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 Dick 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.
josh.meyer@latimes.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(In accordance with Title
17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed
without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest
in receiving the included information for research and
educational purposes. BadConcress.com has no affiliation
whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is BadCongress.com
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.
|
