Lost E-Mails Obscure 'Plame-gate'
By Jason Leopold
May 9, 2008
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/050908a.html

excerpts:
The Bush administration also went on the offensive against the IAEA. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on March 16, Vice President Cheney rebutted ElBaradei’s debunking of the Niger documents as forgeries.

“I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong," Cheney said. The IAEA “has consistently underestimated or missed what it was Saddam Hussein was doing. I don't have any reason to believe they're any more valid this time than they've been in the past.”

The next day – March 17 – Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, sent a letter to President Bush further challenging his use of the Niger suspicions and citing ElBaradei’s findings.

“As subsequent media accounts indicated, the evidence contained ‘crude errors,’ such as a ‘childlike signature’ and the use of stationery from a military government in Niger that has been out of power for over a decade,” Waxman wrote.

Waxman demanded “a full accounting of what you knew about the reliability of the evidence linking Iraq to uranium in Africa, when you knew this, and why you and senior officials in the Administration presented the evidence to the UN Security Council, the Congress, and the American people without disclosing the doubts of the CIA.”

Bush didn’t respond to Waxman. Two days later – on March 19, 2003 – Bush ordered U.S. military forces to invade Iraq.

Now, more than five years later, it appears internal White House e-mails that could shed light on what Bush and his circle knew about the unreliability of their evidence on Iraq’s WMD may have been lost in an electronic black hole.

The black hole also may have swallowed internal e-mail traffic relating to the then-escalating conflict with former Ambassador Wilson as he edged toward going public with his inside knowledge about the unreliability of the Niger suspicions.

<snip>

But David Gewirtz, an expert on e-mail, and the author of the book Where Have All the Emails Gone? believes the loss of e-mails covering the March to May 2003 period is suspicious.

“Sadly, neither elected nor appointed officials in Washington are making the situation any better,” Gewirtz wrote in a technical column about the issue. “In fact, it's getting worse. I've reached the conclusion that it's time to call for a special prosecutor. We now have official White House statements that federal laws are being broken, and I don't see any way for this to be resolved without escalation.”

Gewirtz said he contacted Judge Facciola to offer some technical advice on how to possibly uncover the lost e-mails but was told, “The judge is quite technical.”

“White House e-mail is very problematic and, instead of productive action, we're seeing our Washington friends – even those charged with ultimate oversight – ignoring very practical solutions and instead spinning their wheels, at the expense of both present-day Americans and the historical record,” Gewirtz added.

“What offends me as an IT professional is that none of these problems are insurmountable. In fact, most of them are easy to solve. What's worse: not a single private-sector CIO [chief information officer] would be allowed to get away with negligence on this massive scale.”

Who would investigate these people? The Justice Department? From what the Justice department has demonstrated over the last few years, they are almost as bad.

That is why a special prosecuter is needed.

If they prosecuted this administration with half the eagerness they used on Bill Clinton and MonicaGate, these guys would be hanging from their thumbs. So if I get a blowjob in the Whitehouse, we create a new Pepperdyne Professor for the cost of 100 mill.

If I steal the entire coffers of a government, abolish the Constitution, create new powers, sellout agents, sellout the citizens, create propaganda paradynes, remove the citizens rights and give them to foreign nationals, setup private fascist government with corporate control, a centrally funded monitary system owned by foreign nationals, well, this is all just another day in the Whitehouse now days. Hell, what is a trillion dollars to a guy that spends his days shooting his friends. He will be dead in 10 years or less anyway due to mother nature. He also doesn't see the people he affected or care.

By the way, for all of those thinking of voting for McSame, he folded a savings and loan, now that is leadership. It was nice to see the very beautiful undercover agent at the Steven Colberts lambasting of Bush, I fell of my chair watching that. If you haven't seen it, GOOGLE IT!

The scrambled mess with White House electronic communications is entirely in violation of the Hatch Act:
http://www.osc.gov/ha_fed.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatch_Act_of_1939

As well as being contrary to sound IT practice:



As for the legal issues, well, Cheney/Bush only respect the laws that suit them. You really do have to wonder, as with so many of the activities of these people whether the problem with the millions of emails is witting obstruction or the unwitting obfuscation and confusion of incompetence. Or both.

CIO's get away with it all the time, SOX is only for the outsider Officers.

Don't you find it ironic that we are complaining about purportedly "Lost" Government E-Mails on a message Forum that has just "Lost" most of its' posts?

Best Regards,

No, I find it ironic that the regime keeps getting away with the dog-ate-my-homework excuse while obsessively collecting every phantom trace of private discourse. Even the wayback machine can't help there.

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We really need to get to the bottom of all these problems.

The sooner the better, but as long as it needs to take.

How? No one in a position to help is willing to stick their neck out.

Holy shit! Is there a federal law that requires RRMB preserve such messages, and that they remain available in perpetuity? And did RRMB have a virtually unlimited budget and staff dedicated to assuring that law was followed? And did somebody at RRMB use OUR GD money to bring in a Geek Squad-type outside tech goof to literally wipe the drives?

Really, Iveatch, if you want to compare the communications between the highest offices in the United States of America in the course of initiating a war that to date has thus far led to the death of 4077 American soldiers and untold hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, not to even detail specifics of the two trillion dollars this fiasco is projected to cost... well, you certainly do put a much greater stock in the value of your posts and Scotty's than I do in my own, or anyone else's here.

There is a huge difference between "losing" emails that are required by law to be preserved by the US Government and what happened with this site. The data from the RRMB has not been lost, AAR probably has backups of it and probably still has the DB intact on their server. I have several servers, all of them have some sort of RAID configuration and every single one of them backup nightly to another server off-site as an extra preventative caution.

Do you actually mean to suggest that it's alright for the US Government to treat critical data with such lax standards as to not perform redundant backup and that RRMB should be held to a higher standard?

Trust me, AAR still has the database unless their server administrator and/or administrative team and/or webmaster do not keep records of everything and if there is one thing in the technology age that gets cheaper by the minute, it's storage space. Imagine if Randi Rhodes were to sue AAR for the database, they'd be in big trouble if they could not produce it. Then again, they're not the brightest over there so they may have deleted it. I personally keep backups of backups for almost a year before purging them and backups are kept on an ongoing basis so they're never purged unless a client discontinues service with me in which case I keep their backups for a period of 90 days.