You just know Bush and Co. are worried sick over this:

White House E-Mail Battle Heats Up

The White House has three days to explain why it shouldn’t be required to copy its computer hard drives to ensure no further e-mails are lost, a federal judge ordered Tuesday. [...]

Observing that even that step is “not without its costs,” Facciola gave the White House until close of business Friday to argue why it should not be required to make such copies.

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the White House “fully intends to comply” with the order, which is currently being reviewed.

Actually, I was being snarky. They could care less.

They don’t recall, they erased the emails, they change the White House website….whatever it takes to keep their evil doing from going public.

From CREW:

Two weeks ago, documented how the White House website conflicted with the Bush administration’s claim that the Office of Administration was not subject to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. On August 23, 2007, the Washington Post took note of the conflict between the White House website and the White House position:

The claim, made in a motion filed Tuesday by the Justice Department, is at odds with a depiction of the office on the White House’s own Web site. As of yesterday, the site listed the Office of Administration as one of six presidential entities subject to the open-records law, which is commonly known by its abbreviation, FOIA.

The White House website has been scrubbed — and a new message indicates that the Office of Administration is now exempt from FOIA requests.

Before:

After:

By PETE YOST
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON - Government secrecy by almost any measure is expanding and little is being done to stop it, according to a coalition of 67 organizations favoring greater openness.

From classified information to the president’s use of the state secrets privilege, the lack of disclosure should be a growing concern to the public and the Congress, said Patrice McDermott, director of OpenTheGovernment.org, which compiled a report using mostly the government’s own figures.

“While some of the increased secrecy is attributable to a reaction to 9/11 and to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there is also a significant expansion of the power of the executive at the expense of the public, the courts, and Congress,” McDermott said Friday. “The executive branch seems to believe that something is kept under wraps solely on its say’so, whether it is legitimately so or not.”

White House spokesman Scott Stanzel said the administration’s goal is to effectively protect classified materials and to enforce laws and regulations related to the handling of sensitive information.

From 2003-2005, the FBI made 143,074 requests for telephone companies, Internet service providers, banks, credit bureaus and others to turn over data, the coalition noted. The requests came in the form of national security letters, which are administrative subpoenas that do not require a judge’s approval. In 2000, the FBI issued an estimated 8,500 such requests.

read more HERE

By JENNIFER C. KERR, Associated Press Writer
from YAHOO! NEWS

WASHINGTON - Little-known documents now being made public detail illegal and scandalous activities by the CIA more than 30 years ago: wiretappings of journalists, kidnappings, warrantless searches and more.

The documents provide a glimpse of nearly 700 pages of materials that the agency plans to declassify next week. A six-page summary memo that was declassified in 2000 and released by The National Security Archive at George Washington University on Thursday outlines 18 activities by the CIA that “presented legal questions” and were discussed with President Ford in 1975.

Among them:

_The “two-year physical confinement” in the mid-1960s of a Soviet defector.

_Assassination plots of foreign leaders, including Fidel Castro.

_CIA wiretapping in 1963 of two columnists, Robert Allen and Paul Scott, following a newspaper column in which national security information was disclosed. The wiretapping revealed calls from 12 senators and six representatives but did not indicate the source of the leak.

_The “personal surveillances” in 1972 of muckraking columnist Jack Anderson and staff members, including Les Whitten and Brit Hume. The surveillance involved watching the targets but no wiretapping. The memo said it followed a series of “tilt toward Pakistan” stories by Anderson.

_The personal surveillance of Washington Post reporter Mike Getler over three months beginning in late 1971. No specific stories are mentioned in the memo.

_CIA screening programs, beginning in the early 1950s and lasting until 1973, in which mail coming into the United States was reviewed and “in some cases opened” from the Soviet Union and China.

read more at YAHOO! NEWS

This analysis goes all the way back to January, but I did not know about the 2002 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the group “Judicial Watch”.

By BEN LANDO
UPI Energy Correspondent

WASHINGTON Jan. 25 (UPI) — Most Americans think President Bush invaded Iraq at least partly because of its oil — a war more than half rate him as “poor” in handling and nearly all say has affected the price of gas at the pump.

The UPI/Zogby International interactive poll of 6,909 U.S. adults Jan. 16-18 found 32.7 percent considered Iraq’s oil supply a “major factor” and 23.7 percent “not a factor” in the decision to invade the country. Another 40.7 percent were split somewhere in between while 2.9 percent were “not sure.”

The poll, released Tuesday, had a margin of error of 1.2 percent and comes as Iraq’s draft oil law — still mired in factional fighting — has become a main focus of the Bush administration.

The law is one of Bush’s benchmarks for success for Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, and if the Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds agree on it, it is seen as a pathway for easing tensions altogether.

Also,documents obtained in a 2002 Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the conservative legal group Judicial Watch found Vice President Dick Cheney’s secret Energy Task Force included maps and charts of Iraq’s oil infrastructure and projects as well as a list of “Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts.”

A pre-war oil and energy working group of the U.S. State Department’s Future of Iraq project also focused on Iraq’s oil sector.

The U.S. Agency for International Development in 2004 announced an Iraq contract with McLean, Va.-based consultant BearingPoint for “broad economic reform,” BearingPoint spokesman Steve Lunceford told UPI Oct. 18.

He said it included “privatization of the oil industry.”

Read the entire story at UPI’s website.

They’re sure they would win, but dropped it. They hoped to get the logs before the election, but since they didn’t…..who cares. We’ll just let someone else do it. Huh?

The Washington Post has quietly retreated from a legal battle with Vice President Cheney by dropping a lawsuit demanding Secret Service logs of visitors to his office and residence.

The newspaper’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit prompted a flurry of press attention and court action just prior to the November election. In October, a district court judge in the capital, Ricardo Urbina, cited the looming vote when he ordered the Secret Service to comply immediately with the Post’s request. However, just six days before the election, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an emergency stay blocking Judge Urbina’s order.

“We have decided not to pursue litigation further, though we believe we would have prevailed in the court of appeals as we did in the trial court,” a Post attorney, Eric Lieberman, said in an e-mail yesterday. He said the paper had “a fundamental goal” of getting the records to inform voters before the election and failed in that regard. “We also considered the fact that there are several other well positioned FOIA lawsuits seeking these same types of records, and we are confident that the public’s right of access will ultimately be vindicated in them,” Mr. Lieberman said.

Read more here