Today’s Must Read

Oversight, the Bush administration way.

The White House’s Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board has been an open joke ever since it was launched as a result of a recommendation from the 9/11 Commission’s 2004 report. The panel was supposed to keep a sharp eye on the government’s possible infringement on citizens’ civil liberties. But it turns out that it’s a bigger joke than people even realized.

Yesterday, one of the board’s five handpicked members, Lanny Davis, resigned. Davis, a former Clinton White House official, left over “administration attempts to control the panel’s agenda and edit its public statements.”

Now, we already knew that the board had virtually no power or independence. Here’s how Justin described it last November:

The board can’t demand documents; it can’t force bureaucrats who actually implement the program — and who might be aware of malfeasance — to speak with them under oath. Instead, its sole and complete authority is to take the administration at its word.

But apparently even this powerless watchdog was too much of a threat to the White House. According to The Washington Post, the White House “made more than 200 revisions” to the board’s annual report to Congress this April, some of them deletions of entire passages.

Like, for instance:

Davis charged that the White House sought to remove an extensive discussion of recent findings by the Justice Department’s inspector general of FBI abuses in the uses of so-called “national security letters” to obtain personal data on U.S. citizens without a court order. He also charged that the White House counsel’s office wanted to strike language stating that the panel planned to investigate complaints from civil liberties groups that the Justice Department had improperly used a “material witness statute” to lock up terror suspects for lengthy periods of time without charging them with any crimes.

And the reason for striking the passage about the “material witness statute”?

Chairman Carol E. Dinkins told board members March 29 that the White House counsel’s office had asked to delete the passage, fearing the revelation might inflame the ongoing political controversy over the administration’s dismissal of nine U.S. attorneys.

OK, so the White House deleted two passages. The first was a discussion of an already completed investigation, the results of which had already been made public. Presumably the White House didn’t want to reopen old wounds. The second was spiked because it was inconvenient from a PR perspective. You get the picture.

But it gets even better. Here’s the White House’s unapologetic response when asked why it had been tying the hands of its internal watchdog:

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino called the editing “standard operating procedure,” saying it was appropriate because the board remains legally under the supervision of the Executive Office of the President.

“When you have a formal document going to Congress from any part of the Executive Office of the President, it stands to reason that it must be formally reviewed before it is released,” Perino said Monday evening.

I think what Perino’s describing is more accurately described as “undersight.”