"If there are all these great safeguards in place, THEN WHERE ARE THE E-MAILS?" Blanton asked. [View All]

Here's a meme we need to promote!

From the same LAT article about Bush\Cheney claiming they are not agencies in the Executive Branch.

<snip>

Several security experts said they were not aware that the president had exempted his own office from the oversight requirements. But they said it fit what they saw as a pattern in the administration of avoiding accountability, even on matters of national security.

"If the president and the vice president don't take their own rules seriously, who else should?" said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a nongovernmental research institute at George Washington University in Washington that lobbies for open government.

"If they get a blank check, it's a recipe for disaster. I can't think of a quicker way to break down the credibility of the entire security-classification system."

Blanton noted that the White House had acknowledged that a substantial number of in-house e-mails had disappeared in recent years, at a time when investigators wanted to review them for possible evidence of inappropriate leaks of classified information.

"If there are all these great safeguards in place, then where are the e-mails?" Blanton asked.

Waxman, chairman of the powerful House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, wrote an eight-page letter to Cheney on Thursday in which he complained that the vice president had refused to adhere to the executive order. Waxman, citing the criminal investigation of Cheney's office related to the leak of a CIA agent's identity, suggested that the vice president's office was a national security risk.

<snip>

Link: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney23jun23,0,7611803,print.story?coll=la-home-center

I think we need to push this very part of the story. If they are going to claim that they will take care of their own documents separately, then they have to be able to certify that they know how to handle classified documents on their own. Since they seem to "lose" or "misplace" tons of documents, maybe they need their security clearances revoked.

:shrug: