homans


In March 2001, U.S. Archivist John W. Carlin received a letter from Alberto Gonzales, then counsel to the newly inaugurated president George W. Bush. It concerned an important deadline that was looming—one that Bush owed to Richard Nixon.

In 1974, Congress ordered a lockdown on all records kept by the Nixon White House, afraid that the outgoing president would try to wipe out the paper trail of his disastrous second term and chastened by the recent destruction of decades’ worth of FBI files by the late director J. Edgar Hoover’s loyal secretary. That order was expanded four years later into a law requiring that all presidents’ papers—everything from briefings to personal notes and everyday communications between the president, vice president, and their staffers—be handed over to the National Archives twelve years after their terms ended for eventual public release. Ronald Reagan was the first chief executive to whom the Presidential Records Act applied, and his papers were due to be turned over to Carlin at the beginning of Bush’s term.

Gonzales wanted Carlin to delay the release until June. His letter didn’t say why, but Carlin agreed. Then in June, Carlin got another memo from Gonzales—Bush’s attorney now wanted until the end of August. Carlin agreed again. The extensions continued until November, when Bush issued an executive order: effective immediately, the release of presidential records would require the approval of both the sitting president and the president whose records were in question, rather than just the former. It was what open-government advocates would later describe as a two-key system: under Bush’s rule, Nixon could have buried the Watergate tapes without explaining himself to anyone.

Bush’s executive order had little to do with any concerns of Reagan himself, whose estate has since shared his papers enthusiastically. Some administration critics theorized at the time that Bush was trying to shield from scrutiny his father’s vice presidential records, which were among the Reagan White House documents—but ultimately it wasn’t really about George H. W. Bush, either. It was about the new president and vice president, and the kind of government they intended to run. Bill Clinton’s White House had been relatively obliging in matters of secrecy, handing over millions of pages of documents—down to the White House Christmas card list—when Congress demanded them. Things would be different under Bush. "I think they thought Clinton was too open, had caved in to Congress too much," Carlin says. "It was a different philosophy."

Gonzales’s March 2001 memo was the opening salvo in a war over information, one that began in the earliest days of the Bush administration and will continue beyond its end. The stakes, which no one could have predicted when the letter crossed Carlin’s desk, are now self-evidently enormous: when Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president. We still do not know how intelligence operatives, acting in the name of the United States, have interrogated suspected terrorists, and how they are interrogating them now (see sidebar: TORTURE). We do not know how many Americans’ phone calls and e-mails were scanned by the National Security Agency (see sidebar: WIRETAPPING). We do not know—although we can guess—who ordered the firings of the U.S. attorneys who didn’t comply with the Bush administration’s political agenda, and we do not know who may have been wrongly prosecuted by those who did (see sidebar: POLITICIZATION OF JUSTICE). There are large gaps in our understanding of the backstories to everything from pre-war intelligence in Iraq to the censoring of scientific opinion at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. And those are the things we know we don’t know—there are also what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns.

The thought of revisiting this history after living through it for eight years is exhausting, and both President Barack Obama and Congress will have every political reason to just move on. But we can’t—it’s too important. Fortunately, an accounting of the Bush years is a less daunting prospect than it seems from the outset. If the new president and leaders on Capitol Hill act shrewdly, they can pull it off while successfully navigating the political realities and expectations they now face. A few key actions will take us much of the distance between what we know and what we need to know.

TREAT THE NAVAL OBSERVATORY LIKE A CRIME SCENE

more...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2008/0811.homans.html

[underpants]

1. and Ashcroft effectively killed all FOIA requests

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2002/01/06/ED125108.DTL

THE PRESIDENT DIDN't ask the networks for television time. The attorney general didn't hold a press conference. The media didn't report any dramatic change in governmental policy. As a result, most Americans had no idea that one of their most precious freedoms disappeared on Oct. 12

Yet it happened. In a memo that slipped beneath the political radar, U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft vigorously urged federal agencies to resist most Freedom of Information Act requests made by American citizens.

"When you carefully consider FOIA requests and decide to withhold records, in whole or in part, you can be assured that the Department of Justice will defend your decisions unless they lack a sound legal basis or present an unwarranted risk of adverse impact on the ability of other agencies to protect other important records."

[Mike Nelson]

2. We can move forward AND...

take care of the Bush criminals, too

[Demeter]

3. We Have NO Choice--We Do It, or Cease To Exist

It's our survival as a people, a nation, an economy, at stake.

[babylonsister]

5. Hopefully, both can eventually be done. It's going to be a busy

4-8 years.

[KoKo]

4. More from the article, depressing....

The last time Congress considered matters of this sweeping scope was 1975. Rattled by Nixon’s still-fresh abuses of power and recent reports that the CIA had spied on American dissidents during the Vietnam War, the Senate and House created committees to conduct far-ranging investigations into the covert actions of American intelligence agencies. Over the course of its yearlong inquiry, the Church Committee—as the Senate panel came to be called, after its chairman, Senator Frank Church of Idaho—conducted 800 interviews and reviewed 110,000 pages of government records, producing a report that itself sprawled across thousands of pages. Its revelations were damning: the committee confirmed that the CIA had planned the assassinations of leaders in Africa, Latin America, and Asia, had wiretapped Americans and opened their mail, had proposed infiltrating campus antiwar groups, and, Church concluded, had generally behaved like "a rogue elephant rampaging out of control." The committee’s report ultimately led to the creation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which fairly successfully straddled the line between secrecy and accountability in intelligence matters until the Bush administration decided to circumvent it.

Could Patrick Leahy do what Frank Church did? Perhaps. Will he? Not if he has any sense. Once Bush leaves office, the Democratic-controlled Congress will be under as much pressure as Obama to grapple with a massive economic crisis and bring resolution to two wars, to say nothing of tackling looming colossi such as America’s energy and environmental policies, health care system, and entitlement programs. These are not small problems, and the best solutions to them will involve unpopular sacrifices. Given Congress’s permanently low approval rating, its members don’t have the political capital to spare on a major backward-looking investigation, even if they did have the time to do it.

Because the unfortunate fact is that such investigations, while necessary, tend to be politically poisonous for the lawmakers who run them. Frank Church had presidential aspirations in 1975, but the investigation ate up so much of his time that it kept him from campaigning (he later groused that it might have cost him a shot at being Jimmy Carter’s vice president, too). The public and Congress, who had been furious about agency abuses of power in 1975, had mostly lost interest by the time the committee delivered its report a year later. Only one of its recommendations—the surveillance court—actually made it into law, and Church lost his Senate seat in the 1980 election following spurious accusations that his investigation had led to the assassination of a CIA station chief in Greece. The chairman of the concurrent investigative committee in the House, New York Democrat Otis Pike, saw his reputation similarly battered, and left office in 1979. It’s doubtful that Church’s and Pike’s successors would fare much better in 2009. Scandal-fatigued voters probably consider the Bush era something best forgotten at this point, and would prefer that Congress simply turn the page on it, rather than pick through its adventures in agonizing detail.

Also, 2009 will not be 1975. The Democratic-led Church Committee’s findings were widely accepted, but then committee counsel Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr. points out that this had a lot to do with the target of the investigation: thirty years of intelligence activities, under five presidents and both major parties. "So when we were critical of what had been done," he says, "it didn’t raise partisan concerns." Congress has also changed dramatically since the committee did its work. The partisan allegiances that came to the fore on Capitol Hill in the mid-1990s have hardened, and the public and Congress itself are both conditioned to assume—not inaccurately—that lawmakers’ motives are now dictated more by party membership than by constitutional duty. The findings of an investigation exclusively targeting a Republican administration, conducted under the auspices of a Democratic Congress, would be too easy to dismiss. Moreover, Schwarz notes, the legislative branch is deeply implicated in what the executive branch did during the Bush years, and investigating itself would be something of a conflict of interest.