He may have screwed himself as well

Ambiguities in President Bush’s order establishing a new blue-ribbon commission to examine intelligence that led to the war in Iraq could prompt a legal fight over the public’s right of access to the panel’s meetings and records, lawyers familiar with the matter told The New York Sun. The attorneys said it is evident from the wording of the executive order that the White House hoped to exclude the commission from two federal open government laws, the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act. However, they said that White House lawyers may not have succeeded. ...Lawyers said the legal challenge the White House faces stemmed from Mr. Bush’s desire to establish the panel without authorization from Congress. “There are all sorts of perfectly understandable reasons that the president would want to bypass Congress in setting up a commission like that,” said David Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University. He noted that Congress might have tried to affect the makeup of the commission, the scope of its inquiry, or the handling of its report.

  NY Sun article

Okay, so he wanted that privilege for himself. And we've seen the commission he set up. I think it's being called the Whitewash commission, although I've been calling it the Pointless Commission, reserving Whitewash Commission for the one investigating the outing of Valerie Plame.

White House lawyers sought to solve the problem by writing two seemingly contradictory phrases into the executive order. At one point, the order declares that “the commission shall solely advise and assist the President.” However, the order goes on to state that the CIA and other intelligence agencies “shall utilize the commission and its resulting report.” One phrase is designed to exempt the commission from the public records law; the other is intended to exempt it from the open meeting law. Mr. Glitzenstein said that taken together the two statements don’t make much sense. “It certainly is a bit of a dilemma for them,” he said.“It can’t be both a presidential committee and a CIA committee,” he added. Mr. Glitzenstein said that he was on the losing side of a 1989 Supreme Court ruling that found that if an agency “utilizes” a committee, it controls it. He said of the new board, “The whole purpose was to create a committee to criticize the CIA, so they’re not going to be running that thing.” The attorney said he believes that the intelligence panel is subject to the Federal Advisory Committee Act. That could throw some of its meetings and its records open to the public, though much could still be closed or withheld on national security grounds. “They would have to do that on a case-by-case, meeting-by-meeting, document-by-document basis,” Mr. Glitzenstein said.

Okay. I'm out. I'm pretty sure it's going to be Pointless, no matter how many games they play with it.

Where are those whistleblowers?

Dead you think?