Archives for January 2017

As President Barack Obama soared into office eight years ago, he promised, on his first day in the White House, to launch “a new era of open government.”

“The Government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears,” Obama said in a Jan. 21, 2009 memorandum.

Obama was urging the attorney general to issue new guidelines protecting The Freedom of Information Act. “In the face of doubt,” Obama proclaimed, “openness prevails.”

If one truly believes in American values, then one must also agree that Whistleblowers must be liberated, and freed immediately from earthly bondage, whether it be prison, home incarceration, vindictive prosecution/persecution by politically motivated government officials, disenfranchisement from voting or working, and all around pariah status in the United States, and in the rest of the world.

Not every individual who leaks or pilfers confidential information to reveal it to third parties can be considered a whistleblower, however.

By James Risen

WASHINGTON — If Donald J. Trump decides as president to throw a whistle-blower in jail for trying to talk to a reporter, or gets the F.B.I. to spy on a journalist, he will have one man to thank for bequeathing him such expansive power: Barack Obama.

Mr. Trump made his animus toward the news media clear during the presidential campaign, often expressing his disgust with coverage through Twitter or in diatribes at rallies. So if his campaign is any guide, Mr. Trump seems likely to enthusiastically embrace the aggressive crackdown on journalists and whistle-blowers that is an important yet little understood component of Mr. Obama’s presidential legacy.

The Infrastructure and People behind Drone Killings
Cian Westmoreland