A transparent administration
Stephen Hayes writes in the that “President Obama has made it clear that he believes in transparency only when it serves his own interest. His administration has used the Freedom of Information Act as a shield, and in important ways his agencies are operating under a strong presumption in favor of secrecy.” Weekly Standard:
We were told on February 2 that the [Gitmo prisoner] report would likely be posted on the Pentagon website that afternoon. When we followed up, we were instructed to check back “in a couple days.” We made several additional attempts to obtain the report, and, on March 6, the Pentagon officially went into denial mode: “My understanding is that several requests have been received by our OSD FOIA office and it is being processed for a decision concerning release. If you would like to submit a FOIA request as well, below is a link for your convenience.”
Thanks to an unauthorized leak, the New York Times was able to write about the report last Thursday. According to the Times: Two administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the report was being held up by Defense Department employees fearful of upsetting the White House, at a time when even Congressional Democrats have begun to show misgivings over Mr. Obama’s plan to close Guantánamo. The report shows that 74 detainees released from Guantánamo have returned to jihad — some 14 percent…
Second, the CIA denied a request from former Vice President Dick Cheney to declassify two CIA reports on the results of “enhanced interrogation” techniques. In his speech on Thursday, Obama said: “I reject the assertion that these are the most effective means of interrogation.” Why should we believe him? What evidence did he cite to support this claim? Where are the facts? What do the professionals believe? What did contemporaneous reports tell us? What information did they produce? We are left to wonder.
The CIA, with the direct approval of the Obama White House, used a technicality to keep the documents secret and hidden from public view. “In researching the information in question, we have discovered that it is currently the subject of pending FOIA litigation (Bloche v. Department of Defense, Amnesty International v. Central Intelligence Agency). Therefore, the document is excluded from Mandatory Declassification Review.”
But on April 16, Obama released four Bush-era Justice Department memos that could have been withheld for the same spurious reason. The difference? Obama believes those memos help his continuing case against the Bush administration’s war on terror policies. But the Cheney memos, if we are to believe the former vice president and others familiar with their contents, undermine Obama’s case. So FOIA is being manipulated to keep documents secret. Hardly a “presumption in favor of disclosure.”
It is not surprising that a politician says one thing and does another. What is surprising is that Obama makes these promises in such a grand, sweeping fashion and then, almost immediately, pays them no heed. Obama evidently thinks he can get away with this, and to date he has.
What will happen if the adoring media figure out that the number one fan of the Obama cult of personality is not them, but Obama himself? Will they report twaddle as twaddle? Maybe not, but perhaps a healthy skepticism could re-emerge in the press. The Obama administration has become transparent, but not in the way it intended.