{"id":63095,"date":"2017-01-12T16:01:46","date_gmt":"2017-01-12T20:01:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=63095"},"modified":"2017-01-12T16:01:46","modified_gmt":"2017-01-12T20:01:46","slug":"trump-must-expose-obamas-abuses-of-power","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/?p=63095","title":{"rendered":"Trump Must Expose Obama\u2019s Abuses of Power"},"content":{"rendered":"

by<\/span> JAMES BOVARD
\n<\/a>CounterPunch<\/span>
\n<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Photo by www.GlynLowe.com | CC BY 2.0<\/p><\/div>\n

President-elect Donald Trump will face pervasive doubts about his legitimacy from the day he takes office.\u00a0 Trump\u2019s opponents will assert that he is governing in unprecedented and reckless ways.\u00a0\u00a0 The best response to that charge is to open the books to reveal how the Obama administration stretched its power far beyond what most Americans realized.<\/p>\n

Trump should follow the excellent precedent set by Barack Obama. In 2009, shortly after he took office, Obama released many of the secret Bush administration legal memos that explained why the president was supposedly entitled to order torture<\/a>, deploy troops in American towns and cities<\/a>, and ignore the Fourth Amendment\u2019s <\/a>prohibition on warrantless, unreasonable searches.\u00a0 Those revelations proved that the Bush administration was far more of an elective dictatorship than most people suspected.\u00a0 The disclosures signaled a new era and helped give Obama \u2013 at least temporarily \u2013 a reputation as a champion of civil liberties.<\/p>\n

Turnabout is fair play.\u00a0 Trump should quickly reveal the secret memos underlying Obama\u2019s \u201ctargeted killing\u201d drone assassination program<\/a>. Administration lawyers defeated lawsuits by the ACLU and New York Times<\/a> seeking disclosure of key legal papers on how the president became judge, jury, and executioner<\/a>. Obama sought to codify a presidential right to kill that would have mortified earlier generations of Americans.\u00a0 His program has been cloaked in secrecy and sanctimony from the start and most of the media have shown little curiosity and no outrage even when the feds admitted that innocent civilians were killed.\u00a0 A Trump administration could disclose the memos and legal rationales on the program without endangering anything other than the reputation of the soon-to-be former president and his policymakers.<\/p>\n

At the end of Obama\u2019s presidency, the United States is bombing seven foreign nations \u2013 but most of the actions have been cloaked in secrecy, often supplemented by deceit. Opening the files at the Pentagon, CIA, and State Department\u00a0 on U.S. intervention in the Syrian Civil War might explain why the U.S. plunged deeper into that morass.\u00a0 Pentagon-backed Syrian rebels have openly battled CIA-backed rebels<\/a>.\u00a0 The U.S. has armed and bankrolled Al Qaeda-linked groups <\/a>in Syria despite federal law prohibiting providing material support to terrorist groups. The U.S. dropped 12,192 bombs on Syria <\/a>last year \u2013 at a time when much of the Washington establishment and media was vilifying Obama for not intervening.\u00a0 We need the bureaucratic smoking guns on this policy.<\/p>\n

Likewise, revealing the paper trail behind the U.S. bombing of Libya in 2011 <\/a>\u2013 which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton labeled \u201csmart power at its best<\/a>\u201d \u2013 could preempt cheerleading for similar follies in the future. The purported rationales for this debacle have never passed the laugh test. Obama told Americans that \u201cthe democratic values that we stand for would be overrun\u201d if the U.S. did not join the French and British assault on the Libyan government. Obama asserted that one goal of the U.S. attack was \u201cthe transition to a legitimate government that is responsive to the Libyan people.\u201d\u00a0 But there was no sober reason to expect a happy ending from blasting that regime.\u00a0 What did the U.S. government know and when did it know it regarding the likely effects of\u00a0 toppling Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi?<\/p>\n

It is naive to assume that \u201ctruth will out\u201d from federal bureaucracies. It is vital for a Trump White House to compel disclosures because the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) has become largely a mirage in recent years.\u00a0 While Obama boasted of \u201cthe most transparent administration in history<\/a>,\u201d federal agencies slammed the door on routine requests \u2013 especially from the media. The Associated Press reported last year that the Obama administration \u201cset a record again for censoring government files or outright denying access to them<\/a>\u201d under FOIA.\u00a0 Federal agencies were also hit by a record number of lawsuits contesting FOIA <\/a>denials in 2015.<\/p>\n

If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, some people would have blamed the State Department\u2019s \u201cslow walking\u201d of FOIA requests for her emails (which she improperly kept on a private server). The FBI worked through 650,000 emails<\/a> from Anthony Weiner\u2019s computer in eight days but the State Department claimed it needed 75 years to fully answer a FOIA <\/a>request on Hillary Clinton\u2019s aides\u2019 emails.\u00a0 The State Department delayed for more than five years <\/a>answering a simple request from the Associated Press for the schedule and meetings attended by Ms. Clinton.\u00a0 A fFederal judge <\/a>and the agency\u2019s Inspector General<\/a> slammed its FOIA stonewalling.<\/p>\n

The Department of Homeland Security also has a dreadful FOIA record.\u00a0 That agency\u00a0 permitted political appointees to stifle FOIA responses in a process that \u201creeks of a Nixonian enemies list<\/a>,\u201d according to House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Cal.)\u00a0 Under Obama, the Transportation Security Administration, part of DHS, became far more intrusive and abusive. TSA launched \u201cenhanced patdowns\u201d that, as USA Today noted, \u201crequire screeners to touch passengers\u2019 breasts and genitals<\/a>.\u201d Millions of butts and boobs have been squeezed but no terrorists have been caught.\u00a0 TSA conceals almost all information over its groping with a \u201csensitive security information\u201d FOIA designation<\/a> that justifies perpetual secrecy. Congress has been utterly feckless at exposing the excuses behind TSA abuses.\u00a0 Ending \u00a0TSA coverups<\/a> and reining in the agency would create a bounty of early good will for\u00a0 the Trump administration. (TSA is foot-dragging on a FOIA request I filed in 2015 to see the agency\u2019s files on me.)<\/p>\n

Similar coverups and rascality permeated some areas of domestic policy.\u00a0 The Obama administration endlessly revised the Affordable Care Act \u2013 often based on closed-door calculations that could not have survived sunlight. For instance, a vanload of senior IRS financial managers <\/a>were summoned in 2014 to the Old Executive Office Building and only permitted a peak at a secret Office of Management and Budget memo explaining why the Obama administration was entitled to spend $4 billion on subsidies for consumer health insurance.\u00a0 As the New York Times <\/em>reported last year, the IRS officials \u201cwere told they could read it but could not take notes or make copies<\/a>. The O.M.B. officials left the room to allow their visitors a moment to absorb the document, and then returned to answer a few questions.\u201d\u00a0 The Obama administration acted as if its rationales for spending tax dollars deserved the same level of secrecy as a handy-dandy guide to building nuclear warheads. Federal judge Rosemary Collyer recently slammed the administration\u2019s Obamacare consumer subsidies as unconstitutional.<\/a><\/p>\n

Recent polls show that fewer than 20% of Americans now trust <\/a>the federal government. As Attorney General Ramsey Clark warned in 1968, \u201cNothing so diminishes democracy as secrecy.\u201d Regardless of the policies that Trump pursues, it would be a booster shot for democracy for Americans to learn the back story of the Obama era.<\/p>\n

A shorter version of this column originally appeared in USA Today.<\/em><\/p>\n

___
\nhttp:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2017\/01\/09\/trump-must-expose-obamas-abuses-of-power\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by JAMES BOVARD CounterPunch<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=63095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=63095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=63095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stateofthenation2012.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=63095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}