In November, President Bush quietly signed Executive Order 13233 [PDF]. Essentially, the new order overrides an earlier one and means that a current president can indefinitely deny the release of a former president's papers. Pretty hard to hold your elected officials accountable if you never get to see the records describing what they were actually doing, huh?
That's what Steven L. Hensen, president of the Society of American Archivisits, argued. So, snidely, does www.whitehouse.org.
The White House (or at least its site, whitehouse.gov) is strangely -- or not so strangely -- silent on the issue. The signing of the order doesn't even appear on the list of November news. Quelle surprise.
I don't know -- do you think this could be anything but a lame attempt to use the "current situation" as a cover story for not releasing some papers that contain some Bush-damning (or Bush-dirtying) Iran-Contra-era evidence? Am I too cynical?
Posted on February 17, 2002 at 06:49 PM
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