Accountability

Friends,
Thankfully we have a champion in Waxman. If only he didn't look like a bat, he could be President. We cannot let the White House delay this any longer.

Rev O

Reason to Be Suspicious
Here is the report from the Democratic committee staff issued yesterday. Its main bullet points:
-- "The White House has not had a reliable system for preserving White House e-mails since 2002, when the White House made the decision to stop using the Automatic Records Management System (ARMS) used by the Clinton White House." This despite repeated warnings to that effect from technologists inside the White House and from officials at the National Archives.
-- "Until mid-2005, the system that the White House used for preserving e-mails had serious security flaws." This meant that White House aides could potentially have viewed, changed and/or erased their own or others' ostensibly secure e-mail archives.
-- "The White House has refused to cooperate with efforts by the National Archives to ensure the preservation of White House e-mails."

Torture Watch
Jonathan Turley writes in a USA Today op-ed about "the twisted testimony given this month by Steven Bradbury, the acting chief of the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel and one of the central figures in the Bush torture controversy. While it received relatively little attention, Bradbury not only acknowledged a formal program of waterboarding, he also casually distinguished President Bush's approach from historical models such as waterboarding by the Spanish Inquisition. Though Bradbury insisted that the 'only thing in common is, I think, the use of water,' he omitted that other common denominator: pain. Indeed, the primary difference appears to be that the administration rejected water ingestion rather than water saturation to cause the pain. It turns out that the administration thought seriously about its own style of waterboarding and opted for a Khmer Rouge style over the Spanish style.

Congress to Bush: You've Lost Mail» White House Watch Dan Froomkin Washington Post
The Bush White House has made a mockery of the Presidential Records Act and its requirement that official White House records -- including e-mails -- be preserved for posterity.