Uncovering the Final Secrets of the Bush Administration

By Charles Homans, Washington Monthly. Posted December 1, 2008.

Weismann told me this story in mid-October, in a McPherson Square office suite belonging to the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), where she is now chief counsel. The floor of her office was half obscured by rows of accordion folders full of papers. Among them were the briefs for a case she is now litigating against her old client, Dick Cheney.

In September, CREW sued Cheney to preempt any attempts he might make to destroy or remove the records of his vice presidency when he left office. The suit was prompted by a bit of fine print Weismann had noticed in Bush's November 2001 executive order instituting the two-key system. The administration's lawyers had written that the Presidential Records Act applied only to the vice president's "executive records." Weismann realized that this subtly narrowed definition could exclude many of Cheney's most important papers, including his personal files and any records of his work on the National Security Council and as president of the Senate. "There were all these holes," she says.

A growing body of investigative reporting and memoirs by Bush White House insiders-turned-dissenters suggests that most of the administration's most controversial national security decisions -- on wiretapping, the Iraq War, and renditions -- originated in the Office of the Vice President, hashed out by Cheney, vice presidential counsel David Addington, and aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Cheney's papers are the Amazon rain forest of Bush administration records: they are of immense importance to the big picture, and there is a real risk that they will be lost before we know exactly what's in there. If there is one overarching priority between now and January 20, it is to surround Cheney's office with every possible legal barrier to removing so much as a Post-it Note from the premises.

Of course, what's there will not tell us the entire story. The Bush administration's obsession with secrecy is often compared to Nixon's, but the two are qualitatively different. Nixon was compulsively secretive, and was ultimately undone by his contradictory obsession with record keeping. Cheney, by contrast, is systematically secretive, a habit he acquired as Gerald Ford's chief of staff in the post-Watergate years. "I learned early on that if you don't want your memos to get you in trouble someday, just don't write any," the vice president said in a speech last year at Ford's presidential museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan. (Libby, a meticulous diarist, learned a similar lesson the hard way at the hands of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald.) But even as careful an executive as Cheney would have trouble running an administration completely devoid of written communication. Unless they have been destroyed already, his office's records are likely at least to include e-mails among lower echelons of staffers reflecting the dictates from the vice president's inner circle: Cheney's electronic shadow.

The records of the White House are also uniquely vulnerable. They are in the hands of administration loyalists, and won't stay in the building when Obama takes office. Preserving these documents as public records, even if we can't read them for twelve years, is our most pressing concern.

Declassify, declassify, declassify

Fortunately, most administration paperwork can be found in department and agency files, and will be available immediately after Bush leaves office. "While the White House can keep many of its internal deliberations secret, it will not be able to conceal anything that was actually implemented in policy," says Steven Aftergood, the director of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy. Much of that material is now classified, and pressure should be brought to bear on the Obama administration to make sure that as little as possible of it stays that way.

It's the nature of all presidential administrations to overclassify, and some of the Bush administration's gratuitous secrecy falls into this relatively innocent category. But the administration's higher-ups also used national-security-justified secrecy for political purposes on a regular basis. Relevant offices within the Justice Department were excluded from discussions about wiretapping and torture for expediency's sake, and White House officials who believed in an unfettered executive could use classification to keep the legislative branch from questioning policy. "This was the first time I have seen what I regarded as deliberate decisions, made at the highest of levels, to exploit the classification system, not for reasons of national security but for bureaucratic infighting -- to keep people from weighing in," says J. William Leonard, who ran the National Archives' Information Security Oversight Office -- the office that reviews the federal government's classification decisions -- from 2002 to 2008, after thirty years of classification work in the Defense Department. The decision to bury the previously independent Federal Emergency Management Agency under layers of Department of Homeland Security bureaucracy -- a factor in FEMA's slow response to Hurricane Katrina -- was made without public debate. Although huge swaths of information about Guantnamo Bay detainees remain classified, government prosecutors have often backed off their most serious charges in court cases where evidence has had to be made public, suggesting that much of that is secret for political reasons as well.

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Charles Homans is an editor of the Washington Monthly.

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