This political cartoon was my artifact for the final yesterday. I related it to many things like the Lessig Lecture on President Bush being pathological, the memory radiolab we listened to, Ellsberg and the pentagon papers, and more recent happenings like Guantanamo Bay and the Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame incident.
For those who don't know, Plame was a CIA operative who Libby disclosed in 2003. In this political cartoon, you see Bush and a CIA agent putting tapes into the fire. These tapes are documentation from the past seven years of Bush being in office.
I am writing this blog because today on the front page of the Chicago Tribune, a story caught my eye that was titled White House E-mails Missing. While reading the article, I realized that this cartoon is based off of what has been happening in the White House since 2003. E-mails are not being properly preserved like a law that President Clinton enacted in March 2000. The administration's emailing system has been under survaillence for quite some time now, and before 2003, all of the archieving tapes were recycled.
When I opened up the paper to read more of the article, Valerie Plame's picture was right next to the article. It is ironic that after such a long time of the tapes being hidden, this article comes out the day after our final.
Robert Dallek, a presidential historian is quoted in the article, saying "Given how secretive this administration has been, it of course fans the flames and suspicions about what has been destroyed here." He wants to get an investigation going to see what is actually going on. Could this be a scandal as big as Watergate?
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