It's been obvious for years that Dick Cheney is not only the most powerful VP in history, he's also the most clandestine. His association with corporate power is well documented, and these links have served him well financially and politically. How well? He doesn't want us to know. He gives the country a black eye every day he remains in office. He is incompetent, arrogant, and indictable. His vast network of cronies reaching back to Nixon keep him firmly held in his position, even when the country is failing and hemorrhaging money and blood. I have no idea the hubris and greed that motivates him every day, but there can be little doubt that this man in no way serves the public interest.
This wingnut is actually saying that the order for the executive branch to reveal their documents does not apply to him because HE IS NOT PART OF THE EXECUTIVE BRANCH. HUH? He was previously recorded claiming protections of secret meetings because he WAS part of the executive. Do these people know they are being recorded, or is it just they love sound like jackasses.
Do you think he may be secretly fighting off terrorists, and this is why all his files need to be classified, and so important he won't even tell us how much classified info he keeps? We need to wake up. Information is the only way we will be able to overpower these slugs. They thrive in a country where American Idol is more important than American elections.
Am I buggin ya? Didn't mean to bug ya.
Read on:
Agency Is Target in Cheney Fight on Secrecy Data
By SCOTT SHANE
For four years, Vice President Dick Cheney has resisted routine oversight of his office’s handling of classified information, and when the National Archives unit that monitors classification in the executive branch objected, the vice president’s office suggested abolishing the oversight unit, according to documents released yesterday by a Democratic congressman.
The Information Security Oversight Office, a unit of the National Archives, appealed the issue to the Justice Department, which has not yet ruled on the matter.
Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California and chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, disclosed Mr. Cheney’s effort to shut down the oversight office. Mr. Waxman, who has had a leading role in the stepped-up efforts by Democrats to investigate the Bush administration, outlined the matter in an eight-page letter sent Thursday to the vice president and posted, along with other documentation, on the committee’s Web site.
Officials at the National Archives and the Justice Department confirmed the basic chronology of events cited in Mr. Waxman’s letter.
The letter said that after repeatedly refusing to comply with a routine annual request from the archives for data on his staff’s classification of internal documents, the vice president’s office in 2004 blocked an on-site inspection of records that other agencies of the executive branch regularly go through.
But the National Archives is an executive branch department headed by a presidential appointee, and it is assigned to collect the data on classified documents under a presidential executive order. Its Information Security Oversight Office is the archives division that oversees classification and declassification.
“I know the vice president wants to operate with unprecedented secrecy,” Mr. Waxman said in an interview. “But this is absurd. This order is designed to keep classified information safe. His argument is really that he’s not part of the executive branch, so he doesn’t have to comply.”
A spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, Megan McGinn, said, “We’re confident that we’re conducting the office properly under the law.” She declined to elaborate.
Other officials familiar with Mr. Cheney’s view said that he and his legal adviser, David S. Addington, did not believe that the executive order applied to the vice president’s office because it had a legislative as well as an executive status in the Constitution. Other White House offices, including the National Security Council, routinely comply with the oversight requirements, according to Mr. Waxman’s office and outside experts.
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