It seems like just yesterday that the White House posted
those wonderful words on whitehouse.gov:
“Government
should be transparent. Transparency promotes accountability and provides
information for citizens about what their Government is doing.” It was so
important to President Obama that it was written and posted by midnight the day
after his inauguration. Americans everywhere breathed a sigh of relief, but six
months later the transparency is still more of an ideal than reality.
Recent decisions by the White House have transparency proponents
deeply concerned that the Open Government Initiative is just empty rhetoric.
The latest in a series of setbacks for transparency has been the flap about
releasing the White House visitor logs. The organization Citizens for
Responsibility and Ethics in Washington has filed a Freedom of Information Act
request in order to find out which health
care industry executives have visited and lobbied the administration.
This is the second FOIA filing by CREW. The first request
came from them so they could obtain information about the coal executives who
have been making themselves at home in the White House. This request was
refused by the administration on the grounds that “disclosure of such records might
impinge on privileged presidential communications.”
If this sounds dangerously like Dick Cheney’s top secret
energy meetings with oil executives, that’s because it is. In fact, part of the
reason being given by the administration for not releasing visitor logs is
based on a small passage in Attorney General Eric Holder’s directive about FOIA
requests: namely, that they only apply “if practicable” for cases in
litigation. Since the Bush administration is still in litigation fighting
disclosure of their own visitor logs the new request by CREW can be turned
down.
According to Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, this policy of
not releasing White House visitor logs is under review. Last week during a
press briefing, after he was asked when the administration would be ready to
discuss the new plan he responded, “Having
been in meetings about this yesterday, we are working on the implementation of
this policy.” Since nothing has been forthcoming on the subject in a week
it is difficult not to suspect that they might be working on trying to have it
both ways.
Although CREW has been a major player in this fight to get
the visitor log information released they are not the only interested groups. MSNBC
requested White House visitor logs going back to January 20, but
have been denied. Martin Kaiser of the American Society of News Editors has
sent the Obama administration a letter “characterizing these denials as
acts that speak louder than any number of words, no matter how promising those
words were on paper.”
It is clear that groups and organizations dedicated to
making government more accountable to the people are not going to let this
issue sink into the background. Since President Obama has placed such an
emphasis on the issue of open government and has chided past administrations
for secrecy, he has clearly opened himself up for criticism. As CREW executive
director Melanie Sloan says, “if
you are going to criticize other people for secrecy, you better have an open
door. They talk about transparency more than they exhibit it.” It is time
for President Obama to walk the walk.
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