Legal issues in CURRENT Bush AWOL coverup

[Cocoa]

Common sense tells me that responding to a Freedom of Information request is not voluntary, you have to produce the documents.

Also, if it turns out that you failed to produce the documents, you can't just say, oops, we missed some, my bad.

But, I'm not a lawyer... Anyone know more about this than common sense?

[wurzel]

1. Delay Delay Delay. After November who will care?

[luaneryder]

2. Worked in the V.A. system

as an ROI clerk and we were REQUIRED to send everything we could get out hands on when responding to an FOIA request. OF course, we were also required to respond in the same manner to a Congressional inquiry. If pages looked to be missing we had to document that fact in our response and make an effort to find them. But, in our effort to locate missing data we were not permitted to recreate what we thought might be missing. That's what I suspect is going on with the chimp's records; missing documents are being "recreated" a few at a time.

[Cocoa]

3. good point about recreating the docs

that would take time, wouldn't it. I wouldn't put it past them...

[djg21]

4. FOIA does not mandate the creation of records.

The act simply requires that agency records not specifically exempted from disclosure be made available subject to a request. There is no duty whatsoever to recreate records that no longer exist, or to create records that never existed in the first instance.

In complying with a request, an agency need to perfore a diligent, good-faith search for responsive records. While we can speculate as to the intentions of the pentagon and the NG regarding the newly-rediscovered Bush documents, the fact is that it can never be established that either agency acted in bad-faith. In fact, one might think that the newly-disclosed documents would have never come to light if the agencies were acting in bad faith.

That being said, people can draw whatever inferences they'd like about the newly-discovered documents, and the fact that the documents were "lost" for so long certainly was convenient for Bush.