E-mails of Mass Destruction
While it may not match the mystery surrounding the missing 18 ½ minutes of the White House tapes during the tumultuous Watergate era, the five million deleted e-mails from the Bush administration’s archives from 2003 through 2005, nevertheless has raised deep concerns, enough for a federal judge, U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola in a civil lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive (NSA) and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) to order the White House to answer questions over millions of missing e-mails.
What concerns professional archivists and historians is the missing e-mails may never fully document the communication exchanged during some chaotic events over the last eight years, such as the reasons for invading Iraq, the mass confusion in responding to Hurricane Katrina, and background on the exposure of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent.
The volumes of missing historical material from Pennsylvania Avenue certainly concerns Robert W. Gordon, professor of law and legal history at Yale University, who wrote through an email (and not deleted by this blogger): that the `"lost" e-mails seem to be part of a general strategy to keep the internal workings of the administration invisible to public scrutiny…What this administration seems to have learned from invaluable historical materials such as the Nixon and Johnson tapes, Gordon wrote, is to deep-six records -- in the teeth of specific statutes and orders requiring their preservation.’’
Federal law prohibits the deleting or destroying of internal White House records.
Don Ritchie, associate historian of the U.S. Senate Historical Office, responded that ``as a historian, the loss of any government documentation disturbs me. On the other hand, historians recognize that material saved in any time period represents only a fraction of what happened then''
The White House was given only five business days by the federal judge to answer whether the missing e-mails are on a back-up tape, based on the reasoning that as more time elapses, the more likely the e-mails will be deleted forever or overwritten.
So while the White House scrambles to account for the missing e-mails, there is good news to report. The Bush administration has managed to preserve all the ``knock- knock'' joke e-mails between Dubya and VP Dick Cheney.
-Bill Lucey
billlucey@bellsouth.net
What concerns professional archivists and historians is the missing e-mails may never fully document the communication exchanged during some chaotic events over the last eight years, such as the reasons for invading Iraq, the mass confusion in responding to Hurricane Katrina, and background on the exposure of Valerie Plame’s identity as a CIA agent.
The volumes of missing historical material from Pennsylvania Avenue certainly concerns Robert W. Gordon, professor of law and legal history at Yale University, who wrote through an email (and not deleted by this blogger): that the `"lost" e-mails seem to be part of a general strategy to keep the internal workings of the administration invisible to public scrutiny…What this administration seems to have learned from invaluable historical materials such as the Nixon and Johnson tapes, Gordon wrote, is to deep-six records -- in the teeth of specific statutes and orders requiring their preservation.’’
Federal law prohibits the deleting or destroying of internal White House records.
Don Ritchie, associate historian of the U.S. Senate Historical Office, responded that ``as a historian, the loss of any government documentation disturbs me. On the other hand, historians recognize that material saved in any time period represents only a fraction of what happened then''
The White House was given only five business days by the federal judge to answer whether the missing e-mails are on a back-up tape, based on the reasoning that as more time elapses, the more likely the e-mails will be deleted forever or overwritten.
So while the White House scrambles to account for the missing e-mails, there is good news to report. The Bush administration has managed to preserve all the ``knock- knock'' joke e-mails between Dubya and VP Dick Cheney.
-Bill Lucey
billlucey@bellsouth.net
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