White House redactions on tanker lease deal report raise ire

[The Straight Story]

White House redactions on tanker lease deal report raise ire

By Megan Scully, CongressDaily
When White House officials took a pen to the Pentagon inspector general's latest report on the Air Force's ill-fated deal to lease a new fleet of aerial refueling tankers from Boeing, they were guided by an informal agreement reached last summer by Senate Republican leaders and President Bush's top legal adviser.

Leaders on the Senate Armed Services Committee, however, are not satisfied the administration stuck by that agreement -- in either its dealings with the committee or with the inspector general -- and was too liberal in its redactions of e-mails and other information pertaining to the contentious lease proposal.

The agreement, reviewed Wednesday by CongressDaily, was the product of a July 2004 meeting between Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., Armed Services Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., Armed Services Airland Subcommittee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., and then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, now the attorney general.

The agreement allows the administration to redact references to senior White House personnel and lawmakers in documents available to congressional staffers. In turn, members of Congress could review privately the names of any lawmakers identified in thousands of documents pertaining to the lease.


http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0605/060905cdam1.htm