Published in CMP Channel [online], Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Did White House Lie About Solution Provider's
Role in Loss of 5 Million E-mails?
By Damon Poeter, CMP Channel
When Congress asked about 5 million executive branch e-mails that went missing, a White House lawyer pointed the finger at an outside IT contractor.
The only problem? No such IT contractor exists, according to sources close to the investigation of a possible violation of the Federal Records and Presidential Records acts.
White House Office of Administration (OA) Deputy General Counsel Keith Roberts told the House Oversight Committee on May 29 that "an unidentified company working for the Information Assurance (IA) Directorate of the Office of the Chief Information Officer was responsible for daily audits of the e-mail system and the e-mail archiving process," according to committee chair Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif. That briefing came about after it was confirmed by the White House in April that millions of e-mails had vanished from Executive Office of the President (EOP) archives from 2003-2005.
"Mr. Roberts was not able to explain why the daily audits conducted by this contractor failed to detect the problems in the archive system when they first began," wrote Waxman in an Aug. 30 letter to White House Counsel Fred Fielding. In that letter, Waxman requested that the White House provide the committee by Sept. 10 with an internal Executive Office of the President report on the e-mail system it said it prepared following the discovery of the missing e-mails, as well as the identity of the contractor responsible for daily audits and archiving. That deadline has come and gone with no response from the Bush administration on Waxman's request.
The offices of the president and vice president are required to preserve all official communications, including e-mail, by the Presidential Records Act, a Watergate-era law which establishes that such communications are the property of the American people and cannot be destroyed. The Federal Records Act covers the archiving of communications by other parts of the executive branch.
Contrary to Roberts' statement to the Oversight Committee, several sources, including an IT company currently doing contractual work for the Executive Office of the President, have told ChannelWeb that no outside company had a managed services contract to audit the Executive Office of the President's e-mail archiving system daily during the period when the e-mails went missing.
"There are many contractors working for the [Information Assurance] Directorate and no single one provided audit and archive functions," said a spokesperson for Unisys, an IT security and hardware firm which has provided the Executive Office of the President "with a variety of IT services that support the Office of Administration."
"We don't believe that Unisys is the Information Assurance Directorate contractor to which Deputy Attorney General Keith Roberts referred when he briefed Rep. Waxman's committee in May," said Lisa Meyer, director of public relations for the Blue Bell, Penn.-based company.
Meyer said Unisys worked on a contractual basis for the Executive Office of the President on specific IT projects rather than conducting ongoing management of systems or infrastructure.
"This is not a managed services contract. Rather, we operate at the direction of the government, performing tasks across the organization, not just for IA," she said.
Several calls to the White House for comment were not returned.
Another Scapegoat Emerges
System Management Engineering, another Executive Office of the President contractor, does system design and consultancy work for the White House but has never had system management responsibilities, according to CEO Herbert Quinn. The Reston, Va.-based solution provider currently has a three-year IT services contract with the Executive Office of the President that will end in 2008, Quinn said.
"We don't work at the micro level. Our assignment there is as an enterprise architect. We design systems, we don't manage systems," he said.
Attorneys for two non-profit organizations that have filed lawsuits against the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office of Administration and other relevant agencies and officials over the alleged violations confirm the Unisys spokesperson's claim.
"My understanding is that the audits started after this thing exploded," said Meredith Fuchs, an attorney for the National Security Archive, a non-profit public research institute and library based at George Washington University. The archive, which collects and publishes declassified and unclassified government documents for the public domain, filed suit Sept. 5 in Washington, D.C., against the Executive Office of the President, the White House Office of Administration, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the head of the Office of Adminstration, and the Archivist of the United States.
Anne Weismann, chief counsel for private watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), said much the same.
"On the contractor issue, my info is that through 2005, when they discovered the problem, there was no daily archiving or monitoring. It may be that once they discovered the problem, there may have been a contractor brought on," Weismann said.
The National Security Archive and CREW lawsuits paint a picture of a White House that gave low priority to compliance with its archival duties under the law. The research institute alleges that the Executive Office of the President abandoned the automated record management system (ARMS) built by the previous administration to securely archive e-mails in 2002, never implementing another system for that purpose. The time period for the abandonment of the legacy archival system coincides with the Executive Office of the President's switch from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook, referred to by White House Press Secretary Dana Perino in an April 13 press briefing.
"In 2002, they abandoned Lotus Notes, went to Microsoft Outlook, abandoned ARMS, but never put in a new electronic records management system. So I'm told they just dumped e-mail on servers. This meant that anybody with access to the servers could potentially dump data and delete documents," said Weismann.
"Each agency of the EOP's records are commingled. It's all just a dump. How much is missing? I think 5 million is the low end of what's missing."
Interestingly, NARA's total agency IT investments went from $36 million in 2001 to $62 million in 2002, according to the Clinger Cohen Act Report on Federal Information Technology Investments. Drilling deeper, NARA's budget for IT development, enhancement and modernization (DME) shot up from $3 million to $17 million in that year-on-year period. Budget numbers for later years could not be confirmed.
Yet in the year following the near-doubling of its IT budget, NARA suddenly seemed incapable of preventing massive data loss in the form of millions of e-mails.
Meanwhile, the Oversight Committee is also investigating the use of Republican National Committee e-mail services by White House staff members, following allegations that RNC e-mail was used for official communications to avoid archiving under the Presidential Records and Federal Records acts. The Bush administration has countered that RNC e-mail was used to comply with the Hatch Act's provisions against campaigning with public resources by federal civil servants.
"The truth is that every presidency that has had e-mail, has had problems with keeping e-mail records. But for this administration, it's particularly bad. Here we are, the most powerful nation in the world, and the idea that we wouldn't be preserving our history is just astounding," said Fuchs.
Timeline of Events in White House E-mail Scandal
1994: Executive Office of the President (EOP) implements Automated Records Management System (ARMS) integration with e-mail clients for secure archiving of White House e-mails. ARMS automatically segregates, categorizes and archives e-mails according to whether they fall under Presidential Records Act or Federal Records Act.
1996-1998: White House IT staffer claims in U.S. District Court affidavits that e-mails coming into one White House server were not archived over a 27-month period.
1997: White House Staff manual establishes policy for staff to only use ARMS-supported e-mail clients (Lotus Notes and Oasis All-In-1) for all official communications.
2002-2003: Executive Office of the President switches from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook e-mail client. ARMS integration with Lotus Notes discontinued, not replaced with similar secure archival system for Microsoft Outlook. Presidential records and federal records no longer segregated and archived in separate storage servers.
March 2003-October 2005: Some 5 million EOP e-mails deleted from servers, representing hundreds of days of missing created or received White House e-mails, according to Office of Administration.
Oct. 2005: In response to government subpoenas, OA discovers missing e-mails, begins investigating how this happened.
Feb. 2006: CIA leak case prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald writes that numerous White House emails from 2003 are missing from White House computer archives.
April 2007: White House Press Secretary Dana Perino "wouldn't rule out" that 5 million e-mails lost in EOP system. Perino later says they "should be" on backup tapes. To date, White House has not shown evidence of the missing e-mails being restored via backup tapes.
May 2007: OA counsel Keith Roberts tells House Oversight Committee an outside IT contractor was responsible for "daily audits" of e-mail archive system.
Aug. 2007: Oversight Committee chair Henry Waxman asks White House to name unnamed IT contractor by Sept. 10. As of Oct. 3, committee has not received an answer.
--With additional reporting by Joseph F. Kovar.
Online story here. Archived here.
(Note: Online stories may be taken down by their publisher after a period of time or made available for a fee. Links posted here is from the original online publication of this piece.)
(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. Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
Showing posts with label Bush. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Bush. Show all posts
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Friday, July 27, 2007
Bush - Ledger - Bush as Agent 86 or Maxwell Smart
Published in the Star-Ledger, Tuesday, July 24, 2007
OpEd
"Is he President 43 or Agent 86?
By JOHN FARMER
Just about everybody has someone George W. Bush whom calls to mind, a lookalike or someone with similar characteristics, a figure from the movies or the stage or sports. I've had the sense for some time that I've seen Bush before, in another incarnation, as it were. Now it's come to me. I know just the guy.
Bush is another Maxwell Smart.
You remember Max. He was the ditzy star of the 1960s comedy "Get Smart," a lovable bungler, a klutzy American intelligence agent out to save the world by searching out bad guys but who, in reality, couldn't track an elephant in the snow. Never thought we'd see his like again. Then along came Bush.
The similarities are remarkable. There's the clumsiness with words and facts, for example. In Max's case, it came out with one of his regular lines -- "Would you believe ...?" -- when he was caught in a glaring misstatement, such as his assertion that he could break eight boards with one karate chop, a claim scoffed at by everyone, including his "chief."
"Would you believe six boards?" Max asks. "No? Would you believe three boards? How about a loaf of bread?"
In the Bush version, it comes out this way: "Would you believe weapons of mass destruction? No? Would you believe we'll be received as liberators? How about the insurgents are in their last throes?"
Like Bush, Max is involved in a fight to the death with a secret organization. In Bush's case, it's al Qaeda; in Max's, it's KAOS. Both employ terrorism in a bid to destroy America and the West. KAOS, like al Qaeda, features a diverse set of leaders, among them "Mr. Big," who's actually a dwarf. Ditto al Qaeda, one of whose main men, Osama bin Laden, is a 6-foot-4 Arab. You can see the similarities.
Like Bush, Max is an irrepressible optimist. When he blows an assignment to bag a bad guy, Max tries to get off the hook by explain ing that he almost pulled it off but got a bad break -- "missed him by that much," Max invariably explains.
Bush might well have said the same thing when he let bin Laden slip from his grasp. He had the hard-to-miss bin Laden trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan but pulled U.S. troops and special ops teams off the hunt to concentrate on his misbegotten Iraq invasion. In a mindless blunder, he turned the search over to Afghan tribal leaders whose loyalties were never clear. Naturally, bin Laden escaped. We missed him "by that much," you might say.
Max was always in a sweat about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the bad guys, much as Bush is today about the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Asked by his sidekick, Agent 99, how he'd handle the matter if the offending country re fused to forgo nukes, Max came right to the point: "Then we may have to blast them. That's the only way to keep peace in the world," he declared. (Let's hope the similarity doesn't extend that far.)
Bush is audacious in a Maxwell Smart sort of way, too.
Remember when Bush in a press conference all but dared al Qaeda's turbaned terrorists to at tack American troops and installations? "Bring 'em on," Bush boasted. Max had that kind of boldness. Asked to take a job that put him in constant danger, with the prospect of torture and even death, Max jumps at the chance -- "loving it," as he tells the chief. What a spy! What a president!
The similarities don't end there. Max, like Bush, was security-conscious to a fault. Think of the "Cone of Silence."
Whenever Smart had anything sensitive to discuss, matters of national security or some top-secret operation in the making, he always took "the chief" or Agent 99 into the "Cone of Silence." Nothing said there ever became public, in part because Max usually couldn't remember what was said there.
Well, the Bush White House has its "Cone of Silence," too. It's Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Almost nothing discussed in Cheney's inner sanctum -- energy policy, tax cuts, illegal wiretaps, prisoner renditions to foreign coun tries, permission for "harsh" interrogations (a k a torture), the latest twist in Iraq policy -- ever gets out to Congress or the public no mat ter how important to the national interest or the public welfare. It might as well be hermetically sealed.
There's even a bit of physical resemblance between Bush and Max. The close-cut hairstyle, for example, and the unfortunate smile that too often seems more of a smirk. Then there's this description from Max's Class A Control Identification Card: "sex: male; hair: black; height: 5-feet-9 (close enough); eyes: beady."
For all his blundering, it was hard not to like Maxwell Smart and to hope that just once he'd win one for our side. I feel that way about George W. Bush. He seems a nice guy who, like Max, just got in over his head. But there's one thing he could learn from Smart.
Max understood his job was to oppose KAOS, not create chaos. On that score, Bush sometimes seems confused.
John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com.
Link to online story.
(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. Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
OpEd
"Is he President 43 or Agent 86?
By JOHN FARMER
Just about everybody has someone George W. Bush whom calls to mind, a lookalike or someone with similar characteristics, a figure from the movies or the stage or sports. I've had the sense for some time that I've seen Bush before, in another incarnation, as it were. Now it's come to me. I know just the guy.
Bush is another Maxwell Smart.
You remember Max. He was the ditzy star of the 1960s comedy "Get Smart," a lovable bungler, a klutzy American intelligence agent out to save the world by searching out bad guys but who, in reality, couldn't track an elephant in the snow. Never thought we'd see his like again. Then along came Bush.
The similarities are remarkable. There's the clumsiness with words and facts, for example. In Max's case, it came out with one of his regular lines -- "Would you believe ...?" -- when he was caught in a glaring misstatement, such as his assertion that he could break eight boards with one karate chop, a claim scoffed at by everyone, including his "chief."
"Would you believe six boards?" Max asks. "No? Would you believe three boards? How about a loaf of bread?"
In the Bush version, it comes out this way: "Would you believe weapons of mass destruction? No? Would you believe we'll be received as liberators? How about the insurgents are in their last throes?"
Like Bush, Max is involved in a fight to the death with a secret organization. In Bush's case, it's al Qaeda; in Max's, it's KAOS. Both employ terrorism in a bid to destroy America and the West. KAOS, like al Qaeda, features a diverse set of leaders, among them "Mr. Big," who's actually a dwarf. Ditto al Qaeda, one of whose main men, Osama bin Laden, is a 6-foot-4 Arab. You can see the similarities.
Like Bush, Max is an irrepressible optimist. When he blows an assignment to bag a bad guy, Max tries to get off the hook by explain ing that he almost pulled it off but got a bad break -- "missed him by that much," Max invariably explains.
Bush might well have said the same thing when he let bin Laden slip from his grasp. He had the hard-to-miss bin Laden trapped in the mountains of Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan but pulled U.S. troops and special ops teams off the hunt to concentrate on his misbegotten Iraq invasion. In a mindless blunder, he turned the search over to Afghan tribal leaders whose loyalties were never clear. Naturally, bin Laden escaped. We missed him "by that much," you might say.
Max was always in a sweat about nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the bad guys, much as Bush is today about the prospect of a nuclear Iran. Asked by his sidekick, Agent 99, how he'd handle the matter if the offending country re fused to forgo nukes, Max came right to the point: "Then we may have to blast them. That's the only way to keep peace in the world," he declared. (Let's hope the similarity doesn't extend that far.)
Bush is audacious in a Maxwell Smart sort of way, too.
Remember when Bush in a press conference all but dared al Qaeda's turbaned terrorists to at tack American troops and installations? "Bring 'em on," Bush boasted. Max had that kind of boldness. Asked to take a job that put him in constant danger, with the prospect of torture and even death, Max jumps at the chance -- "loving it," as he tells the chief. What a spy! What a president!
The similarities don't end there. Max, like Bush, was security-conscious to a fault. Think of the "Cone of Silence."
Whenever Smart had anything sensitive to discuss, matters of national security or some top-secret operation in the making, he always took "the chief" or Agent 99 into the "Cone of Silence." Nothing said there ever became public, in part because Max usually couldn't remember what was said there.
Well, the Bush White House has its "Cone of Silence," too. It's Vice President Dick Cheney's office.
Almost nothing discussed in Cheney's inner sanctum -- energy policy, tax cuts, illegal wiretaps, prisoner renditions to foreign coun tries, permission for "harsh" interrogations (a k a torture), the latest twist in Iraq policy -- ever gets out to Congress or the public no mat ter how important to the national interest or the public welfare. It might as well be hermetically sealed.
There's even a bit of physical resemblance between Bush and Max. The close-cut hairstyle, for example, and the unfortunate smile that too often seems more of a smirk. Then there's this description from Max's Class A Control Identification Card: "sex: male; hair: black; height: 5-feet-9 (close enough); eyes: beady."
For all his blundering, it was hard not to like Maxwell Smart and to hope that just once he'd win one for our side. I feel that way about George W. Bush. He seems a nice guy who, like Max, just got in over his head. But there's one thing he could learn from Smart.
Max understood his job was to oppose KAOS, not create chaos. On that score, Bush sometimes seems confused.
John Farmer may be reached at jfarmer@starledger.com.
Link to online story.
(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. Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff and Clippings have no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of these articles nor are Plainfield Today, Plainfield Stuff or Clippings endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
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