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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Mephisto who wrote (2764)	2/11/2002 9:47:39 PM
From: zonkie	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 15516

I'm glad you brought up the subject of Bush's overly secret administration. Here is part 1 of a 4 part article which deals with the same subject. I've been meaning to post this for several days. ______________ FEATURE STORY \| February 25, 2002 What Are They Hiding? by Russ Baker o one ever accused conservative House Republican Dan Burton of mincing his words. This is, after all, the man who once famously called President Clinton a "scumbag." But it's one thing to throw rhetorical bombs at a President from the opposition party, and quite another to denounce your own party's man as "dictatorial," as Burton did to President Bush in December. What outrages Burton is the Bush Administration's overarching obsession with secrecy, with keeping information on a broad range of fronts out of the public view. That Burton has latched on to a key element of Bush's MO has grown clearer with the unfolding of the Enron scandal. As more and more connections between members of the Bush Administration and Enron come to light, the press and the public may be forgiven for wondering, "What else are they hiding?" The answer is "a lot"--the Bush team has already established a record on secrecy that makes Richard Nixon, just to take a random example from our presidential past, look like a boy scout. Presidential Records Act or starters, Bush is blocking the scheduled release of documents under the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which mandates that all but the most highly sensitive documents are to be made public twelve years after a President leaves office. Under the PRA, Ronald Reagan's papers were supposed to be released last year. On January 20, 2001, the first batch (68,000 pages) of Reagan's papers, mostly notes from meetings with advisers and internal White House memos, came up for routine release. It should have come off without a hitch--after all, presidential libraries have for years been releasing documents informally. But the new Bush Administration, fresh from its own Florida election controversy, took advantage of a PRA clause allowing a thirty-day presidential consultation, and thus began what turned into a grand stall. By last August, half a year had passed and still nothing had been released. This raised suspicions. Since the law already exempted the most sensitive documents from disclosure, why did the Bush Administration have to review the rest for what it said were national security purposes? "It's pretty fishy," says Anna Nelson, an American University history professor who works with a number of scholarly and historical organizations on presidential papers access. "The precautions on 'national security' are extreme. These are not Iran/contra papers." Nelson surmises that many officials in the current Administration (including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) were authors of the twelve-year-old memos that are now being blocked: "They probably don't remember what they said, and they are feeling iffy about it." Meanwhile, George W. Bush is now deciding which papers of his father's, former President George H.W. Bush, will be released, beginning on January 20, 2005. After September 11 the Administration had virtual carte blanche to stall any and all document releases, and it did so boldly [see Bruce Shapiro, "Information Lockdown," November 12, 2001]. In November Bush issued an executive order that declared that not only could a former President assert executive privilege over his papers against the will of the incumbent President (a measure Reagan instituted just before he left office) but that a sitting President could also block the papers of a predecessor, even if that predecessor had approved their release. The implications of this change are breathtaking. "The bottom line is that secrecy prevails in every situation when at least one party wants it," says Mark Rozell, a political science professor at the Catholic University of America and a leading scholar on executive privilege. thenation.com

To: Mephisto who wrote (2764)	3/7/2002 1:08:14 AM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

Bush asks for trouble by snubbing senators Jules Witcover Originally published Mar 6, 2002 WASHINGTON -- Shovelful by shovelful, the Bush administration is digging itself a deeper hole in its relations with Congress by playing the executive privilege and secrecy cards. The latest example is the refusal of the White House to permit Tom Ridge, the director of homeland security, to testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee next month on the president's budget request for $38 billion to make the country safer from terrorist attacks. The stated ground, as in the refusal to release documents sought by Congress regarding the secret meetings of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force last year, is the need to preserve confidentiality between the president and his chief administration advisers. Heads of departments and other Cabinet members routinely testify before Congress on the business of their agencies. But Mr. Ridge is not a Cabinet member, although many critics think he should be. Without stature on a par with Cabinet members, these critics say, he has been frustrated getting cooperation from them because each agency head protects his own turf. Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia and the ranking Republican on the committee, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, wrote to Mr. Ridge, saying, "You are the single executive branch official with the responsibility to integrate the many complex functions of the various federal agencies in one formulation and the execution of homeland defense programs. Your views and insights on the policies necessary to meet these objectives are critical to the committee and the nation." In reply, Mr. Ridge's spokeswoman, Susan Neely, replied that "Ridge's job is to make recommendations to the president and the president has spoken." But Mr. Byrd and Mr. Stevens are not likely to swallow that. Notably, they already have support for getting Mr. Ridge to appear from another prominent Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, the ranking minority member of the Senate Intelligence Committee. "He is the homeland security czar," Mr. Shelby told The New York Times. "I agree with Senators Byrd and Stevens that he should appear." If Mr. Ridge's job description as a presidential adviser will be used to shelter him from congressional interrogation on the job he's doing, it invites an outcry from Capitol Hill. The focus of that outcry should be that either he is given Cabinet stature subject to the same scrutiny department secretaries have to face or that he is told to testify. Important members of Congress already are steaming about a growing sense that Mr. Bush, accused of being a unilateralist in foreign policy, would like to conduct the war on terrorism without full consultation with Congress, whose lawful function is to provide the money required. Putting Mr. Ridge under wraps is particularly ironic. When he was appointed homeland security director shortly after Sept. 11, the administration seemed to lose no opportunity to trot him out front and center as the point man and spokesman for the domestic aspects of prosecuting the war. But his performance in that function left something to be desired, particularly in the uncertainty the administration conveyed about possible further terrorist attacks. He soon was pulled back from that role, leaving him to focus on the central task of coordinating all aspects of homeland defense in which various agencies have a role. Republican Rep. William Thornberry of Texas, who has been urging a consolidation of federal functions on border security into a new agency that would be headed by Mr. Ridge, says he has no problem with Mr. Ridge not testifying on grounds of his presidential advisory role. But he says he remains concerned that the homeland security director does not have the tools and authority to achieve the necessary cooperation among involved agencies. The White House decision to snub the Senate Appropriations Committee by denying it Mr. Ridge's views is certainly not going to help the contentious climate building toward the administration on consultation about the war. Complaints from congressional Democrats is one thing; with Republicans joining in, the White House is asking for trouble. Jules Witcover writes from The Sun's Washington bureau. Copyright © 2002, The Baltimore Sun From the archive \| E-mail address: jules.witcover@baltsun.com sunspot.net