Late last week, the White House, in response to a lawsuit from Judicial Watch (a conservative “watchdog” group), released hundreds of documents relating to Bill Clinton’s controversial end-of-term pardons. Much to Judicial Watch’s chagrin, the Bush White House blacked out most of the information.
The only items not deleted from the material are the names of the person who wrote the document and the person it was sent to.
The government accountability group Judicial Watch said Friday that it received the Justice Department documents following a court battle that featured a Republican administration fighting to keep secret documents generated by its Democratic predecessor.
The Bush White House has argued that releasing pardon-related documents would have a chilling effect on internal discussions leading up to presidential action on such requests.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton called it an instance of the Bush administration covering up a Clinton administration scandal.
Let me get this straight. The new Judicial Watch line is to argue that the Bush White House is trying to shield Bill Clinton from scandal. It’s a massive cover-up orchestrated by Karl Rove & Co. to protect their predecessor, whom they hate, from embarrassment.
In fact, in his statement, Fitton said it “boggles the mind that the Bush Administration would go to such unprecedented lengths to cover up a Clinton Administration scandal.” Actually, it boggles the mind Fitton would repeat such a hard-to-believe scenario in print.
What Fitton seems to fundamentally misunderstand is the Bush White House’s penchant for secrecy in all matters, whether they relate to Clinton or not. As the Federation of American Scientists’ Steven Aftergood explained:
The government does a remarkable job of counting the number of national security secrets it generates each year. Since President George W. Bush entered office, the pace of classification activity has increased by 75 percent, said William Leonard in March 2 congressional testimony. His Information Security Oversight Office oversees the classification system and recorded a rise from 9 million classification actions in fiscal year 2001 to 16 million in fiscal year 2004.
Yet an even more aggressive form of government information control has gone unenumerated and often unrecognized in the Bush era, as government agencies have restricted access to unclassified information in libraries, archives, Web sites, and official databases. Once freely available, a growing number of these sources are now barred to the public as “sensitive but unclassified” or “for official use only.” Less of a goal-directed policy than a bureaucratic reflex, the widespread clampdown on formerly public information reflects a largely inarticulate concern about “security.” It also accords neatly with the Bush administration’s preference for unchecked executive authority.
This gang is still keeping presidential papers from Nixon and LBJ secret for goodness sakes. If Judicial Watch is under the impression that the Bush White House is anxious to cooperate with Clinton is some kind of cover-up, it’s scarily unobservant about Bush’s fondness for keeping nearly everything under wraps.