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Obama Promises to Tell Truth "When Practical" |
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Written by Eric Francke
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Sunday, 21 June 2009 11:51 |
Obama Promises to Tell Truth "When Practical"
Much to the dismay of Obama supporters and fellow idealists, watchdog groups that specialize in Freedom of Information Act requests have discovered that the Obama White House very clever crafted its transparency pledge to allow it to hide any details it wants with full impunity, and is already exercising its options to hide day-to-day meetings and events. During Obama's campaign, he denounced the Bush administration for holding "secret energy meetings" with oil executives at the White House and promised a new era of transparency and openess. He instructed his Attorney General, Eric Holder, to distribute a memo reflecting this new policy, which was published with much fanfare. However, it contains a major lookhole which was not noticed by the press at the time. The Holder memo also said the new standard applies "if practicable" for cases involving "pending litigation."
When it was noticed that the Obama adminstration had secret meetings going on with coal executives, the White House logs were requested under the Freedom of Information Act to see who was attending, the administration rejected a FOIA request for the logs showing the identities of coal executives who had visited the White House. It is an exact duplication of the same policy that Obama criticized Bush for.
Dan Metcalfe, the former longtime chief of FOIA policy at the Justice Department, says the "when practical" passage and other "lawyerly hedges" means the Holder memo is now "astonishingly weaker" with regard to tranparency than even the Bush policies.
"Nothing has changed," says David -Sobel, a lawyer who litigates FOIA cases. "For a president who said he was going to bring unprecedented transparency to government, you would certainly expect more than the recycling of old Bush secrecy policies."
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