Let's Keep Up Our Efforts - Its All Working!

After years of hammering on the walls of secrecy surrounding the bush White House, activists and Congress have begun, slowly, to open some cracks.

A federal magistrate on Tuesday ordered the administration to reveal by this week whether it has backup copies of millions of missing White House e-mails, which may describe decisions related to the Iraq war.

Last month, a federal judge ruled that lists of presidential visitors that bush has kept secret are in fact public records.

On New Year's Eve, bush bowed to lawmakers in his own party and signed a bill speeding the release of millions of government documents requested by Americans under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), a measure he has opposed.

In the waning days of an administration marked by a penchant for confidentiality, open government groups and Congress have redoubled efforts to ensure that the written record of the Bush presidency is not lost to history. They say recent developments show growing irritation with a president who has used national security concerns to draw a veil over the workings of the executive branch and to hoard power for the White House.

Those developments include the declassification of the nation's intelligence budget and new recommendations that the president's daily intelligence briefings be saved as presidential records.

"They're getting exactly the open government results they labored to prevent, and in part because they so overreached," said Thomas Blanton, who heads the National Security Archive at George Washington University. "They could have gotten 90 percent of the extra power they wanted if they went to Congress and the public, but by going for 100 percent and doing it in total secrecy, they undermined their own legitimacy and left the presidency weaker than when they started."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto responded that "we are simply trying to preserve national security information, ( bullshit) because that's in the best interests of the country; 9 bullshit )we are indeed protective of the prerogatives of the executive branch." (cover up)

Fratto said the administration is working to resolve the missing e-mails issue, and that bush's concerns about the FOIA requests centered on the resources required, not the release of information.

The line was drawn early in the bush administration, when Vice President Cheney stiff-armed lawmakers and environmentalists who requested records from his energy policy task force, a battle the White House won in the Supreme Court.

As the executive branch tightened its grip on information, even the Department of Health and Human Services was provided new power to classify its work. In 2001, bush issued an executive order giving past presidents and their families the authority to stall release of presidential papers indefinitely.

When bush in 2002 invoked executive privilege and the "national interest" in refusing a subpoena from Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), then the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, for Justice Department documents relating to a decades-old murder investigation, Burton complained about a "veil of secrecy that is descending around the administration."

But most of the secrecy measures emerged from the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when efforts to keep government decision-making closely held drew few objections from Congress and a frightened public.

Early in 2002, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft issued a memo urging government agencies to use whatever legal means necessary to reject requests for public documents allowed by the FOIA. Later, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew H. Card Jr. directed agencies to restrict access to "sensitive but unclassified" information.

Days after Democrats took control of Congress in January 2007, the House and Senate passed H.R. 1, which implemented the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission. The bill includes a provision to improve congressional oversight of the intelligence community by making the nation's annual intelligence budget figure public. The Directorate of National Intelligence released the $43.5 billion figure Oct. 30.

Congress subsequently revived efforts to speed up the release of public documents and activists used lawsuits in an attempt to pry loose White House correspondence and other material, particularly related to the war.

"The administration has brought these challenges on itself," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), ranking minority member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, who favored the disclosure of the intelligence budget. "By trying to keep secret information that doesn't need to be secret, it invites skepticism of all of its secrecy claims."

This year, Congress took aim at a years-old logjam created by delays in responding to public records requests. The White House opposed the Open Government Act of 2007 and enlisted allies in Congress to block it. But in December, Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) lifted his hold on the bill. On New Year's Eve at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., Bush signed it.

The law penalizes agencies that take months or years to meet FOIA requests by denying them the right to charge research or copy fees for documents released after the 20-day deadline, among other provisions.

In 2006, Sens. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) drafted a bipartisan bill requiring the White House budget office to put government contract information online. The bill eventually passed, and Bush signed it. The site, USASpending.gov, went online last month.

The administration, however, has won other battles over secrecy.

Last month, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court rejected a request by the American Civil Liberties Union to release documents on the administration's warrantless wiretapping program. A bill overturning bush's executive order on the release of presidential records remains mired in Congress. And the White House continues to refuse congressional demands for information about detainee interrogation methods.

Open government advocates see last week's court order that the White House reveal whether it has backup records of millions of deleted e-mails as the next big battle in the disclosure war.

The National Security Archive and Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington, which are seeking the records, say they cover about 10 million e-mails deleted from White House databases from 2003 to 2005. Federal law requires the White House to retain such records.

Fratto said the e-mails were inadvertently deleted,(cover up)and their number is uncertain. "It was a problem we announced, admitted to and will remedy," he said.

By attacking White House efforts at secrecy now, advocates also hope to put such tactics beyond the reach of future administrations.