Document Review Quotes
Thomas Jefferson thought that Franklin should write the first draft of the Declaration of Independence:
The response to the newspaper was required by law to be made promptly to the Journal’s Freedom of Information Act Letter Request. The failure to find the documents was not that unusual. However the legal request was properly made by the newspaper almost 15 years earlier. The original letter was send in October 1989. It took the CIA 15 years to say that they had not found any relevant documents. Incredibly enough this was not the oldest outstanding pending Freedom of Information Request. One had been submitted to the FBI in 1987 that had not then been responded to yet.
The things that makes this quotation historically important is how fast Cixi was adopting modern technology as a tool to manage the government and how she was managing day to day the significant international negotiations taking place on the other side of the earth. While in most areas Chinese bureaucracy was notorious for obstructionism and delay, Cixi maintained direct and almost real time control of the parts of the government that she felt most important. She resembled Abraham Lincoln in the sense that they both found innovative ways to use new technology to enable them to better and more directly manage and control the government.
The issue of when a government report is a report and who in the executive branch controls it has long been a contentious one. In an early dispute, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams suggested to the President that a statement he was about to make conflicted with one of Adams' reports:
