There's a pattern of missing documents in the Bush administration

[Oilwellian]

New York Times, today:
Political advisers to President Bush may have improperly used their Republican National Committee e-mail accounts to conduct official government business, and some communications that are required to be preserved under federal law may be lost as a result, White House officials said Wednesday. . .



The Politico, March 24, 2007:
In DOJ documents that were publicly posted by the House Judiciary Committee, there is a gap from mid-November to early December in e-mails and other memos, which was a critical period as the White House and Justice Department reviewed, then approved, which U.S. attorneys would be fired while also developing a political and communications strategy for countering any fallout from the firings.


Newsweek, February 28, 2007:
A federal judge ruled today that suspected Al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla is mentally competent. . . . But the ruling by U.S. Judge Marcia Cooke in Miami leaves open what may be more intriguing questions than those surrounding the defendant's mental health: what happened to a crucial video recording of Padilla being interrogated in a U.S. military brig that has mysteriously disappeared?


NPR, June 24, 2004:
Key documents are missing from the batch of newly declassified documents the White House released this week on its policies on torture and the treatment of prisoners, critics say. Absent are any memos to and from the FBI and CIA and any documents dated after April 2003. No documents address the State Department's concern over the Bush administration's interpretation of the Geneva Conventions.



USA Today, May 24, 2004:
The Pentagon sought Sunday to explain why some 2,000 pages were missing from a congressional copy of a classified report detailing the alleged acts of abuse by soldiers against Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. . . . .


USA Today, May 24, 2004:
The Pentagon sought Sunday to explain why some 2,000 pages were missing from a congressional copy of a classified report detailing the alleged acts of abuse by soldiers against Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison. . . . .

Associated Press, September 5, 2004:
Documents that should have been written to explain gaps in President Bush's Texas Air National Guard service are missing from the military records released about his service in 1972 and 1973, according to regulations and outside experts.


Newsweek, March 1, 2006:
Brown's comments about the president surfaced in a transcript of an Aug. 29, 2005, videoconference call produced by Bush administration officials today after they initially told Congress that no such document existed. . . .


Washington Post, April 3, 2007:
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.

For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.

But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/04/12/lost_documents/index.html


Let's see if we can find anymore and pass them on to Greenwald. A similar incident involving documents is Bush's refusal to release Reagan's presidential records and are still in hiding at Texas A&M.

[phoebe]

1. we could start at the very beginning of this admin. with the "fire"

that destroyed records at the library keeping GHW Bush records, promptely followed by the directive to seal all presidential records for a selective period of time.

worth noting this article from September 2004, by Henry Waxman titled: Secrecy in the Bush Administration
Waxman lists all the changes made by Bushco. regarding record keeping
http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/4/6326

snip

Freedom of Information Act
The Freedom of Information Act is the primary law providing access to information held by the executive branch. Adopted in 1966, FOIA established the principle that the public should have broad access to government records. Under the Bush Administration, however, the statute’s reach has been narrowed and agencies have resisted FOIA requests through procedural tactics and delay.

The Administration has:

Issued guidance reversing the presumption in favor of disclosure and instructing agencies to withhold a broad and undefined category of “sensitive” information;
Supported statutory and regulatory changes that preclude disclosure of a wide range of information, including information relating to the economic, health, and security infrastructure of the nation; and
Placed administrative obstacles in the way of organizations seeking to use FOIA to obtain federal records, such as denials of fee waivers and delays in agency responses.
Independent academic experts consulted for this report decried these trends. They stated that the Administration has “radically reduced the public right to know,” that its policies “are not only sucking the spirit out of the FOIA, but shriveling its very heart,” and that no Administration in modern times has “done more to conceal the workings of government from the people.”

snip

The Federal Advisory Committee Act
The Federal Advisory Committee Act prevents secret advisory groups from exercising hidden influence on government policy, requiring openness and a balance of viewpoints for all government advisory bodies. The Bush Administration, however, has supported legislation that creates new statutory exemptions from FACA. It has also sought to avoid the application of FACA through various mechanisms, such as manipulating appointments to advisory bodies, conducting key advisory functions through “subcommittees,” and invoking unusual statutory exemptions. As a result, such key bodies as the Vice President’s energy task force and the presidential commission investigating the failure of intelligence in Iraq have operated without complying with FACA.


FACA is key to exactly what Bushco. et al have been doing all along.

on edit: spelling

[Oilwellian]

2. excellent post

thanks for contributing.

[phoebe]

3. Article on Presidential Daily Briefs and the falsehoods regarding public disclosure made by Bushco.

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB116/index.htm


snip

A Washington Post editorial asked," If a president's intelligence briefing is not a legitimate secret, after all, what is?" (Note 8)

Well, legitimate secrets include information like the specifications of a weapon system, the identity of a spy who'd be shot, or the bottom line of a negotiation in progress, but these real secrets make up only a fraction of what is classified today, and rarely adorn the PDB. During the Cold War, for example, the codeword GAMMA GUPY referred to the National Security Agency ability to listen in on the radio-telephone conversations of Soviet leaders while they were driving around Moscow in their limos. (Note 9) A document that specifically described that capacity would be far more sensitive than a President's Daily Brief item that said Soviet leaders were bemoaning the grain harvest failure and thinking about firing the Ukraine party secretary.

Vice President Cheney described the President's Daily Briefs as "the family jewels." (Note 10)

This was an unintentionally ironic turn of phrase, since the original use of the words "family jewels" in the CIA context referred to the internal compilation of agency "horrors" put together in the early 1970s after press reports of CIA assassination plots, and use of psychotropic drugs on unsuspecting victims. The PDB is about as far away from these operational matters as you can get. It provides a tour d'horizon of world events, based on the CIA's best information, spiced up with intercepted communications and spy photos. According to the CIA's own history of its presidential briefings, roughly 40 per cent of what the PDB covers is addressed in the newspapers. (Note 11) According to Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, President Clinton complained that "most days the PDB contained material he had already read elsewhere." (Note 12) President Reagan's first national security adviser, Richard Allen, wrote that the PDB "is, at best, a form of staccato information, a news digest for the very privileged. But it is rarely predictive. In fact, some would consider it pedestrian, even anodyne." (Note 13)

The former CIA general counsel, Elizabeth Rindskopf Parker, who admitted she was not on the distribution list, called the PDB "sacrosanct," saying, "It's something you never, ever share… It really is advising your client, the president, in the most intimate way." (Note 14)

The President is not the CIA's "client." Even the intelligence community uses the term "customer" not "client," because the CIA is precluded from making policy recommendations to the President. The first answer on the CIA website to "frequently asked questions" says the CIA is an information provider, not a policy maker. (Note 15) The PDB is an information brief, the CIA's equivalent of Headline News, not deliberative or pre-decisional or legal advice. Many presidential briefings at least as sensitive and far more deliberative than the PDBs have reached the public domain without damage to national security or to future presidents' ability to get candid advice, ranging from declassified copies of Henry Kissinger's morning briefing for President Nixon, to verbatim quotes from briefings by CIA director William Webster and national security adviser Brent Scowcroft to President George H.W. Bush that appear in the joint Bush-Scowcroft memoir, A World Transformed. (Note 16)


Not deliberately going off topic but this article serves to remind us how Bushco. manipulates the law.
The implication is that documents should be allowed to go "missing" from public scrutiny. Let's not forget to link the two practices together..