White House Tells Court of Missing Emails From Beginning of Iraq War
The White House has admitted in court that it has lost three months of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq war, raising questions about the possible deletion of politically sensitive records.
The disclosure came in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that specialises in uncovering classified documents.
The archive was told it could not receive emails relating to Iraq, despite a 30-year-old law requiring the preservation of presidential records, because a system upgrade had deleted up to 5m emails.
George Bush’s administration faced a deadline of this week to outline the contents of 438 backup tapes that were believed to contain emails deleted in 2003 between March-when the US invaded Iraq-and September.
In a court filing yesterday, however, White House chief information officer Theresa Payne said “the earliest date” with email on any of the tapes was May 23 2003: the date the UN gave formal approval to the US occupation of Iraq.
“What is most shocking is that if anyone at the White House was deleting their emails during the invasion of Iraq, those e-mails are not on any backup tapes,” Tom Blanton, director of the archive, said.
Payton also told the US courts that verifying the contents of the tapes between late May and September of 2003 would be overly costly and an administrative burden.
Congress has begun an investigation of its own into a White House recordkeeping under George Bush, whose aides eliminated an automatic email archive programme used by predecessor Bill Clinton.
The loss of White House emails also proved an obstacle to Patrick Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor investigating the leaked identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame.
Fitzgerald said in 2006 that he believed some potentially relevant emails sent by aides in vice president Dick Cheney’s office were lost in the Bush administration’s email system.
© 2008 The Guardian
Even if they found it, the dimocrats would deliberately erase them and then go whoops!
Silly us.
I suggest that from here on out, dissatisfied committee chairpersons send their Sternly Worded Letters to the White House by USPS registered snail mail, return receipt requested.
I am only somewhat technically savvy and would therefore request some clarification from readers.
Evidence of e-mail can exist in at least three places - the sender, recipient, and server - correct? And of course, additional evidence could exist beyond these three entities if the sender and/or recipient shared them. Am I on the right track?
So, e-mail can never be accidently or inadvertently lost. All parties to a given e-mail, for example, would need to collude in order to make it disappear.
Is this correct?
Ken Nuti
Medford, MA
One of the things that contributed to the consensus that Nixon needed to be impeached was an 18-minute gap in tapes of Oval Office conversations. That gap was considered to be too convenient to be accidental. Now the Oval Office has an occupant who thinks that Congress and the courts will buy a 3-month gap that just HAPPENS to end on the day the UN semi-legitimized the US occupation of Iraq? If the other branches of gevernment and the American people stand for this, then the country fully deserves whatever totalitarian government it gets in the future. (BTW, I fully expect the American people to stand, or sit, or even lie down for this. Sheep to the slaughter. And I don’t put a lot of stock in the Dim’s ability to act.)
Ignorance is strength.
Every day wasted in not impeaching gives cheney/bush more power…
Correct ~KEN NUTI~If you know who sent the E-mails. Of course it should all be there on a computer’s hardrive and can be retrieved, unless the hard drive was replaced.
All they have to do is have the ‘pet’ comm. companies check their servers - after all, hasn’t ALL e-mail been scrutinized since Jan 21, 2001?
OK, thanks Kem Patrick.
To continue the logic then, a “system upgrade” of any merit wouldn’t actually be an inadvertent cause of deletion of five million e-mail messages unless that deletion was programmed into the architecture of the upgrade.
Curmudgeon, I believe the white house uses an in-house server not connected with telecom companies.
What does Mr. Blanton mean by “backup tapes”? I back up e-mail, dox, and everything else we do here on CD’s, as should everyone who wants to archive their stuff separately from a network. So, no one was doing this?
That’s not realistic.
Ken Nuti
Medford, MA
As an ex-IT person I can tell you the whole thing is implausible. Any reasonable system would have periodic backups and secure off-site archives for disaster recovery, especially if the law required preservation. Backup tapes or media of 5 million emails is a lot to lose. As others have pointed out, traces of emails exist in several places. If the entire system were “accidentally” wiped out due to an upgrade, it would require diligently wiping data to binary zeros off many individual pieces of hardware where remnants of files could linger. If not diligently wiped to binary zeros, much of the content could be retrieved by special programs that bypass indexes. Or all the hardware would have to be scrapped and replaced, not a trivial task. Also, before an upgrade, a system is typically completely backed up to provide fallback in case of upgrade failure. Lastly, if any of the emails went back and forth to addresses outside of the White House, those would exist elsewhere.
For the sake of optimism, let us hope that the National Security Archive’s non-profit budget can afford to bring in enlightened IT folks such as yourself to make a good showing in court.
Or, JCLIENTELLE, maybe you found a calling; get them to hire you :o)
www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv
Ken Nuti
Medford, MA