Maybe We’ll Learn How All the CIA Leak Cover-Up Emails Disappeared?
Since some folks are ruining a perfectly good politics-free Trash thread by talking shop, I feel obliged to weigh in with politics. So I’ll point to this report that the Administration may finally be willing to explain how all of OVP’s emails from the time period when Dick Cheney and Scooter Libby were arranging a cover-up of the Plame outing disappeared–poof!!!–from the White House servers. (h/t RB)
The years-long legal battle over millions of missing White House emails from George W. Bush’s presidency may finally be drawing to a close. “We are very close to a final settlement,” Anne Weismann, chief counsel for the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), tells Mother Jones. “We have been in negotiations with [the White House] for months, and I think they really want out from under all this.”
CREW and another nonprofit, the National Security Archive, first sued the Bush administration in September of 2007, hoping to force the White House to recover missing emails and implement an effective archiving system that would prevent important presidential records from being lost or misplaced in the future. But the litigation has been on hold since March 2009, when the Obama administration and the plaintiffs jointly agreed to pursue a settlement.
Details of the agreement are still being finalized, but Weismann says CREW expects to prevail in the three areas that are most important to her organization: “restoration of missing emails, assurances going forward that the White House has an appropriate and effective electronic record-keeping system, and information about what happened.”
That last one–“information about what happened”–might be very informative indeed, if we get a straight story that explains not only where the OVP emails went but why someone was searching for the Hadley-Rove email the night after Rove turned over his version of said email.
But I’m not holding my breath.
O/T
Since I have been the skunk at the picnic more than once here,may I offer this scentsation?:
Sun Dec-13-09 12:47 AM
Original message
Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Source: Guardian UK
Drug money saved banks in global crisis, claims UN advisor
Drugs and crime chief says $352bn in criminal proceeds was effectively laundered by financial institutions
Rajeev Syal
The Observer, Sunday 13 December 20
Drugs money worth billions of dollars kept the financial system afloat at the height of the global crisis, the United Nations’ drugs and crime tsar has told the Observer.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were “the only liquid investment capital” available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result.
This will raise questions about crime’s influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations. Speaking from his office in Vienna, Costa said evidence that illegal money was being absorbed into the financial system was first drawn to his attention by intelligence agencies and prosecutors around 18 months ago. “In many instances, the money from drugs was the only liquid investment capital. In the second half of 2008, liquidity was the banking system’s main problem and hence liquid capital became an important factor,” he said.
Some of the evidence put before his office indicated that gang money was used to save some banks from collapse when lending seized up, he said.
Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2009/dec/13/drug-money…
Golly, I wonder what “collateral” was required? Who’s holding all the chits?
Bob in AZ
I saw this report earlier.
The devil is in the details, not to criticize the organizations that stepped up and did what our elected officials should have done.
The content of the missing emails (missing from the non governmental servers as well) if exposed in a timely fashion (prior to expiration of statutes of limitations) might have answered some questions.
If CREW gets “…information about what happened.”; will it be persons unknown (or persons redacted), or will the names of the person(s) responsible for causing what happened be revealed.
It would be a unexpected turn of events to see this suit settled and CREW
obtain what it expects. Still expecting a hidden trap door to suddenly..
I left out the other plaintiff in this action, National Security Archive.
Doing the work that our elected officials should have done.
Meh, they will get hosed on anything critical and call it a victory anyway.
Here’s what we are likely to get in the best case scenario:
1. A cogent explanation of all the flaws in the EOP email retention system that make it impossible to tell what really happened with respect to Libby’s emails from the first weekend in October 2003.
2. A cogent explanation of why the email searchs done for the Plame leak investigation didn’t turn up relevant emails.
3. A re-release of all the previous information, but in electronic plain text format (Hey CREW, please, please ask for this).
What we won’t ever know, unless Libby talks, is how and why he deleted his email from that weekend. I’m pretty convinced he did, but there’s no way to prove it.
Should we also get the laundry list of ways the current White House’s telecomms system corrects the Bush systems many, possibly intended and outsourced faults, including a statement that it is in full compliance with applicable records retention laws and best practices?
Our elected congressional representatives should be ashamed of themselves that an outside organization is making this happen. Oversight, overlook — what’s the diff nowadays?