Bush Iraq Emails Not Recoverable
By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report
Wednesday 07 May 2008
A late-night court filing by the White House on Monday revealed that official
administration emails about the run up to the invasion of Iraq and the initial
occupation may never be recovered.
Whistleblowers have accused the White House of destroying email records from
their internal servers. The Bush administration disputes this accusation, claiming
instead that many emails were stored incorrectly. The storage system came under
harsh criticism from former employees who called it "primitive" and
said it had deep security flaws that would inevitably lead to destruction of
records. In September 2002, the Bush administration dismantled the Automatic
Records Management System (ARMS) put in place by the Clinton administration
and never replaced it.
Presidents are responsible for preserving all historical records during their
time in office under the Presidential Records Act. Congress is conducting an
investigation into possible violations of this act, including the destruction
of at least ten million White House email records.
In response to a judge's orders, the White House Office of Administration (OA),
which manages the networks and email systems in the White House, filed a statement
(PDF Page 20),
which revealed that no emails were saved between March 1 2003 and May 22, 2003.
"Office of Administration is preserving 438 disaster recovery backup tapes
that were written to between March 1, 2003 and September 30, 2003. Of those
438 tapes, the earliest date on which data was written ... is May 23, 2003,"
according to the Bush administration filing.
This time period is perhaps the most historically significant of the entire
Bush administration. It includes the run up to the invasion of Iraq, diplomatic
jockeying to try and rally United Nations support for war, the possible planning
for retaliation against former diplomat Joe Wilson, who was accusing the administration
of lying about Iraq weapons of mass destruction claims, the use of harsh interrogations
in the so-called "War on Terror", as well as the formation of the
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) - the ruling body in Iraq after the invasion
- and the controversial policy decisions the CPA undertook.
The filing was issued as part of an ongoing lawsuit by two government watchdog
groups in an attempt to force the Bush administration to preserve the backup
tapes and any email records contained on them.
"We have likely lost for all time a critical piece of our nation's history.
This latest filing by the White House is yet more evidence of an administration
committed to secrecy and delay at all costs," said Anne Weismann, chief
counsel for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and
a lead attorney in the lawsuit.
The Bush administration previously revealed backup tapes for the period of
September 30, 2003 through October 6, 2003 were also destroyed. This period
coincides with the beginning of the Department of Justice investigation into
the outing of covert CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson.
In March, the White House disclosed many of the computer hard drives that would
have contained email records and forensic data were physically destroyed as
a part of a so-called "refresh program" undertaken by the White House
to replace older computers. The suggestion to examine all the individual workstations
came after the White House admitted to "recycling" or taping over
some of the emergency backup tapes that record email records.
In previous investigations by Congressional committees, the examination of
email records has been the most powerful tool in determining responsibility
for potentially illegal acts committed by members of the Bush administration.
During a hearing on possible violations of the Presidential Records Act in
February, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Congressman John Sarbanes
(D-Maryland) implied the email archiving system had been intentionally destroyed
by the Bush administration to allow White House staff to cover their tracks
and erase evidence of wrongdoing.
"I have to believe that [American citizens] would find it completely implausible
that this amount of email would just disappear by accident. And I mean to imply
what I'm implying," Sarbanes said.
Matt Renner is an assistant editor and Washington reporter for Truthout.
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