Obama Goes Back and Forth on Secrecy

On December 29, Barack Obama signed an executive order that goes a ways toward making good on his promise of a more open government.

He instructed all agencies of the federal government that every record they have would ultimately be released.

He reversed a Bush Administration policy that allowed an intelligence agency to block the release of a document, even if it didn’t threaten national security.

And he set up a National Declassification Center to expedite the release of 40 million pages of Cold War documents, “no later than December 31, 2013.”

Ironically, though, two weeks before issuing his latest executive order, Obama issue another one that conferred additional secrecy on Interpol. Obama amended Executive Order 12425 by stating that Interpol’s “property and assets…shall be immune from search” and that its archives “shall be inviolable.”

This incoherence is typical of Obama’s actions on the secrecy front all year long.

In January, he ordered agencies to be more responsive to Freedom of Information Act requests. (That hasn’t always worked well, as I can testify, since I’ve had a FOIA request pending before the U.S. Northern Command for months now.)

But during the year, he invoked the doctrine of state secrets several times so as to stymie lawsuits brought by citizens’ groups over domestic spying and by Guantanamo detainees over their mistreatment

At least at the end of the year, he’s returning to the moral high ground and nodding again toward “greater openness and transparency,” as he put it.

May we see more nods in that direction in the year ahead.