when Bush hands over the keys to the White House in January, he will leave behind more unanswered questions of sweeping national importance than any modern president. ... the things we know we don’t know—there are also what Donald Rumsfeld might call the unknown unknowns.A few key actions will take us much of the distance between what we know and what we need to know. Full Story »
Posted by Beth Wellington
The writer sets out prior attempts to grapple with administrative secrecy and posits that the best course to take is to try to secure the papers in Mr. Cheney;s possession, declassify as much as possible and appoint what he calls a 9-12 Commission to reach a consensus beyond party of executive abuses of power and weakening of civil liberties. In helpful sidebars, he sets out what we know, what we don't know and his suggestions for how to find out the missing parts of the picture on the issues of torture, wiretapping and the politicization of justice. U would have liked similar breakouts for pre-war intelligence in Iraq and the censoring of scientific opinion at EPA and Interior. For links, I've added two pieces recommended by Steven Aftergood about how the Bush administration appears to be altering the records on the White House Website and how the Obama administration could operate with more transparency. Plus "Airbrushing History" alluded to in one of the articles out from the U. of Illinois- Urbana.
What the 9/12 Commission needs to do, above all else, is tell a story. In War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, veteran war correspondent Chris Hedges writes that following a conflict it is crucial for both sides, aggressor and victim alike, to surrender the narratives they have created in support of their own causes and agree upon a single account of what happened. “Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory there is no peace in any society,” he writes, “only an absence of war.” Comparisons of our deeply divided nation to a literally civil-war-torn one aren’t worth belaboring, but it is a fact that pervasive misinformation and secrecy, worsened by an increasingly tribal political culture and the sheer complexity of the issues at hand, have left Americans with fragmented and conflicting understandings of what exactly has been done in our name over the past eight years. Without a collectively agreed-upon story of the Bush administration’s excesses, efforts by Congress to undo them and ensure that they don’t happen again are likely to be misinterpreted by half of the electorate as a Democratic power grab rather than a reinstatement of constitutional protections. That would worsen the partisan trench warfare that got us an irresponsible Congress and hubristic White House in the first place.
