Removing Stones from a Long Standing Stonewall

An editorial in the New York Times opines that: "True to its mania for secrecy, the Bush administration is leaving behind vast gaps in the most sensitive White House e-mail records, and with lawyers and public interest groups in hot pursuit of information that deserves to be part of the permanent historical record. E-mail messages that have gone suspiciously missing are estimated to number in the millions. These could illuminate some of the administration’s darker moments, including the lead-up to the Iraq war, when intelligence was distorted, the destruction of videotapes of C.I.A. torture interrogations, and the vindictive outing of the C.I.A. operative Valerie Plame Wilson." The missing gaps in "... history also includes improper business conducted by more than 50 White House appointees via e-mail at the Republican Party headquarters." Our first line of defense against such inappropriate attempts to hoodwink the American people that everything just went poof! are the historians and archivists who requested the emails some time ago and found their efforts unanswered and then told 'geez we lost everything.' Such juvenile excuses don't cut it with tech- savvy investigators. E-mails leave plenty of electronic traces behind on the many servers they pass through that are easily traceable and are then easy to reassemble into their original context. But it seems the Bushies were didn't really play by the rules; they never intended their e-mails to be seen by the public. They used private servers that belonged to the RNC; a highly inappropriate practice that openly suggests Bush's true intent to privatize his records. As the matter has played out and provided some interesting information has surfaced through the diligent work of "(h)istorians and archivists (who) are suing the administration. We should be grateful for their efforts. Entire days of e-mail records have turned up conveniently blank at the offices of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney." It is Cheney who continues the battle against the release of the rest of the e-mails; "he is fighting to the last the transfer of his records to the National Archives, as required by law. He recently argued in court that he “alone may determine what constitutes vice presidential records or personal records.” As in: L’etat c’est Dick" (The state it is Dick). Both Reagan and Clinton tried to avoid making some records public. "But the Bush team, from day one, has flouted the requirement to preserve a truthful record, ignoring repeated warnings from the National Archives. In government agencies, the public’s freedom-of-information rights have been maliciously hobbled." The National Archives also faces a significant challenge in the shear growth of electronic information since Clinton that is now associated with the Bush Administration. "It will take years to ingest before historians can truly get a handle on what is missing." Bush has covered his electronic tracks that suggest felonious intent. The Times concludes by expressing it's hope for change; that: "President-elect Barack Obama must quickly undo the damage by ordering that records be shielded from political interference, by repairing the freedom-of-information process, and by ending the abuse of the classification process to cloak the truths of the presidency."