Still No Records

Some time ago, I posted about a lawsuit filed against the Bush administration to prevent it making off with vast amounts of records from the most sensitive periods in its administration. As Mr. Bush's final days in office tick past, he remains determined to restrict access to his records. Apparently, entire days of email are missing. Vice President Cheney continues to argue that he has no responsibility to hand over records at all.

As the NYT points out in this editorial, little has changed from the filing of the original lawsuits, and the ease of producing digital records will mean that even following its own dubious reporting standards, the Bush administration will hand over 50 times more documents than Bill Clinton did. That means it will be years before the archive can make sense of it all, and further years before historians can determine what is there, and what is not.

Any administration needs a certain amount of latitude with information in order to govern effectively, but as I've said before, the idea that no one will ever know what our leaders did is fundamentally undemocratic. But then, who knows how much more these guys have to lose.