CT Claim I haven't seen addressed: W199I-WF-213589

[Arkan_Wolfshade]

Has anybody confirmed, or debunked, the existence of an executive order related to the string "W199I-WF-213589" and telling the FBI to back off investigations? There are so many CT sites referring to it, I am having trouble finding debunking of it.


Executive Order W199I-WF-213589

Conspiracy theorists keep talking about a Presidential order named W199I-WF-213589 (or simply W199I) supposedly signed by George W. Bush in July 2001 - but looking for information, it appears to be widespread among conspiracy sites...but none of them can quote it. The best anybody provides is a "partial scan of documents released to the BBC", and a transcript to a BBC interview that references the documents...yet surely they must be online somewhere? Is this whole thing fictitious? Surely Executive Orders are somewhat recorded? http://www.gaianxaos.com/SpecialReports_files/199I-WF.htm and http://propagandamatrix.com/newsnight_greg_palast_report.html (BBC transcript) are the two closest things I can find to "reputable" sources Sherurcij (talk) (Terrorist Wikiproject) 03:27, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

According to the official White House website, the only executive orders issued in July 2001 were ones about trade with Belarus and energy efficiency in government operations. The document number "W199I-WF-213589" at the websites you mention appears to be some kind of internal FBI case number, not an executive order number. -- Mwalcoff 05:51, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

You may be interested in this GIF file [60], also from propagandamatrix.com, which purports to be a copy of an FBI printout with that number. Of course, the "printout" is of the sort that anyone with a PC could churn out in about three minutes, so I certainly wouldn't give it much credibility, no matter what the conspiracy theorists are trying to claim it "proves". In any event, it most certainly is not an executive order. That fact alone should be enough to make any rational person question just how much conspiracy theorists care about accuracy. (As an aside, Mr. Palast is quite a character in his own right, to put it mildly.) --Aaron 06:04, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

Note that the GIF file mentioned above is also so low resolution that you can only make out parts of the heading, not any of the actual content. StuRat 12:09, 29 January 2006 (UTC)

You ain't gonna get this information. Executive orders are issued purely at the pleasure of the President, and he can attach to them any degree of security he likes; he can certainly claim executive privilege. If the President wanted to withhold the information, it would take a Supreme Court decision to wrest it from him. That's what happened in the case of Nixon tapes in 1974. The Watergate scandal article states, "This issue of access to the tapes went all the way to the Supreme Court. On July 24, 1974, in United States v. Nixon, the Court (which did not include the recused Justice Rehnquist) ruled unanimously that Nixon's claims of executive privilege over the tapes were void and they further ordered him to surrender them to Jaworski. On July 30 he complied with the order and released the subpoenaed tapes." --Halcatalyst 06:06, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reference_desk_archive/Humanities/January_2006#Executive_Order_W199I-WF-213589

[LashL]

All that I have seen about it is that the W199i is used in reference to an FBI case Id #199I-wf-213589 which was conducted from 2/23/1996 until 9/11/1996.

Supposedly, it had to do with investigating a bin Laden relative named Abdullah bin Laden, and said investigation was stopped on Sept. 11, 1996 (N.B. Of course, GWB was not president at that time). The number does not appear to be an executive order number at all, let alone one signed in 2001.


Not much help, I'm sure, but that's what I remember about it.

[ktesibios]

Executive orders are numbered consecutively; at present the numbering is still in the low 5 digits (in the 13,000s).

http://www.archives.gov/federal-register/executive-orders/disposition.html

There is such a thing as a secret E.O., but they fall into the regular numbering scheme.

Another thing to remember is that the purpose of an E.O. is to give guidance and instruction to the executive branch in fulfilling its duty to see that the laws be faithfully carried out. Pick an E.O at random and read it. It will cite the specific statutes under which authorization for the provisions of the E.O. are claimed. They don't give a President a means of pulling legislation out of his nethers, or to rule by decree.

The tinfoil-hat brigade is still circulating lists of E.O.'s which purportedly give the President the power to confiscate everything that isn't red hot or welded to the deck and ship us all to concentration camps in the 106,000 white boxcars with built-in shackles the government bought from Gunderson Steel back in the early '90s. The next time you run across one of these lists, look up the E.O.s- it generally turns out that most of them were either superseded or abolished and that they are mostly about the divvying up of bureaucratic turf, rather than rounding people up and putting them on those boxcars.

Nevertheless, these lists continue to circulate- in the world of conspiracism there's no such thing as an obsolete claim.

[Pardalis]

All I got to say is WTF?

[Panoply_Prefect]

I just came across this EO W1991 in a debate. As I understand it no one has actually located it?

Oh, and Hi btw, my first post.

Cheers,
SLOB

[Brainache]

I just came across this EO W1991 in a debate. As I understand it no one has actually located it?

Oh, and Hi btw, my first post.

Cheers,
SLOB

Oooh I know!!

It's not an executive order. Its a file number of um er something.
The presidential executive orders are somewhere in the 13000s or something.

See I've learned stuff here(sort of).

[MikeW]

LashL has it right. <shameless self promotion> http://www.911myths.com/html/back_off_bin_ladin.html </shameless self promotion>

The key being this is a 1996 FBI case number, not anything to do with Bush at all. The suggestion that it was otherwise came from a misleading piece from Greg Palast, where he quotes an unnamed source as saying the FBI was told to "back off", and quotes this closed case apparently as an example, but at no point explains that it happened in 1996.

This was taken up, Chinese whispers-style by Alex Jones, who then changed it to become an Executive Order that Bush signed telling the FBI to back off the bin Ladins, but that's just total fiction.