Bush’s 11th-Hour Bid for Secrecy

[babylonsister]

Bush’s 11th-Hour Bid for Secrecy

Posted on Nov 29, 2008

By Stanley Kutler


The times are unprecedented. Not since 1861 have we watched the last gasps of an outgoing administration with such anxiety. Then the nation was concerned with drift and inertia; now we watch for further ideological mischief.

Republicans were aghast in 2001 to discover that President Bill Clinton’s staff allegedly had dropped the “W” from White House computer keyboards. Frat house stuff. George W. Bush has left a legacy significantly more troubling, measured by the breakdown of normal government processes, as well as of constitutional guarantees and practices. We watch last-minute rushes to implement new administrative rules, to transform and burrow political appointees into tenured civil servants, to further weaken environmental safeguards, to shift public funds to a desired end, and to lay down policy declarations to leave the current administration’s successors bound or embarrassed until they are undone.

Think, for example, about the fate of official records. Will they be removed or shredded to further obscure this administration’s doings? Nourished on secrecy from its inception, and carefully concealing many of its activities through the years, the Bush administration may be determined to make one last play for secrecy by taking its records and storing them in a Dallas warehouse, pending a Bush library. In these waning weeks, a group of us is locked in legal combat with Vice President Dick Cheney and his corps of unseen advisers, seeking an injunction to prevent them from leaving office with their e-mail records. {Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, et al., v. Richard B. Cheney, et al, Civil Action No. 08-1548, U.S. District Court, District of Columbia}. Cheney and his team are resisting at every turn, following a strategy of running out the clock and thereby implicitly admitting their intention to destroy or take their records.

If Barack Obama as president would withdraw Bush’s infamous Executive Order 13233, which effectively repealed the Presidential Records Act of 1978, Bush and Cheney still can expect to seal their papers for at least 12 years. If Richard Nixon is their model, count on at least 20.

more...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20081129_bushs_11th_hour_bid_for_secrecy/

[Lasher]

1. But repeal of EO 13223 will open up records of Saint Ronnie and Poppy.

If they haven't done anything wrong, what are they trying to hide?

[defendandprotect]

4. "People's government" where people denied access/info --!!!

..and game entirely in hands of wealthy --

[pretzel4gore]

2. who cares?

point is, the criminal punks got away with it. They stole the 2k election, stood by for 911, and intentionally destroyed the economy- all for private gain (hatred for liberal democracy America) and nitwits worry they'll nuke Abilene or Salt Lake City?

[defendandprotect]

3. I keep asking, "Is the White House on fire yet?" .....

Nothing left in Treasury...

and presume all records will be "My Pet Goat" ---