Though Obama thus far does not seem as bellicose as did George W. Bush, there are growing signs that his administration will continue the Washington tradition of covering up the crimes of his predecessors.
The Obama administration is repeating the same arguments used by the Bush White House to justify whitewashing the illegal deletion or coverup of millions of White House emails.
The Obama administration has not released the key secret Bush administration legal documents on the torture and warrantless wiretapping scandals.
Obama’s legal wiz kids are invoking the same state secrets claims to justify covering up government crimes that the Bush team used ad nauseam.
In his first days in office, Obama made positive sounds with his executive orders on the Freedom of Information Act and greater transparency throughout the federal government.
But lofty rhetoric and executive orders are no substitute for revealing the hard facts on government crimes.
As GHW Bush asserted at the start of his Administration after the sordid Iran Contra Affair, it is not good policy to “Criminalize” the policy moves of a Presidential Administration. In effect, the President, as President Richard Nixon averred, is the Law and he has a “Get out of Jail Free Card”. That the new President appears to be carrying this hair-brained policy forward is not really surprising because we are wed to a Military Industrial Complex that is , at basis , against the principles of the Founders who wrote the Constitution and so one can assume a Get Out of Jail Card Free is going to get increasing use as this degenerative march to Military Suicide continues apace. The only real change we’ll likely see is the increasing lethality and chaos of International Affairs concurrent with a steady erosion of Civil Liberties. No mystery here, move along…..
I guess they were right when they said that Obama is a man of the future. There is little doubt in my mind that in the near future he will be committing crimes of his own (for all I know he may already have a few under his belt).