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Vertaal:
              Hoe te om de Verborgen Geheimen van het Beleid van Bush te weten te komen
Maandag, 1 December, 2008
In Maart 2001, de V.S. Archivist John W. Carlin ontving een brief van Alberto Gonzales, dan advies aan onlangs ingehuldigd voorzitter George W. Bush. Het betrof een belangrijke uiterste termijn die - opdoemde die Bush aan Richard Nixon verschuldigd was. In 1974, gaf opdracht het Congres tot een lockdown op alle verslagen die door het Witte bange Huis Nixon worden bijgehouden, dat de uitgaande voorzitter zou proberen om de document sleep van zijn rampzalige tweede termijn teniet te doen en chastened door de recente vernietiging van decennia' waarde van FBI dossiers door de recente directeur J. De loyale secretaresse van Edgar Hoover's. Die orde werd uitgebreid vier jaar later in een wet vereist die dat alle voorzitters' documenten - alles van briefings aan persoonlijke nota's en dagelijkse communicatie tussen de voorzitter, ondervoorzitter, en hun stafmedewerkers - aan het Algemeen Rijksarchief twaalf jaar na hun termijnen overhandigd worden die voor uiteindelijke openbare versie worden gebeëindigd. Ronald Reagan was de eerste president op wie het Presidentiële Akte van Verslagen van toepassing was, en zijn documenten moesten aan Carlin aan het begin van de termijn van Bush worden omgekeerd. Gonzales wilde Carlin de versie tot Juni vertragen. Zijn brief zei niet waarom, maar Carlin akkoord ging. Dan in Juni, kreeg Carlin een ander memorandum van Gonzales - procureur van Bush die nu tot het eind van Augustus wordt gewild. Opnieuw goedgekeurde Carlin. De uitbreidingen gingen tot November verder, toen Bush een uitvoerende orde uitgaf: efficiënt onmiddellijk, zou de versie van presidentiële verslagen de goedkeuring van de beide zittingsvoorzitter vereisen en de voorzitter de van wie verslagen, eerder dan enkel de eerstgenoemden in kwestie waren. Het was wat de open-overheidsverdedigers later als twee-zeer belangrijk systeem zouden beschrijven: onder de regel van Bush, kon Nixon de banden begraven hebben van de Sluisdeur zonder aan iedereen te verklaren. De uitvoerende orde van Bush weinig had met om het even welke zorgen van Reagan zelf te doen, het waarvan landgoed sindsdien zijn documenten enthousiast heeft gedeeld. Sommige beleidscritici theoretiseerden in de tijd dat Bush probeerde om van nauwkeurig onderzoek de ondeugd presidentiële verslagen van zijn vader te beschermen, die onder de documenten van het Witte Huis Reagan waren - maar uiteindelijk het was niet werkelijk over George H. W. Bush, één van beiden. Het was over de nieuwe voorzitter en de ondervoorzitter, en het soort overheid die zij zijn bedoeld om in werking te stellen. Bill Clinton’s White House had been relatively obliging in matters of secrecy, handing over millions of pages of documents — down to the White House Christmas card list — when Congress demanded them. Things would be different under Bush. “I think they thought Clinton was too open, had caved in to Congress too much,” Carlin says. “It was a different philosophy.” Gonzales’s March 2001 memo was the opening salvo in a war over information, one that began in the earliest days of the Bush administration and will continue beyond its end. The stakes, which no one could have predicted when the letter crossed Carlin’s desk, are now self-evidently enormous: when Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president. We still do not know how intelligence operatives, acting in the name of the United States, have interrogated suspected terrorists, and how they are interrogating them now. We do not know how many Americans’ phone calls and e-mails were scanned by the National Security Agency. We do not know — although we can guess — who ordered the firings of the U.S. attorneys who didn’t comply with the Bush administration’s political agenda, and we do not know who may have been wrongly prosecuted by those who did. There are large gaps in our understanding of the backstories to everything from pre-war intelligence in Iraq to the censoring of scientific opinion at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. And those are the things we know we don’t know — there are also what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns. The thought of revisiting this history after living through it for eight years is exhausting, and both President Barack Obama and Congress will have every political reason to just move on. But we can’t — it’s too important. Fortunately, an accounting of the Bush years is a less daunting prospect than it seems from the outset. If the new president and leaders on Capitol Hill act shrewdly, they can pull it off while successfully navigating the political realities and expectations they now face. A few key actions will take us much of the distance between what we know and what we need to know.
Three months after Bush issued his presidential records order, a Justice Department attorney named Anne Weismann stood in front of Judge Emmet Sullivan in Washington’s district court. Weismann was defending Dick Cheney’s refusal to hand over the records from the energy task force meetings he had convened the previous year, which had prompted a lawsuit by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club. Sullivan was irate. “I get the feeling the government’s underestimating the seriousness of this case,” he told Weismann. Weismann had been a Justice lawyer for twenty years, and had appeared often in Sullivan’s court. But this case was different. “I’ve never seen him that angry — he wouldn’t even let me talk,” she recalled recently. The encounter made her rethink what she was doing. Weismann still believes that there were limited legal arguments to make in defense of keeping the energy task force records secret. But what drove Cheney was something bigger. The case would ultimately wind its way to the Supreme Court, after Cheney’s legal team claimed to Sullivan that executive privilege meant the White House didn’t have to hand over anything to the courts if he didn’t feel like it. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled in Cheney’s favor, Weismann was no longer representing the vice president. The day Sullivan read her the riot act in district court, she says, “was the point at which I said, ‘I have to stop doing this.’ ” Have Your Say: How to Find out the Hidden Secrets of the Bush Administration Please read our posting guidelines before posting. Alternatively you can discuss this report here. Related News
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