Congressional leaders who are investigating the refusal of Vice President Cheney to comply with executive branch procedures for oversight of classification and declassification activity yesterday asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales (pdf) to account for his sluggish handling of the issue.
Last January, J. William Leonard, the director of the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), asked the Attorney General to determine whether the Office of the Vice President is subject to reporting requirements like other executive branch agencies, or not.
A reply is not optional. The executive order states clearly that “The Attorney General, upon request…, shall render an interpretation of this order with respect to any question arising in the course of its administration” (sec. 6.2b).
Yet no such reply has been forthcoming.
“Due to conflicting statements from your department, the status of your review of this matter is unclear,” wrote Reps. Henry Waxman, John Conyers Jr., and William Lacy Clay in their letter to the Attorney General. “More than six months (sic) have passed since Mr. Leonard’s letter to you, and the Information Security Oversight Office has received no response to its inquiry.”
The House letter asked Attorney General Gonzales to reply to a series of questions regarding his review of the Vice President’s status as a classifier.
The Congressmen cited a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel reply (pdf) to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists (first reported by Michael Isikoff in Newsweek this week) indicating that “no documents” had been generated in response to the ISOO inquiry.
On the Senate floor yesterday, Sen. Patrick Leahy extolled the FAS request as a example of the utility of the Freedom of Information Act.
“Just this week, we witnessed the great value of FOIA in shedding light on a controversial policy within the Office of the Vice President regarding the handling of classified information, with news reports that a FOIA request to the Justice Department first revealed that the Attorney General may have delayed a review into the legality of this troubling policy,” Sen. Leahy said in a June 27 statement on the status of the Open Government Act, which has been held up by opposition from a Republican Senator.
In a June 25 letter (pdf), Sen. Dick Durbin asked the Vice President to comply with the requirements of the Executive Order “so that we will not be compelled to take corrective action in our appropriations bill.”
The research community lacks strategies to incentivize collaboration on high-quality data acquisition and sharing. The government should fund collaborative roadmapping, certification, collection, and sharing of large, high-quality datasets in life science.
The potential of new nuclear power plants to meet energy demand, increase energy security, and revitalize local economies depends on new regulatory and operational approaches at the NRC.
In anticipation of future known and unknown health security threats, including new pandemics, biothreats, and climate-related health emergencies, our answers need to be much faster, cheaper, and less disruptive to other operations.
To unlock the full potential of artificial intelligence within the Department of Health and Human Services, an AI Corps should be established, embedding specialized AI experts within each of the department’s 10 agencies.