Our colleague Weston Kosova at The Gaggle has some choice words to say about the Obama administration's stonewalling on the release of documents showing how big telecom firms lobbied Congress (and the Bush White House) for immunity for their role in warrantless wiretapping. We wonder: could this have anything to do with the fact that candidate Obama flipped his position during the campaign and backed the telecom industry's immunity campaign?
Remember when Barack Obama was running for president and he promised that, unlike secrecy-obsessed George Bush and Dick Cheney, he would insist on a “transparent” administration that wouldn’t hide information from the American people unless it was absolutely necessary? That would have been nice. But of course it turns out it was just talk. Obama has only been president for 10 months and already he is just as casual as his predecessors about demanding secrecy for things that have no good reason to be kept secret at all. Why, for instance, is the Obama White House fighting so hard to prevent the release of documents about who lobbied Congress to give immunity to the telephone companies that cooperated with Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program?
Read the rest of Kosova's post here.
Here's the NEWSWEEK story by Declassified's Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff that broke the telecom's lobbying campaign.
Here's our follow up on how the Bush administration was stonewalling on releasing documents about the lobbying campaign—the same position that the Obama administration now appears to be backing, despite a federal judge's order to turn over the material.
And here's a story on Obama's campaign flip-flop on telecom immunity--and the anger it sparked from some his supporters.
