The telling of the history of the Bush administration is going to be a matter of pitched battle from the very beginning.
The required transfer in four weeks of all of the Bush White House’s electronic mail messages and documents to the National Archives has been imperiled by a combination of technical glitches, lawsuits and lagging computer forensic work, according to government officials, historians and lawyers.
Federal law requires outgoing White House officials to provide the Archives copies of their records, a cache estimated at more than 300 million messages and 25,000 boxes of documents depicting some of the most sensitive policymaking of the past eight years.
But archivists are uncertain whether the transfer will include all the electronic messages sent and received by the officials, because the administration began trying only in recent months to recover from White House backup tapes hundreds of thousands of e-mails that were reported missing from readily accessible files in 2005.
The risks that the transfer may be incomplete are also pointed up by a continuing legal battle between a coalition of historians and nonprofit groups over access to Vice President Cheney’s records. The coalition is contesting the administration’s assertion in federal court this month that he “alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records” and “how his records will be created, maintained, managed, and disposed,” without outside challenge or judicial review.
Eventual access to the documentary record of the Bush presidency has been eagerly anticipated by historians and journalists because the president and his aides generally have sought to shield from public disclosure many details of their deliberations and interactions with outside groups.
The fight for open government is one of the most unappreciated areas of progressive values. I sincerely hope that the Obama administration will be allies in the effort to provide the public and historians with access to records that should belong to the people. The Bush administration is ideologicially opposed to open government and they have a lot to hide.
It never stops, does it, with Bush and Co.? Now, the fight moves to just what records are available, and since the President may be derelict of duty, it is to his interest to limit the scope of what the National Archive comes away with. Always with this criminal-chief executive, it is a problem.
Will we ever be done suffering the consequences of his ill fated actions? How much damage to our republic has this irresponsible and criminal leader inflicted?
I am sure that history will deem him the worst of anyone who has occupied the White House. Soon he will be GTT – Gone to Texas. GOOD RIDDANCE!
And oddly enough, in a wholly unforseeable event completely unrelated to the Current Issue, the one guy who might possibly be able to shed some light on the technical aspects of this story, given his position as the primary IT developer/fixer, just happens to get himself killed in a solo plane crash. A cynical person might find it odd how often inconvienient people like Mr. Connell stumble into fatal accidents….
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He was a figure in an ongoing controversy about alleged vote flipping in Ohio in the 2004 presidential election. In October, U.S. Judge Solomon Oliver of Ohio ordered Connell to testify in a lawsuit in connection with charges that electronic voting apparatus in some Ohio districts flipped votes to Bush from Democratic nominee John Kerry.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."So it goes.
I think I’m suffering from BFF: Bush Failure Fatigue.
Can I get disability for that?
depends wholly upon the good will of the people involved. If we had a system where all emails went to third party storage the folks with bad intentions would conduct all their nefarious business on the phone or in person or by snail mail. In this area we’re dependent upon having honest people in government.
Good luck with that.
Don’t these guys send tapes of all of all their computer backups to some mountain somewhere (I think it’s literally called “Iron Mountain”)? Can’t we get access to that? The backups may not be as well-organized, but we should be able to get more than we have now.