| Topic: |
Politics > Politics-USA |
| User: |
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| Date: |
23 Jun 2007 10:39:30 AM |
| Object: |
Bush claims oversight exemption too |
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-cheney23jun23,0,863839.story?coll=la-home-nation
From the Los Angeles Times
Bush claims oversight exemption too
The White House says the president's own order on classified data does
not apply to his office or the vice president's.
By Josh Meyer
Times Staff Writer
June 23, 2007
WASHINGTON - The White House said Friday that, like Vice President
***** Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an
independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified
national security information.
An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 - amending an
existing order - requires all government agencies that are part of the
executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't
specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice
president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman
said.
The issue flared Thursday when Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles)
criticized Cheney for refusing to file annual reports with the federal
National Archives and Records Administration, for refusing to spell
out how his office handles classified documents, and for refusing to
submit to an inspection by the archives' Information Security
Oversight Office.
The archives administration has been pressing the vice president's
office to cooperate with oversight for the last several years,
contending that by not doing so, Cheney and his staff have created a
potential national security risk.
Bush amended the oversight directive in response to the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks to help ensure that national secrets would not be
mishandled, made public or improperly declassified.
The order aimed to create a uniform system for classifying,
declassifying and otherwise safeguarding national security
information. It gave the archives' oversight unit responsibility for
evaluating the effectiveness of each agency's classification programs.
It applied to the executive branch of government, mostly agencies led
by Bush administration appointees - not to legislative offices such as
Congress or to judicial offices such as the courts.
"Our democratic principles require that the American people be
informed of the activities of their government," the executive order
said.
But from the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney's exempt
from the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto
said in an interview Friday.
Cheney's office filed the reports in 2001 and 2002 but stopped in
2003.
As a result, the National Archives has been unable to review how much
information the president's and vice president's offices are
classifying and declassifying. And the security oversight office
cannot inspect the president and vice president's executive offices to
determine whether safeguards are in place to protect the classified
information they handle and to properly declassify information when
required.
Those two offices have access to the most highly classified
information, including intelligence on terrorists and unfriendly
foreign countries.
Waxman and J. William Leonard, director of the Information Security
Oversight Office, have argued that the order clearly applies to all
executive branch agencies, including the offices of the vice president
and the president.
The White House disagrees, Fratto said.
"We don't dispute that the ISOO has a different opinion. But let's be
very clear: This executive order was issued by the president, and he
knows what his intentions were," Fratto said. "He is in compliance
with his executive order."
Fratto conceded that the lengthy directive, technically an amendment
to an existing executive order, did not specifically exempt the
president's or vice president's offices. Instead, it refers to
"agencies" as being subject to the requirements, which Fratto said did
not include the two executive offices. "It does take a little bit of
inference," Fratto said.
Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists'
government secrecy project, disputed the White House explanation of
the executive order.
He noted that the order defines "agency" as any executive agency,
military department and "any other entity within the executive branch
that comes into the possession of classified information" - which, he
said, includes Bush's and Cheney's offices.
Cheney's office drew criticism Thursday for claiming that it was
exempt from the reporting requirements because the vice president's
office is not fully within the executive branch. It cited his
legislative role as president of the Senate when needed to break a
tie.
At a Friday news conference, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said
constitutional scholars could debate that assertion.
But, she said, Cheney's office is exempt from the requirements because
the president intended him to be.
Cheney's office did not comment Friday.
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.
He also accused Cheney or his staff of trying to have the archives'
watchdog unit abolished after its director, Leonard, pressed for more
oversight and for a legal opinion from the Justice Department as to
whether the executive order applied to the vice president's office.
Perino denied that attempts were made to abolish the unit.
A spokeswoman for the archives, Susan Cooper, would not comment Friday
on whether the archives' watchdog unit ever tried to inspect the
president's executive office or obtain annual classification reports.
Fratto said that he was not aware of such an effort but that it would
be rebuffed. "I'm not going to get into hypotheticals, but the
executive order does not grant them that authority," Fratto said.
He noted that the oversight requirements did, however, apply to the
National Security Council, the president's principal forum for
considering national security and foreign policy matters with his
senior national security advisors and cabinet officials.
Fratto said that the White House and Cheney's office had a legal
obligation to adhere to the executive order's guidelines regarding the
proper handling of classified documents, even if they didn't have to
submit to oversight by an outside agency.
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