QUILLBLOG

Information management

Though there is hardly a lack of books about what’s gone wrong with the Bush administration and its invasion of Iraq, access to information about the president became much more difficult for authors and historians to obtain in recent years, according to a story in The New York Times books section.

President George W. Bush’s 2001 executive order restricted the release of presidential records by giving sitting presidents the power to delay the release of papers indefinitely, while extending the control of former presidents, vice presidents and their families. It also changed the system from one that automatically released documents 30 days after a current or former president is notified to one that withholds papers until a president specifically permits their release.

Now there is a move to overturn that order. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is scheduled to discuss a new bill and a Democrat hopes to bring it to the House of Representatives next week.

According to the story, however, Bush hardly needed to worry about slowing the process down. The Russian transcript of the 1989 meeting in Malta in which President George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to end the cold war, was published in Moscow in 1993, but Americans are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.

As the Leonard Cohen song goes “democracy is coming to the U.S.A.”

Comments are closed.