Crooks

Just how much will the public tolerate?

http://newstandardnews.net/content/index.cfm/items/3261

Thickening the haze of secrecy surrounding the executive branch, the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney has declared itself exempt from a yearly requirement to report how it uses its power to classify secret information.

In its 2005 report to the president released last month, the Information Security Oversight Office (ISOO), a branch of the National Archives, provides a quantitative overview of hundreds of thousands of pages of classified and declassified documents. But the vice president.s input consists of a single footnote explaining that his office failed to meet its reporting requirements for the third year in a row.

...

In 2003 . around the time Cheney's office stopped reporting to the ISOO, the Bush administration affirmed and expanded the vice president.s classification powers through a revision of Executive Order 12958, the same order mandating the yearly ISOO assessment. The amended order explicitly granted the vice president unprecedented authority to classify information "in the performance of executive duties," including the ability to label information "secret" and "top secret" on par with the heads of federal agencies and the president himself.