Those Missing E-Mails

THOSE MISSING E-MAILS
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Editorial staff]
[Commentary] With each passing week, the fate of e-mails generated by President Bush's staff grows more curious and troubling. While evidence has not emerged of a deliberate effort by the White House to destroy sensitive electronic messages, there's reason to be concerned about the potential loss of historical records. But according to the National Archives, missing e-mails are not unusual. The agency says that about 500,000 messages combined from the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush were determined by a court not to be complete. Some involved the Iran-Contra scandal. In Bill Clinton's administration, 2 million e-mails disappeared, which his Republican inquisitors thought might have contained information about former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky and a campaign finance investigation of Clinton vice president Al Gore. In reality, technical glitches with the Automated Records Management System (ARMS), created in 1994 in response to a 1989 lawsuit, caused the archival failure. The missing Reagan, Bush and Clinton e-mails and information were recovered from backup tapes. All this leads to our overriding concern: preservation of the historical record. Each missing e-mail is one less piece of the puzzle of how policies are made and decisions are reached. In an ideal world, the National Archives would have more than an advisory role in how records are handled during a president's term. An attempt to give it some authority could set up a fight between the legislative and executive branches. When it comes to preserving the nation's history, that's a battle worth waging.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/10/AR200802...
(requires registration)