Letters to the Editor
sysprog
Published Letters: 1591 Editor's Choice: 2
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March 17, 2005 * Wolfowitz
[Read the article: The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://archive.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/03/17/wolfowitz_nomination
Mr. Magoo goes to the World Bank
The problem with Paul Wolfowitz isn't that he's an evil genius. It's that he has been consistently, astonishingly, unswervingly wrong about foreign policy for 30 years.
By Michael Lind
March 17, 2005
. . . Like the myopic cartoon character, Wolfowitz stumbles onward blindly and serenely, leaving wreckage and confusion behind. Critics are wrong to portray Wolfowitz as a malevolent genius. In fact, he's friendly, soft-spoken, well meaning and thoughtful. He would be the model of a scholar and a statesman but for one fact: He is completely inept. . .
. . . In military matters, this deputy secretary of defense displayed a level of ignorance without precedent in the history of civilian appointees to the Pentagon. (Even Robert McNamara's much-maligned "whiz kids" got some things right.) During the Clinton years Wolfowitz peddled the fantasy that American-supported rebels in Iraq could set up a base camp in one region and proceed to depose Saddam with minimal U.S. involvement. With the Bay of Pigs fiasco in mind, Gen. Anthony Zinni described this as the "Bay of Goats" strategy. . . .I dunno. I think Mister Magoo was way funnier.
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This Morning's Press Gaggle
[Read the article: The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2007/04/20070413-1.html
Office of the Press Secretary
April 13, 2007
Press Gaggle by Dana Perino and Dr. Ali Al-Dabbagh, Spokesman for the Government of Iraq
White House Conference Center Briefing Room
9:40 A.M. EDT
MS. PERINO : . . . there was a conversion sometime between 2002 and 2003 to convert people that were using Lotus Notes when we first arrived to Microsoft Outlook. And I know that the tech people worked to get us all transferred over. We had to save our Word documents and all to make sure that they weren't lost in that transition.I don't have a specific number for you. Again, I wouldn't rule out that there were a potential 5 million emails lost, but we'll see if we can get to you. If it was 5 million, I think that, again, out of 1,700 people using email every day, again, there was no intent to have lost them.
And in addition to that, I think one of the things that we're talking about here, when you're asking about double-delete and what were the motivations, that is separate and apart from what we're talking about here, which is no one -- no person that was actually doing official government work or talking to any other outside groups or to the media would have known that their files would have -- that some of the emails would have been inadvertently lost in a transition of conversion of a technical sort.
Q : Dana, can I follow up on that real quick. So this allegation about the 5 million missing emails refers only, as you understand it, to this 2002-2003 time period?
MS. PERINO : I don't know the time period. I'm saying 2002-2003 because that's when I worked at CEQ, and that's when I know that I got -- I moved from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Outlook . . .
Microsoft ate my homework.
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over/under * five million missing emails?
[Read the article: The Bush administration's terrible luck with finding documents]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I bet the over.
Remember, anybody who bet, last fall, on the FBI, and against CREW, lost their bet.