Thursday, November 15, 2012

Obama: Transparently Disappointing

The president has fallen far short of promises to establish “an unprecedented level of openness in government.”

On March 28, 2011, a group of leading transparency advocates passed through the security checkpoints along the perimeter of the White House compound to present Barack Obama with an award for his efforts to open up government. The president who took office promising “an unprecedented level of openness in government” was getting his due for introducing sunlight into the murky workings of state. Supposedly. 

Some of the participating activists were thrilled. “In the 28 years that I’ve advocated for open government...this is the first time I’ve heard of such a meeting,” wrote Gary Bass, director of OMB Watch, on the transparency group’s website. “Rather than it being a photo op,” wrote Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, “it was everything we hoped.”
They were right about one thing: It wasn’t a photo op. The meeting was closed to the media, off limits even to a promised pool photographer and reporter. The ceremony did not appear on Obama’s public schedule, and the White House did not release a transcript of the conversation. “Shh!” read the headline in Politico. “Obama Gets Anti-Secrecy Award.”
The activists at the meeting, including Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, Patrice McDermott of OpenTheGovernment.org, and Lucy Dalglish of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, stood by the award. But others used the occasion to assess the gap between candidate Obama’s transparency pledges (including one he signed with the Reason Foundation, the nonprofit organization that publishes this magazine) and President Obama’s transparency record. Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, Washington’s premier open-government group, told The Hill the award was “foolishly conceived” given Obama’s “tremendously disappointing” actions in office. Steve Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, told Politico, “I don’t feel moved today to say ‘Thank you, Mr. President.’ ”

 Read more: http://reason.com/archives/2012/11/14/obama-transparently-disappointing

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