One of my students, Farhan Daredia, now edits a legal news site called Main Justice with former WSJ/Salon reporter Mary Jacoby -- where he posted some interesting analysis about how Dick Cheney got screwed by Bush-Cheney anti-transparency policies:
The CIA on Thursday denied former Vice President Dick Cheney’s March 31 request to the National Archives and Records Administration for classified intelligence documents regarding the effectiveness and necessity of torture. Why? Because of an executive order made by President George W. Bush intended to complicate and overrule the Mandatory Declassification Review process. Oops.
In 1995, President Bill Clinton filed Executive Order 12958, an order intended to make the government more transparent...But Clinton was overruled by Executive Order 13292, signed by President George W. Bush on March 25, 2003. It amended the Clinton executive order, giving the Vice President essentially the same authority as the President in the classification process, and adding a number of exemptions to reject declassification requests:
What’s the conflicting litigation holding Cheney up? According to the letter rejecting Cheney’s request:
we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency).
...So, long story short, the documents Cheney wants declassified cannot be declassified because there is already a FOIA request to have the documents declassified, now that sounds like good old-fashioned Bush administration logic!
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