Unprecedented Secrecy

We'll Never Know: The Unprecedented Secrecy of the Bush Administration

by Brian Morton | March 27, 2008


If you think about it, it's amazing how completely and thoroughly information has been "managed" over the last seven years of the Bush administration. E-mails have been mishandled and then lost, information that regularly was disseminated to Americans about the workings of their government has been cut off, questions that normally were answered have simply been ignored, and no effort is made to ever find out those answers.

By itself, this is a mildly impressive feat, until you realize that to accomplish this it required an almost top-to-bottom infestation of political will in the entire system--to manage every bit of federal apparatus to make sure that the president and his accomplices would never look bad, no matter how small the news or how astonishing the effort made to conceal it.

It is also becoming clear that the Bushies made an effort right at the start to make sure that information would never see the light of day. As soon as they took office, they scrapped the Clinton administration's custom-made computer archiving system that, according to news reports, was installed after a court order. It would be one thing if the system was replaced by something newer or better, yet the one the Bush people put in could hardly be called an archive, as it simply recorded over previously recorded information that was supposed to be preserved as part of the Presidential Records Act.

At every juncture, when administration officials are questioned about the apparent losses, they respond first with delays, then denials, and then excuses.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/13719