"Let me say it as simply as I can: Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this presidency."
Fast Forward 9 months:
Now it appears that with Obama's support and urging, Congress will add an amendment to a bill that will exempt pictures of the United States (under the Bush Administration) torturing prisoners and suspected terrorists from being released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has been one of the hallmarks of healthy democratic government because it forced governmental transparency and kept the government accountable for their actions. Now, a Democratic Congress, who under George W. Bush praised the FOIA, are set to render the Act null and void simply because their leader asked for it. Forget principles and any independence if you are a Democrat, they just subserviently bow down to the commands of the President.
Here is Glenn Greenwald on the subject:
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.
What made those detainee photographs so important from the start is that they depict brutal abuse well outside of the Abu Ghraib facility and thus reveal to Americans -- and the world -- that America's torture was not, as they've been constantly told, limited to rogue sadists at Abu Ghraib and the waterboarding of three bad guys. Instead, our torture regime was systematic, pervasive, brutal, fatal, and -- because it was the by-product of conscious policies set at the highest levels of government -- common across America's "War on Terror" detention regime. These photographs would have documented those vital facts; combated the false denials from torture apologists; fueled the momentum for accountability; and revealed, in graphic and unavoidable terms, what was truly done by America's government. But a Democrat-led Congress, at the urging of a Democratic President, is now taking
extraordinary steps -- including a new law which has no purpose other than to suppress evidence of America's war crimes -- to ensure that this evidence never
sees the light of day.
As a side-comment, isn't it sad that the ACLU is the one leading the charge on getting the photos released instead of the media? And they wonder why old-school media/journalism is on the brink of extinction. Maybe if they possessed courage, patriotism and journalistic integrity it would be a different story.
Finally, here is Adam Sewer writing about the hypocrisy of Sen. Joe Liberman and his "notion" of executive accountability and transparency:
The administration, perhaps sensing that they're not really on solid legal ground when it comes to arguing that the government should be able to hide evidence of its own wrongdoing under the rubric of national security, is getting a little cover from Congress. Yesterday, the conference summary of the current homeland security appropriations bill indicates that an amendment from Sen. Joe Lieberman that would exempt the photos from the FOIA Act has been adopted, which means that the government could legally withhold the pictures if the bill is passed. The same Sen. Lieberman, deeply concerned about the constitutionality of executive branch "czars," has inserted language into a bill allowing the government to conceal evidence of its own abuses.
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