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Shutting the records from gaze

Not surprisingly George Bush on assuming office issued an executive order, as Charles Homas [in a piece "Last Secrets of the Bush Administration" in The Washington Monthly, reproduced on truthout.org] writes:

".......Bush issued an executive order: effective immediately, the release of presidential records would require the approval of both the sitting president and the president whose records were in question, rather than just the former. It was what open-government advocates would later describe as a two-key system: under Bush's rule, Nixon could have buried the Watergate tapes without explaining himself to anyone."

So, we are left this, as Homas explains:

"......when Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president. We still do not know how intelligence operatives, acting in the name of the United States, have interrogated suspected terrorists, and how they are interrogating them now. We do not know how many Americans' phone calls and e-mails were scanned by the National Security Agency. We do not know-although we can guess-who ordered the firings of the U.S. attorneys who didn't comply with the Bush administration's political agenda, and we do not know who may have been wrongly prosecuted by those who did (see sidebar: POLITICIZATION OF JUSTICE). There are large gaps in our understanding of the backstories to everything from pre-war intelligence in Iraq to the censoring of scientific opinion at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior. And those are the things we know we don't know-there are also what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns."

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