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Glenn Greenwald is not an easy guy to please. And he's very pleased indeed:
Barack Obama will have spent his first several days in office issuing a series of executive orders which, some quibbling and important caveats aside, meet or actually exceed even the most optimistic expectations of civil libertarians — everything from ordering the closing of Guantanamo to suspending military commissions to compelling CIA interrogators to adhere to the Army Field Manual to banning CIA "black sites" and, perhaps most encouragingly (in my view): severely restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents on the basis of secrecy, which has been the prime corrosive agent of the Bush era. As a result, establishment and right-wing figures who have been assuring everyone that Obama would scorn "the Left" (meaning: those who believe in Constitutional safeguards) and would continue most of Bush's "counter-Terrorism" policies are growing increasingly nervous about this flurry of unexpected activity.That bit on "severely restricting his own power and the power of former Presidents to withhold documents on the basis of secrecy" has been somewhat buried beneath the sexy torture bans (that's a weird sentence, huh?). But it's important! YObama has declared that only the president and ex-presidents can assert executive privilege to cover documents - the Bush administration had tried to open that authority to other executive-branch officials. And when the president does declare executive privilege, the attorney general and the White House counsel must review the constitutionality of the claim. In other words, executive privilege is now limited to presidents, a pain in the ass, and there are structures in place to encourage scrutiny and discourage secrecy. You can read the full executive order here. On a similar tip, Obama has thrilled journalists by releasing a memorandum directing agencies to "examine Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests with a bias toward release of the documents." Under the Bush administration, Ashcroft directed the government's agencies to to err in favor of non-disclosure -- a fairly remarkable statement, when you think about it. Government information was on a need to know basis: If you didn't work for the government, you didn't need to know. That just changed.But more reassuring than even these orders is the philosophy behind them. In his statement on transparency, Obama said that "Information maintained by the Federal Government is a national asset." That's in sharp contrast to the Bush administration's belief that information maintained by the Federal Government should be classified, hidden away, and then sealed -- or possibly shredded, or maybe burnt, or shot into outer space -- upon exit. What we're seeing here is the difference between an administration that does not expect to be engaging in an array of unethical and possibly criminal activities and an administration that knew full well that it was engaging in an array of unethical and possibly criminal activities. The Obama administration can insist on transparency because it believes it has nothing to fear from disclosure. And having set down these rules, they need to keep it that way.
