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In December 1989, one month after the fall of the Berlin Wall, President George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev met in Malta and, in the words of a Soviet spokesman, "buried the cold war at the bottom of the Mediterranean."

The Russian transcript of that momentous summit was published in Moscow in 1993. Fourteen years later American historians are still waiting for their own government to release a transcript.

Now lawmakers and scholars are hoping to pry open the gateway to such archival documents by lifting what they say has been a major obstacle to historical research: a directive issued by the current Bush White House in 2001 that has severely slowed or prevented the release of important presidential papers.

Essentially what's going on here is indicative of the past six years of this administration, where the Bush White House has consolidated power in the Executive Branch at the expense of a more open society:

President George W. Bush's 2001 executive order restricted the release of presidential records by giving sitting presidents the power to delay the release of papers indefinitely, while extending the control of former presidents, vice presidents and their families. It also changed the system from one that automatically released documents 30 days after a current or former president is notified to one that withholds papers until a president specifically permits their release.

Thomas S. Blanton, executive director of an independent research institute called the National Security Archive at George Washington University said he believes the Bush White House is primarily concerned with reversing what it sees as an erosion of presidential power after Watergate. "It has the added advantage of giving the incumbent a lot more control over history," he said.

"There was a fair, reasonable, orderly, clear, sensible and workable process for presidential records in place during the 1990s," which Mr. Bush's executive order "overturned and replaced with the opposite," Mr. Blanton recently testified. It "is not just wrong, it's stupid."

Not only is it stupid and wrong, it's anti-American! Don't we live in the USA, not the USSR?

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