Obama’s Anti-Transparency Crusade
Glenn Greenwald, in this searing article in Salon, describes how President Obama, working with a Democrat-controlled Congress, has waged war against the very transparency he promised during the campaign to bring into government:
A Historian’s Account of Democrats and Bush-era War Crimes
THURSDAY OCT. 8, 2009 13:09 EDTThe American Propsect‘s Adam Serwer notes that, yesterday, Sen. Joe Lieberman successfully inserted into the Homeland Security appropriations bill an amendment — supported by the Obama White House — to provide an exemption from the Freedom of Information Act’s mandates by authorizing the Defense Secretary to suppress long-concealed photographs of detainee abuse. Two courts had ruled — unanimously — that the American people have the right to see these photographs under FOIA, a 40-year-old law championed by the Democrats in the LBJ era and long considered a crowning jewel in their legislative achievements. But this Lieberman amendment, which is now likely to pass, undermines all of that and — as EBay founder Pierre Omidyar put it today — its central purpose is to “legalize suppression” of evidence of American war crimes.
Read full article here.