White House Tape Recycling Possibly Erased Emails 251
Pojut points us to a Washington Post story which details the White House's admission that it routinely recycled backup tapes from 2001 to 2003, possibly destroying e-mail records from that time period. While the tapes are being analyzed to determine if any of the data can be recovered, the White House also indicated that some e-mail through 2005 may not have been preserved. We discussed the beginnings of this investigation a few months ago. From the Post:
"During the period in question, the Bush presidency faced some of its biggest controversies, including the Iraq war, the leak of former CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson's name and the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes. White House spokesman Tony Fratto said he has no reason to believe any e-mails were deliberately destroyed."
Re:Is it possible to have a private conversation? (Score:5, Informative)
Chill dude.
Re:Is it possible to have a private conversation? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Wait (Score:5, Informative)
White House Tape Recycling Erased Emails
There. Fixed that for you.
Never attribute to malice what can be explained by simple stupidity....except when it comes to the Bush White House.
I worked on this during the Clinton Administration (Score:5, Informative)
I spent 18 months working with the EOP on the security of the email system used to send out presidential press releases. The story that this happened by accident is just not credible.
First the archives, the archives were a pervasive force that was felt throughout the EOP. Every piece of paper, every tape, every scrap of information had to go to the archive. It was a whole cultural thing. And it was clearly a pre-Clinton culture. The people I was working with had been there since Reagan. They never refered to this as a Clinton mandate, it was the law.
The idea that a tape could be recycled for any purpose was a total departure from the Clinton era culture.
Second FOIA, was a constant issue.
Now we could assume that these changes were only due to the goal of 'restoring' executive power that Cheney and other Nixon era accomplices have advanced. Or it could be that they knew they had much criminality to hide.
I don't think these legal issues are going to go away after Bush leaves office. We are going to see a constant attempt to suppress government papers that implicate Bush in the criminality of his administration.
Re:I worked on this during the Clinton Administrat (Score:2, Informative)
It is highly unlikely Berger was attempting to destroy the documents, he knew there were copies.
More likely he was wanting to either make sure that the Bush administration was unable to destroy them or to make them public.
No original information was destroyed (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Wait x 2 (Score:2, Informative)
Youngsters... 1987, Iran-Contra hearings -- Oliver North was tripped up by copies of email recovered from backup tapes of the PROFS.
Email was certainly not a toy in 2003...
Re:Wait (Score:3, Informative)
You are still thinking like it is 2008 not 2003. (Half a decade ago) Email was still considered a Toy Comunication which was just starting to gain accecptance as vital information.
Government email was found to be vital information back in the eighties when the PROFS communications of Oliver North and Adm. Poindexter were found to be valuable evidence in the Iran-Contra affair. To think that in 2003 email was considered a "toy" in the executive branch is just wrong. Here is a good article [findarticles.com] on the topic.
Re: Is it possible to have a private conversation? (Score:3, Informative)
Many companies (like Microsoft) are trying to keep email useful by making it company policy that email is not preserved.
Once you have something that could be preserved... the temptation is powerful to require people to preserve it, and thereby stifle it's use.
Most big companies have an annual "records retention day", i.e. a records _destruction_ day, where everyone has to destroy stuff and confirm to their supervisor that they are in compliance with company policy. The policy is written to ensure that almost all communications are destroyed as soon as the law allows, and they make no bones about the fact that it's to make sure nothing comes back to bite them when there's a lawsuit.
The law requires different retention periods for different kinds of stuff. The idea that the oilmen running the White House would be unaware of this is ludicrous.
Re:I worked on this during the Clinton Administrat (Score:3, Informative)
Or the following chronology:
May 22, 1993
- Judge Richey cites the Clinton White House and the acting Archivist of the United States for contempt of court for failing to carry out his order to issue new and appropriate guidelines for the preservation of the computer records of the Reagan, Bush and Clinton White House staff.
August 13, 1993
- The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit vacates Judge Richey's contempt orders but upholds his overall decision that the Federal Records Act (FRA) requires that complete electronic copies of e-mail messages be preserved by the White House, and by extension, government agencies in general. The appeals court remands the case to Judge Richey to decide the issue of the dividing line between "agency" records covered by the FRA and presidential records covered by the Presidential Records Act.
March 25, 1994
- In a brief filed in federal court, the Clinton administration declares that the National Security Council is not an agency, and should be accorded the protection from public scrutiny given to the President's personal advisers. This argument attempts to remove the Clinton administration's White House e- mail from the reach of FOIA requests and the FRA, arguing that all its documents are subject only to the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and therefore not to court oversight.
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Meanwhile, the site you link to in your homepage has a poll up:
Who would make the worst president? Giuliani, Paul, Kucinich, Nader, Huckabee.
It also makes arguments about why Hillary is a wonderful human being.
I call BS Astroturf on your entire post.