Obama's Claim of "Transparent" Government

In 2008 Barack Obama promised so many wonderful things he would do if elected. It is 2.5 years later and he has done precious little of what he promised.

Here's a post by Glenn Greenwald in Salon magazine that highlights Obama's failure at "transparency":

Ali Soufan is a long-time FBI agent and interrogator who was at the center of the U.S. government's counter-terrorism activities from 1997 through 2005, and became an outspoken critic of the government's torture program. He has written a book exposing the abuses of the CIA's interrogation program as well as pervasive ineptitude and corruption in the War on Terror. He is, however, encountering a significant problem: the CIA is barring the publication of vast amounts of information in his book including, as Scott Shane details in The New York Times today, many facts that are not remotely secret and others that have been publicly available for years, including ones featured in the 9/11 Report and even in Soufan's own public Congressional testimony.

Shane notes that the government's censorship effort "amounts to a fight over who gets to write the history of the Sept. 11 attacks and their aftermath," particularly given the imminent publication of a book by CIA agent Jose Rodriguez -- who destroyed the videotapes of CIA interrogations in violation of multiple court orders and subpoenas only to be protected by the Obama DOJ -- that touts the benefits of the CIA's "tough" actions, propagandistically entitled: "Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives." Most striking about this event is the CIA's defense of its censorship of information from Soufan's book even though it has long been publicly reported and documented:

A spokeswoman for the C.I.A., Jennifer Youngblood, said . . . ."Just because something is in the public domain doesn't mean it's been officially released or declassified by the U.S. government."

...

This is a perfect symbol of the Obama administration: claims of secrecy are used to censor a vital critic of torture and other CIA abuses (Soufan) and to prosecute an NSA whistleblower who exposed substantial corruption and criminality (Drake), while protecting from all consequences the official who illegally destroyed video evidence of the CIA's torture program (Rodriguez) and then help ensure that his torture-hailing propaganda book becomes the defining narrative of those events. As usual, the real high-level criminals prosper while those who expose their criminality are the only ones punished.

Just marvel at the Kafkaesque, authoritarian mentality that produces responses like that: someone can be censored, or even prosecuted and imprisoned, for discussing "classified" information that has long been documented in the public domain. But as absurd as it is, this deceitful scheme -- suppressing embarrassing information or evidence of illegality by claiming that even public information is "classified" -- is standard government practice for punishing whistleblowers and other critics and shielding high-level lawbreakers.

The Obama DOJ has continuously claimed that victims of the U.S. rendition, torture and eavesdropping programs cannot have their claims litigated in court because what was done to them are "state secrets" -- even when what was done to them has long been publicly known and even formally, publicly investigated and litigated in open court in other countries. Identically, the Obama DOJ just tried (and failed) to prosecute NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake for "espionage" for "leaking," among other things, documents that do not even remotely contain properly classified information, leading to a formal complaint by a long-time NSA official demanding that the officials who improperly classified those documents themselves be punished.

Go read the original to get the whole article and the embedded links.

The treatment of Ali Soufan is sleazy and criminal. So much for "constitutional lawyer" Obama and his promises about transparency. This demonstrates that Obama has no respect for the law or for democracy. He is just another "politician" like Bush and the rest of the Republicans and a majority of the Democrats. They give lip service to democracy, but ultimately they don't believe in government "of the people. by the people, and for the people". They believe in government of the bureaucracy, by the office-holders, and for the vested interests.