Obama: Against Whistleblowing, but not Against Democracy

Posted by Flattau Associates Staff on 15 February 2012 | 0 Comments

Tags: democracy, Obama, whistleblower freedom, democracy data, democracy statistics, democracy dataset, DMQ

Just the other day, Perter Van Buren, a career US Foreign Service Officer, wrote a piece that initially appeared on TomDispatch, and then on Aljazeera, that called out the Obama Administration for its crackdown on whistleblowers in the United States. In the article, Van Buren referenced a January 23 incident where, "the Obama administration charged former CIA officer John Kiriakou under the Espionage Act for disclosing classified information to journalists about the waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects." According to the author, "His is just the latest prosecution in an unprecedented assault on government whistleblowers and leakers of every sort. Kiriakou's plight will clearly be but one more battle in a broader war to ensure that government actions and sunshine policies don't go together...How it plays out in court and elsewhere will significantly affect our democracy." Van Buren ends his piece by stating that the Obama Administration, "fears the noise of democracy, preferring the silence of compliance."

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