Excerpts from an editorial in International Herald Tribune yesterday:
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 America’s 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 CIA torture interrogations; and the vindictive outing of the CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson. Historians and archivists 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. Modern administrations from Ronald Reagan’s to Bill Clinton’s typically tried to evade at least some disclosure obligations under the public archives law. 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 is further burdened by the steady and inevitable growth in digital records — a mass 50 times larger than that left eight years ago by the Clinton administration. It will take years to ingest before historians can truly get a handle on what is missing.
