Obama: Transparently Disappointing
The president has fallen far short of promises to establish “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”
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Why has the president turned away from transparency? Theories abound. One transparency advocate I spoke to in January blamed security hawks in Congress, Democrats and Republicans who “won’t let” Obama open up government. When I asked him why he thought Obama didn’t just buck the objections and do what he promised, the transparency advocate said it would be “politically risky.”
Thomas Drake has another theory. A former NSA official, Drake became a poster boy for the transparency movement in 2005 after exposing the NSA’s Trailblazer project, an overpriced data collection program that he felt was tantamount to domestic spying. In 2010 a grand jury indicted Drake under the odious Espionage Act of 1917 for giving information about Trailblazer to a reporter at The Baltimore Sun. The Obama administration’s prosecutors did everything they could to keep the Drake case quiet. Invoking the Classified Information Procedures Act, they asked U.S. District Judge Richard D. Bennett to prohibit Drake’s legal team from mentioning overclassification or whistleblowing, tried to limit cross-examination, and demanded that jurors be forbidden from reading the Sun’s Trailblazer stories.
In June 2011, after Drake said he would not “plea bargain with the truth,” federal prosecutors threw out all the charges save one: a single misdemeanor count of “exceeding his authorized access to government computers.” Drake took the deal and was sentenced to community service.
In the fall of 2011, I heard Drake speak after a screening of All the President’s Men at the American Film Institute in Silver Spring, Maryland. “If I hadn’t said something about the wrongdoing that I became aware of, then I would’ve been condoning the very activity I discovered and found out about,” Drake told the audience. “My responsibility as a senior executive in the national security community, and assigned to the National Security Agency, was to honor the oath, which is to support and defend the Constitution and make sure I faithfully executed the law of the land. That included all statutes; that included all regulations.”
After the event, I caught Drake in the hall-way to ask him about Obama’s failure to uphold his transparency promises. “Obama’s been co-opted by the national security community,” Drake said. “People hoped he would take them on, but he became enamored by all the secret stuff. He’s getting all these cool briefings. It goes to his head. I can send drones anywhere! It’s very powerful stuff. It becomes pathological.”
Tall, gaunt, and worried-looking, Drake added that “if this had happened in too many other countries, I would’ve been disappeared.” As it stands, he is doing his community service at the Library of Congress, perhaps the only silver lining in Obama’s war on transparency.
‘You’ll Notice That It Is an Empty Chair’
While many of Obama’s transparency failures concern national security, not all of them do. In October 2011 a panel of science journalists convened at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to discuss the transparency record of federal agencies. After introducing six science journalists, panel moderator Seth Borenstein, a writer for the Associated Press, introduced the representative from the Obama administration. “You’ll notice that it is an empty chair,” Borenstein said.
That last seat had been offered to three different federal agencies: the Department of Health and Human Services, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Each agency had declined, said Curtis Brainard, the science editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, “despite my best efforts, which came out to dozens of emails and phone calls.” After two months of “begging and pleading” with agency officials, Brainard made “a last-ditch effort to reach out to the White House itself, explaining the fact that their agencies and departments have declined this invitation, and why I believe this event is so important to addressing some of these issues in media relations.” The result of Brainard’s efforts could serve as an epitaph for Obama’s transparency record: “I never heard back from them.”
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tl;dr
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Too bad - there was a lot of substance here.
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And damned depressing substance too.
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Ayup
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Just pretend it's the comments section to AM Links. You can do it!
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Actually, it was surprisingly informative. And depressing. Very depressing.
Why is everything I read these days depressing? Does our world suck that much?
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He looks like black spock pushing up his eyebrow like that.
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But Spocks ears were way cooler than those dumbo ears of the Bamster. Also, Spock didn't have purple lips. Spock also had the Vulcan death grip. The Bamster only has a teleprompter and his side kick Opie.
So, Spock is way more cool than the Bamster.
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Dude, don't insult Tim Russ by comparing Obama to him.
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Transparency the Chicago way. You see sumpthin? I didn't see nuthin. That's what I thought. Carry on.
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Wait, a politician lied? Next thing you'll tell me there's gambling in this casino!
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Will he pick up his Nobel prize for physics himself, or will he be too busy healing the Jersey Shore and bringing back the Dodo?
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The promises of greater transparency should embrace full disclosure of college applications, letters of admission, transcripts and the like.
Given that Obama supports affirmative action, why the reluctance to release information that proves that he was a beneficiary of the same?
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Just pretend it's the comments section to AM Links. You can do it!
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oops.
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No, no double posts are totally par for the AM links.
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Let me preempt the TEAM BLUE cheerleaders ... *ahem*
But, but, but... CHENEY! BOOOOSH! HALLIBURTONOILMANMEETIGNZ!!1!!1
Thank you. please continue.
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Seth Borenstein, a writer for the Associated Press, introduced the representative from the Obama administration. “You’ll notice that it is an empty chair,” Borenstein said.
So that's where Clint Eastwood got the idea. And I thought he was being so original.
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According to Eastwood, it was a last-minute epiphany just before he started the talk.
Personally, I think both applications of the 'empty seat' were appropriate; an empty suit even more so. -
They're so transparent, you can't see what they're hiding.
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The important issue of transparency in government is such a high priority for the new administration.
www.hqew.net -
Yep transparent, just like that emperor and his fun new clothes
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As Obama said "Brawndo has what plants crave.. it has electrolytes"
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I'm glad you went to all the trouble to so carefully investigate and document all these cases of disappointment in Obama's "transparency". I didn't know about some of them. It seems as if the entire Gov 2.0 has been a flop, or at least its superficial successes have covered up these more serious problems.
What I wonder is whether this reticence is related to WikiLeaks? Is it a post-WikiLeaks contraction? Assanges stated goal as an anarchist was to get the liberal state to retract and behave unlike its nature, and become also confused without exchange of information as it retreated into silos, and then fail or at least become discredited. Did he succeed in his mission?
I think there are more ideological reasons for what happened with Obama and some of his Administration people and friends who have a past in cadre organizations on the left. I think they have no intention of ever becoming opening because I think they are devoted to bureaucratic centralism or "democratic centralism" and perhaps not even that.
It's also important to note the Big Data related to the elections which Obama For America is sitting on and which may never find its way to the DNC for the next candidate.
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