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Obama's secrecy fixation causing Sunshine Week implosion
Even the most loyal establishment Democrats are now harshly denouncing the president for his war on transparency
Meanwhile, Politico this morning reports on an acrimonious meeting between Obama and various Democratic senators in which they accused Obama of adopting the secrecy obsession of the Bush administration. Apparently, the charge was led by Jay Rockefeller, one of the Senate's most faithful advocates of the National Security State and the rampant secrecy behind which it operates; Obama's secrecy, evidently, is too much even for him:
"Two Obama administration officials, who asked not to be named, confirmed Rockefeller raised the drone oversight issue with the president at the session. . . . While Obama defended his handling of the issue, he told his former Senate colleagues he understood their concerns about being left out of the loop on such sensitive decisions, senators said. The president noted that he would have 'probably objected' over the White House's handling of this issue if he were still a senator, they said. But, according to the sources, he noted his viewpoint changed now that he occupies the Oval Office — not a room in a Senate office building. . . .
"During a Senate Select Committee on Intelligence hearing Tuesday just before the meeting with Obama, the senior senator from West Virginia railed against the administration's secrecy and publicly charged that it amounted to a return to the Bush approach. . . . 'It's a terrible situation,' a clearly irritated Rockefeller said during the annual hearing focusing on global threats to the US. . . . Rockefeller also charged that after Brennan was confirmed, the administration clammed up again and 'went directly back to the way they were from 2001-2 to 2007'. As for the legal memos shared after two years of requests, Rockefeller said there was 'nothing in them which is a threat to anybody.'
To justify his conduct, Obama "tried to assure his former colleagues that his administration is more open to oversight than that of President George W. Bush", saying: "This is not Dick Cheney we're talking about here." This excuse Obama used - I used to object to these things when I was a Senator but see it differently now that I'm president - is one that is frequently heard from his followers, but more important, is what Bush supporters always said would happen once a Democrat became president: that, with the secret information you get in the Oval Office and the need to Keep Us Safe™, a Democratic president would realize that Bush and Cheney were right all along about many of the policies which Democrats spent eight years so harshly denouncing. Given that Obama himself is now expressly saying this ("he noted his viewpoint changed now that he occupies the Oval Office"
, doesn't he and his party - as I've asked many times before - owe a heartfelt and sincere public apology to Bush and Cheney for bashing them so harshly for policies which Obama now not only adopts but has come to explicitly defend?
Then we come to this morning's New York Times Op-Ed by the always-great Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler and Floyd Abrams, the self-proclaimed First Amendment champion who represented the New York Times in fighting off the Nixon administration's attempts to prevent publication of the Pentagon Papers leaked by Daniel Ellsberg. While Benkler has been a vocal defender of WikiLeaks and Bradley Manning, Abrams has been a critic of both. Nonetheless, those two united to warn the nation of the grave dangers posed to whistleblowing and a free press from the wildly excessive prosecution of Manning:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/mar/14/obama-transparency-podesta-sunshine-week
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