10 Million emails go missing. Torture tapes destroyed. And now the great paper shredding fiasco! Shredding contracts during Bush/Cheney Behold, the Bush Administration in chart form: Federal spending on paper shredding has increased more than 600 percent since George W. Bush took office. This chart, generated by usaspending.gov, the U.S. government's brand spanking new database of federal expenditures, shows spending on "contracts for paper shredding services" going back to 2000. Click here for the full, heartbreaking breakdown. In 2000, the feds spent $452,807 to make unpleasant truths go away; by 2006, the "Cheney Effect" had bumped that number up to $2.9 million. And by halfway through 2007, the feds almost matched that number, with $2.7 million and counting. Pretty much says it all. http://radaronline.com/exclusives/2007/12/bush-secret-shredding-soars.php --------------------- Hell! Jr’s not going to have anything to put in that big ol’ library.
This is such a shame. Historians have been fighting this for the past few years, once it was known that the Bush Administration was destroying its own paper trail.
i wonder how much was actually shredded and how much was overcharged by the contractor who won the paper shredding contract. it would be sad in either scenario... does blackwater, halliburton, or kbr have a paper shredding division?
Hum... Fire burns on White House grounds Thick black smoke billowed from a fire Wednesday on the White House compound in the Executive Office Building. The blaze appeared to be located near the ceremonial office of Vice President Dick Cheney on the second floor of the building. The vice president was across the street in his office in the West Wing of the White House. Secret Service spokesman Darrin Blackford said the Old Executive Office building was evacuated as a precaution. District of Columbia firefighters poured water on the blaze and moved furniture from the building onto a balcony. The Executive Office Building houses the Office of Management and Budget and staff of the National Security Council and other agencies. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071219...e&printer=1;_ylt=Apd0e1MGFBUuC3kLzhwOe.4Gw_IE
its pretty telling that i'm sure both repubs and dems probably were thinking that mc mark is implying though. i know I am.
I thought everyone was aware that once a year a sacrifice is in order to appease Cheney's desire for destruction.
Lessons learned from water gate, do not let evidence just sit there. If you destroy the evidence, the worst you get is a slap on the wrist.
"uh...about those missing emails that we said were taped over, well maybe not..." White House suggests no e-mail missing Amid Growing Number of Questions, White House Suggests No E-Mail Is Missing The White House tried Thursday to tamp down a growing e-mail controversy, dismissing suggestions that millions of electronic messages are missing from the early days of the Bush administration. The comments by spokesman Tony Fratto shifted away from White House statements last spring that expressed uncertainty over whether the allegations were true or not. The latest round of questions began Wednesday when the White House, under a court order to disclose, was forced to admit that it had undercut its last line of defense for preserving any missing electronic messages by recycling its backup tapes — taping over its previously backed-up electronic documents, raising the possibility that some e-mail was erased. In response, the White House went on the offensive. "We have no reason to believe that there is any data missing at all" from White House computer servers, said Fratto. "And we've certainly found no evidence of any data missing." The court filing about recycling of backup tapes also stated that the White House is undertaking an independent assessment to whether any e-mail is missing. Fratto's comments also shifted away from what the White House apparently told the prosecutor overseeing the CIA leak investigation two years ago. In January 2006, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald reported that "we have learned that not all e-mail of the Office of Vice President and the Executive Office of the President for certain time periods in 2003 was preserved through the normal archiving process on the White House computer system." The White House says the e-mail matter arose in October 2005 in connection with the CIA leak probe. Fitzgerald revealed it to the public three months later in preparations for the trial of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, who was later convicted of four felonies in the Valerie Plame affair. President Bush commuted Libby's 30-month prison term. Regarding allegations of missing e-mails, the White House tried to bolster its position by casting doubt on a chart created by a former White House employee that suggested there is a large amount of missing e-mail. "We tried to reconstruct some of the work" in the chart and "could not authenticate the correctness of the data," said Fratto. "We have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any e-mail at all are missing." In response, one of the private groups suing the White House over the issue noted that the chart is one of 3,470 pages including spreadsheets and related documents that may be responsive to the issue of missing e-mail and which the Bush administration refuses to make public. Also, in a briefing for congressional investigators last May, two White House lawyers said a review of the e-mail system had apparently found some days with a very small number of preserved e-mails and some days with no e-mails preserved at all, according to an account of the briefing by Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Oversight and Reform Committee. Regarding the disclosure that backup tapes had been recycled, the sworn declaration by Theresa Payton defended the White House's conduct by saying that recycling backup tapes was "consistent with industry best practices." An e-mail technology expert disagreed. "The best practice is to archive and store everything in a system that's searchable for e-mail and kept in an orderly and organized way," said Rurik Bradbury, vice president of strategy for Intermedia, which runs e-mail systems for a quarter of a million companies. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/2008/01/white_house_suggests_no_email.php
Yeah, my blood’s so mad feels like coagulatin’ I’m sitting here just contemplatin’ I can’t twist the truth, it knows no regulation. Handful of senators don’t pass legislation And marches alone can’t bring integration When human respect is disintegratin’ This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’
Let me ask you one question Is your money that good Will it buy you forgiveness Do you think that it could I think you will find When your death takes its toll All the money you made Will never buy back your soul
Is this worse than a blow job? -------------------- White House Study Found 473 Days of Email Gone By Dan Eggen and Elizabeth Williamson The Washington Post Friday 18 January 2008 The White House possesses no archived e-mail messages for many of its component offices, including the Executive Office of the President and the Office of the Vice President, for hundreds of days between 2003 and 2005, according to the summary of an internal White House study that was disclosed yesterday by a congressional Democrat. The 2005 study - whose credibility the White House attacked this week - identified 473 separate days in which no electronic messages were stored for one or more White House offices, said House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). Waxman said he decided to release the summary after White House spokesman Tony Fratto said yesterday that there is "no evidence" that any White House e-mails from those years are missing. Fratto's assertion "seems to be an unsubstantiated statement that has no relation to the facts they have shared with us," Waxman said. The competing claims were the latest salvos in an escalating dispute over whether the Bush administration has complied with long-standing statutory requirements to preserve official White House records - including those reflecting potentially sensitive policy discussions - for history and in case of any future legal demands. Waxman said he is seeking testimony on the issue at a hearing next month from White House counsel Fred F. Fielding, National Archivist Allen Weinstein and Alan R. Swendiman, the politically appointed director of the Office of Administration, which produced the 2005 study at issue. Another official in that office on Tuesday challenged the study's credibility in a court affidavit, contending that current White House employees have been unable to confirm the veracity of the analysis or to recreate its findings. Waxman's disclosure provides the first details about the study's findings. The White House is required by law to preserve e-mails considered presidential or federal records, and it is the target of several lawsuits seeking information about missing data and efforts to preserve electronic communications. The internal study found that for Bush's executive office, no e-mails were archived on 12 separate days between December 2003 and February 2004, Waxman said. Vice President Cheney's office showed no electronic messages on 16 occasions from September 2003 to May 2005. Archived e-mails were missing from even more days in other parts of the White House, the analysis found. The Council on Environmental Quality and the Council of Economic Advisers, for example, showed no stored e-mails for 2 1/2 months beginning in November 2003. The Office of Management and Budget showed no messages for 59 days - including the period from Nov. 1, 2003, to Dec. 9, 2003 - and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative showed no e-mail for 73 days. The administration has so far refused to release the study and a number of documents related to it, including a large summary chart used in a closed-door briefing conducted for Waxman and other lawmakers last September by Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to the president. The briefers took the chart with them when they left, Waxman said, but committee staffers had copied many of the details. Waxman described the findings in a letter to Fielding, which he released. "Mr. Fratto's statements have added to the considerable confusion that exists regarding the status of White House efforts to preserve e-mails," Waxman's letter said. Two advocacy groups suing the Bush administration over its e-mail policies, Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) and the National Security Archive, also said yesterday that the White House's new statements are incomplete and contrary to earlier acknowledgments that some e-mails are missing. CREW also asserted in court papers filed yesterday that "critical and highly relevant evidence may have been destroyed" by the White House. The group's chief counsel, Anne Weismann, said the chart referenced in Waxman's letter corresponded to information from an informant who contacted the group and described nearly 500 days between 2003 and 2005 when no e-mails from several White House offices were archived. Weismann said the source further described many more days during the same period when the volume of archived e-mail was unusually low. "The example I was given is that the average volumes per day in the White House office, for example, was 60,000 to 100,000, yet there were entire weeks when it was as low as five a day," she said. Fratto said yesterday that "we tried to reconstruct some of the work . . . and could not replicate that or could not authenticate the correctness of the data in that chart." In an e-mailed response to questions, he also said the e-mails in question may exist on backup tapes that are separate from the archival system. Theresa Payton, chief information officer in the White House Office of Administration, also said in her court affidavit that her office has "serious reservations about the reliability of the chart" and has "so far been unable to replicate its results or to affirm the correctness of the assumptions underlying it." Payton also disclosed that e-mail backup tapes were routinely "recycled" during the first three years of the Bush administration. The White House stopped the practice in October 2003, when it "began preserving and storing all back-up tapes," Payton said. Technology experts say recycled data is often impossible to recover, especially if the tapes have been written over repeatedly, raising the possibility that some e-mails could be gone forever. The special counsel who oversaw the investigation of the Valerie Plame Wilson CIA leak case, Patrick J. Fitzgerald, wrote in a letter to defense counsel in January 2006 that some e-mail in the offices of Bush and Cheney was not preserved through "the normal archiving process" in 2003. When asked yesterday about a previous statement by White House spokeswoman Dana Perino that some White House e-mails are indeed missing, Fratto demurred. "I'm not sure what was said on that," he said. "I could tell you today, though, that we have no evidence and we have no way of showing that any e-mail at all are missing." ------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...1/17/AR2008011703575.html?hpid=topnews&sub=AR
So destroying over 5 million emails, required by law to be archived, is not as bad as lying about a blow job. Got it
