Former White House counsel John W. Dean III knows a little about the perils of presidential cover-ups. He was one of the key players in Nixon’s downfall.
On November 1, President George W. Bush signed Executive Order 13233, a policy enabling his administration to govern in secrecy. For good reason, this has upset any historians, journalists, and Congresspersons (both Republican and Democratic). The Order ends 27 years of Congressional and judicial efforts to make presidential papers and records publicly available. In issuing it, the president not only has pushed his lawmaking powers beyond their limits, but he may be making the same mistakes as Richard Nixon.
The Secret Presidency
As president watchers know, we have a president who likes secrecy. He has hired only tested leak-proof and loyal staffers, effectively sealing the Bush White House. He has had his records as the Governor of Texas hidden, shipping them off to his father’s presidential library, where they are inaccessible. He has stiffed the Congressional requests for information about how he developed his energy policy — refusing to respond.
No president can govern in a fishbowl. But not since Richard Nixon went to work in the Oval Office has there been as concentrated an effort to keep the real work of a president hidden, showing the public only a scripted president, as now. While this effort was evident before the September 11th terrorist attacks, the events of that day have become the justification for even greater secrecy.
The mystical veil of “national security” has been cast over much of the Bush administration. There were the secret arrests of terror-related suspects (currently over 1,000 publicly unknown people). There was the expansion of the wiretap granting powers of a secret federal court hidden within the Department of Justice. There was, and continues to be, an apparent policy of precluding news organizations and congressional leaders from access to anything other than managed and generic news about the war in Afghanistan.
With all these moves, President Bush is brushing aside one historical tradition of openness after another. It is in this context that the president’s latest action must be viewed.
The Executive Order suggests that President Bush not only does not want Americans to know what he is doing, but he also does not want to worry that historians and others will someday find out. Certainly that is the implicit message in his new effort to preclude public access to presidential papers — his, and those of all presidents since the Reagan-Bush administration. There is, however, no justification whatsoever for this latest effort to hide the work of past, present, and future presidents.
from The GuerrillaNewsNetwork
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