Where Are the White House E-mails?

[EV_Ares]

When histories of the Iraq war are written, scholars will want to know how the Bush Administration came to grips with one of the nation's costliest intelligence blunders: inflated estimates of Saddam Hussein's arsenal and his links to al-Qaeda. But they may have to reconstruct some pivotal moments without access to a key channel of official communication, e-mails flowing to and from the President's closest White House aides. According to one official analysis, there were 12 days without archived e-mail from the President's inner offices during a troubled period, December 2003 to February 2004, when it became clear that the central premise of the war — the presence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq —had collapsed.

Those dozen days are part of a large body of records that White House technical experts had reported missing last fall in a closed meeting with the staff of Rep. Henry Waxman's House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Last week Waxman revealed the extent of the archives allegedly missing from several executive offices: a total of 473 days from 2003 to 2005. One expert put together a chart that seemed to indicate substantial amounts of e-mail traffic had not been retained from White House computer servers. Waxman said he made the allegations public after a White House official insisted that "we have actually no reason to believe that any e-mails are missing."

But a non-profit watchdog group says that situation is even worse than Waxman had presented it. Anne Weismann, chief counsel of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said the Democratic Congressman's analysis focuses only on days of no e-mail records, omitting weeks for which there was a significantly low volume of e-mail. An informant told her group that the White House typically logs as many as 100,000 e-mails a day but there were days when as few as five were archived. CREW has sued the White House over the missing e-mail.

The Presidential Records Act requires preservation of all White House documents and messages, including e-mail. Internal communications in this Administration will be scrutinized by Bush critics who believe that intelligence pointing to WMD possessed by Saddam was manipulated to justify the Iraq war.

entire article @ link: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1706374,00.html

[fenriswolf]

1. dude when your children are educated

in a corporate school with almost no understanding of history, what little they will know about this period was that it was a very unstable time because democracy had failed and that this was the rise of the corporations who now control all aspects of our lives because they know best. lost emails? whats that? what is this facism that you speak of?

*edit, its a little melodramatic but more to the truth, the lost emails are already forgotten about, it will definatly go down in history but everyone has forgotten about it and their will be no outcry.

[Fovea]

4. Melodramatic?

I doubt that in one hundred years you will learn any history that isn't taught to you by the corporatist party.

Except for the underground history, which will be just as factual as the corporate history.

If there were accountability for the last eight years, a lot of folk would be in the Hague right now.

It cannot be tried any more than Oswald was tried.
Move on, nothing to see here.

[jimshoes]

2. If Jesse James partnered up with Al Capone

they would still have nothing on this group of pirates in the white house.

[Old and In the Way]

3. It will be known as the Undocumented Administration

They'll be a placeholder in history with the goofy smirk of the Boyking. Of course they can't leave a documented trial of their crimes....the record will be in videotape and blogposts.

[fenriswolf]

5. and the many bushisms around

i just love the fact that their was a word created to describe a quote that is syntactically or grammatically funny that came from bush. LOL

[ThomWV]

6. Let me ask you a question, have you ever printed an E-Mail?

3 Million E-Mails lost and not one single printed page? Did you ever print one and put it in a file for future reference? Hmmmmmm ...