Vice President Cheney's office has refused to comply with an executive order governing the handling of classified information for the past four years and recently tried to abolish the office that sought to enforce those rules, according to documents released by a congressional committee yesterday.
Since 2003, the vice president's staff has not cooperated with an office at the National Achieves and Records Administration charged with making sure the executive branch protects classified information. Cheney aides have not filed reports on their possession of classified data and at one point blocked an inspection of their office. After the Archives office pressed the matter, the documents say, Cheney's staff this year proposed eliminating it.
The dispute centers on a relatively obscure process but underscores a wider struggle waged in the past 6 1/2 years over Cheney's penchant for secrecy. Since becoming vice president, he has fought attempts to peer into the inner workings of his office, shielding an array of information such as the industry executives who advised his energy task force, details about his privately funded travel and secret service logs showing who visits his official residence.
"He's saying he's above the law," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which released a series of correspondence yesterday outlining the situation. "It just seems to me this is arrogant and shows bad judgment."
3 comments:
Kimba,
Henry Waxman is a nutball. And what you are seemingly pointing to makes you seem a bit off your rocker as well. What are you insinuating? Is there some cabal of Masons or Skull & bones people that control every aspect of your life? Come on. You should join the John Birch Society... I know who you can talk to get started.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/BrentBozellIII/2002/02/04/task_force_tomfoolery
…..Second, while Cheney's task force was a small group of government types that did not include Enron, Hillary's task force was a sprawling crowd of more than 500 people, including a pile of non-government employees from liberal foundations and even big insurance companies. But the most important distinction in this brouhaha is this: Most of the media didn't find a whiff of news in the struggle over Hillary's task force -- ever. In January 1993, the Washington Times first reported Hillary's FACA problem. This could have and should have been rich in irony -- Hillary Clinton, the Watergate crusader, utterly ignoring a post-Watergate reform. Rep. Bill Clinger demanded that the closed meetings stop. But the entire major media, print and broadcast couldn't be bothered. There was almost universal disinterest. The next month, the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons sued, which spurred a story in The New York Times, The Washington Post and one from ABC's Brit Hume. That caused journalists to rush to Hillary's defense, on principle. "I'm all for secrecy," volunteered Newsweek bigfoot Evan Thomas. "For one thing, that's the only way they are going to get it done." In March, Judge Royce Lamberth ruled the task force did violate the FACA. Finally, the other networks noticed -- for a few seconds. Time even called it a "victory" for the Clintons. The scandal continued, however. Weeks later, the Washington Times revealed many task force members Clinton claimed as federal employees were not. When the Clintonites released a list of 511 names, the Times noted the list "did not meet the (General Accounting Office) request for dates of employment, salaries and detailed backgrounds." The network reaction to the GAO then? Absolutely nothing. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton was still having her toenails polished by the press. In a famously fawning May 1993 cover story, Time's Margaret Carlson relegated the task force to one paragraph out of 40, and left it utterly out of her interview with the First Lady, saving that space for questions about whether Hillary set up her employees on dates. Carlson claimed her magazine had looked at the controversy in several ways. But it never had. She suggested it was all politics: "I think people look around for a way to challenge something and they find a statute that might help them. It's not as clear for journalistic purposes as you might think ... By the time you explain what this is, you've used up 30 lines." So Carlson instead used those lines to show how Hillary cooks a mean omelet. The Clinton task force story got juicier. Since the Clinton White House lied when it claimed there were no private-sector members of the task force, Judge Lamberth demanded in late 1997 that the task force reimburse the AAPS by $285,000 for its misleading testimony (a judgment overturned in 1999). But the entire major media, with few exceptions, couldn't have cared less. And now they ask if Cheney's been hiding something!
Kimba,
What do you think of our do nothing Congress? I heard a $3000 pay raise and a whole lot of hot air.
79 percent of the US population cannot tell you who the Vice President is. Sadly the rest of us get to work our asses off, often making less. A couple more flushes and we may get most of the shit gone.
:-(
markie
Kimba,
What do you think of our do nothing Congress? I heard a $3000 pay raise and a whole lot of hot air.
79 percent of the US population cannot tell you who the Vice President is. Sadly the rest of us get to work our asses off, often making less. A couple more flushes and we may get most of the shit gone.
:-(
markie
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