Obama Edicts Boost FOIA and .gov Websites 400
Ian Lamont writes "The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the National Security Archive are praising President Obama's executive orders to make the federal government more open. Yesterday, Obama issued two memos and one executive order instructing government agencies to err on the side of making information public and not to look for reasons to legally withhold it. The moves are expected to make it easier for people to file Freedom of Information Act requests, and should also boost the amount of information that agencies place on their websites. The general counsel for the National Security Archive (an NGO that publishes declassified documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act) even predicts that agencies will use blogs to share information. Obama's directives reverse a 2001 memo from former US Attorney General John Ashcroft instructing federal agencies to generally withhold information from citizens filing FOIA requests."
Re:Score for current slashdot poll (Score:5, Insightful)
Transparency of government is not a technology issue, it's an administrative issue.
Technology is just what is used to distribute information.
so +1 for "Administration policies"
also he gets +1 for taking the neutrality captain on board, that is a technology point
"Open" (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this on the same website yesterday that said "President Obama has not issued any executive orders" when in fact he had already done several?
Nice Move by Obama (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm going to disagree with Obama more than I will agree with him but one should give credit where it is due... Open information is *critical* to nurture an informed populace and an informed populace is needed to care for a representative government.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
There might be a real reason not to release the raw info on this to the public.
1) Protect the folks who may have given up information under torture from retaliation
2) Protect Soldiers who under orders committed torture from retaliation
While some of this stuff needs to be released the equivalent of a words being blacked out is appropriate. For the victims and for the soldiers (who should be tried in court (military or civil) before their identities are relaeased.
Re:I am not a lawyer, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
Bad policy is bad policy, no matter what side of the aisle you're on.
Re:Nice Move by Obama (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, bashing him for a move like this is kinda like tossing a sack full of kittens into a lake. I was not terribly impressed with Mr. Obama or Mc. Cain, but I'm willing to give anyone a chance. So far so good, more transparency, taking steps to close camp X-Ray. At this rate, and if he gets my extended family members who are in Iraq home soon I may even come to like him. But then again we are only two days in ;-)
Re:I am not a lawyer, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Since I don't know what preceeded it, I don't know the change. But it does seem reasonable. As I read it:
The archivist gets all this stuff. He flags anything that may be sensitive to executive privledge. He notifies the former president whose administration created it and the current president and AG. The current president can withhold things. The former president can then ask the archivist to withhold those files, but the AG then has to sign off.
And then, if no one says boo, it gets published after 30 days.
It seems pretty reasonable to me, since there is an executive privledge. This one at least has periodic oversight by new executives.
Re:Score for current slashdot poll (Score:2, Insightful)
(IANAUSC; I Am Not A US Citizen.)
A transparent government where citizens can moderate and verify what the government does is arguably important because it gives the citizens more power to make informed judgements.
All too often I've seen in my country -which has something similar as FOIA- arguments why information should be withheld while it is important for the citizens to obtain this information. Think about something such as electronic voting and electronic medical files. The legal framework is there, but often some kind of lame technical argument is used to withhold information while it is CLEARLY in the interest of the public; the citizens.
Transparency has the potention to increase the democratic value of a State. But one must be careful that there is not too much information; this means careful consideration must be concerned when citizens or journalists hash through the huge piles of information obtained from FOIA framework.
In this case, it also allows the citizens to check the right- and wrongdoings of a previous administration while at the same time provide a legal basis for the citizens to verify the current administration. This alone boosts trust of the citizens in the current administration which is smart; the real, long term benefits or the effectiveness of this directive we've got yet to see, and without having it read is difficult to discuss.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with your first point, but IMHO soldiers who committed torture do not deserve protection. They could and should have refused to execute their orders.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:4, Insightful)
no one who commits torture for any reason should be protected from retaliation, orders or not.
Illegal orders are still illegal, and our military personnel are trained to know that. Ignoring it and doing it just because "it's orders" is not a justifiable defense, IMO.
Re:Nice Move by Obama (Score:4, Insightful)
As a Conservative I am also more likely to disagree with what Obama's decisions and policy. But even I find this refreshing and good. The extreme secrecy lent to presidential and governmental documentation, current and past was not something I agreed with President Bush on. I'm happy to see Obama reverse this.
Other conservatives agree as well. [hotair.com]
And that's not all! (Score:4, Insightful)
While this is not entirely related to freedom of information, it is related to transparency, shining light on government corruption and rapid changes storming the executive.
http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=42299 [cnsnews.com]
This article reports what I heard over NPR on the drive home yesterday. The revolving door that has been a peeve to me and many others is being addressed in Obama's actions. A lot of people who set their lives up using te good ole boy system of mutual mack scratching will be very upset by this... and I hope they are! It is time these despicable practices come to an end.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:FOIA change: excellent... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd also be interested in seeing the registry of the National Flute Association. It's time the flutists of America were driven out of the shadows!
Seriously dude, spell out your acronyms; it's just common courtesy.
Re:"Open" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's play Situation Replacement, shall we?
----
Location: Germany
When: December 1945
>> Can we get all the ugly from the Holocaust in the open so we can start to earn our respect back?
Help the victims. Heal them physically and mentally. Pay them. Acknowledge wrongdoing. Admit guilt. State the facts. Do this all extremely publicly.
But burn those goddamn pictures. All they will do is piss people off, no matter how hard you try to make things right.
----
Sometimes the ugly needs to be seen.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
good point, but lynch mob protection is not achieved by obscuring the identity of the perpetrator if the charge is murder. Criminal charges are a matter of public record.
Re:I am not a lawyer, but... (Score:3, Insightful)
Jesus, that IS an improvement, if it's as you say.
Wow.
Not only that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good point, and not only that, but if the ugly isn't out in the open, eventually people will forget.
If we didn't have all those awful photos and films of holocaust victims and emaciated survivors, in 20 years once all the people are dead who lived through that time period revisionist historians could argue that the holocaust really wasn't all that bad, and people would believe them.
First-hand sources -- diaries, pictures, films, videos -- keep us all honest.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:2, Insightful)
The repercussions for a soldier of not following orders may be severe (in wartime this may be execution, and the US is formally at war against terror, drugs, and some other wars here and there).
Furthermore, how can a soldier judge which orders are illegal? In case of torture: there is the fine line between allowed interrogation techniques and torturous interrogation techniques. Some say water boarding is OK, others say it is torture. How can a simple soldier judge this? Should he? He's a soldier after all, not a judge. His superiors are supposed to judge for him what is allowed or not, and based on their superiorness give orders. Until it goes to the obvious illegal (shooting defenceless people, rape) - it is not that easy.
The superiors giving the orders are at least as much as fault as the soldier following them, maybe even more. Those superiors got into their jobs for being supposedly better at making decisions, knowing what is right (legal) or not.
Re:Not only that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well said.
Same as Japan. Currently their education ministers are trying their damnest best to hide all the torture and massacre [wikipedia.org] information.
Japanese children grew up not knowing the crimes against humanity that their forefathers did 65 years ago.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this explains how this absolves them of guilt. The same could be said of Nazi prison camp guards. They were told the jews and other political prisoners were dangerous and were destroying German society.
It's not sufficient to be willing to die following orders. You must also be willing to die for disobeying immoral orders. Otherwise you're just a mercenary.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:1, Insightful)
Soldiers systematically have their capacity to reason removed from them. We know that this turns them into soulless reactive drones who will never be real "leaders", this is why we honor them: the sacrifices they have made to keep us safe.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:3, Insightful)
"When the charge is "torture", being "at war" is not a mitigating circumstance."
For a soldier at war just about *anything* is mitigating the Military has its own legal code. Lets not forget there was a real debate as to what was and was not torture at the time and before we release the identities of these soldiers that needs to be hashed out.
"If anything that just adds War Crime charges on top of the Human Rights Violations."
Human Rights is *not* a legal term its a political one. Legally speaking Rape is not a HRV nor is torture. Throwing around terms like HRV is more a way to deal with policies than it is to deal with specific violations of the law.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
None of this explains how this absolves them of guilt. The same could be said of Nazi prison camp guards. They were told the jews and other political prisoners were dangerous and were destroying German society.
It's not sufficient to be willing to die following orders. You must also be willing to die for disobeying immoral orders. Otherwise you're just a mercenary.
Immoral orders? By whose morality? The victor's. If the Germans had won, a completely different measure of morality would have been applied.
At the risk of being called a troll or something, the guards working the concentration camps probably thought they were protecting their homeland. I'm no expert, and assuming they were drawn from the ranks (one could technically make the leap and consider lower ranking SS to also be ignorant). They were told these people were dangerous to their society. Did they have any reason not to believe it (I'd wager that the guards had no way to disprove their superiors in this matter). It wasn't clear-cut as if the jews, gypsies, and others were taking up arms.
Be wary of moral relativism. You may consider your enemy immoral for wanting to kill you, but I'm entirely sure he considers it quite moral. The reverse is also true.
Re:Score for current slashdot poll (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:2, Insightful)
Your post thoroughly endorses moral relativism and then closes by saying "be wary of moral relativism".
Do you mean "be aware of" or are you just confused?
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:5, Insightful)
The Nuremberg trials established in international law that it is not an acceptable defense. Justifiable, sure, it's a reasonable thing to say. But it doesn't get you off the hook, and it shouldn't, you should be mindful enough of your own actions to not TORTURE SOMEONE because someone else told you to.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:4, Insightful)
"It's not sufficient to be willing to die following orders. You must also be willing to die for disobeying immoral orders. Otherwise you're just a mercenary."
So if someone tells you to follow orders or your wife and family will be put into the prison camp, are you still a mercenary? Or are you caught in an impossible situation and trying to make a choice that nobody should have to make?
I'm not saying that this was the situation in the American military, but let's not be so hasty to judge people. At least, let's presume them innocent, keep their identities secret, and follow-up in a measured manner rather than chance ruining their good names in the court of public opinion.
-Jeff
That shows amazing ignorance of the military (Score:5, Insightful)
Soldiers, at least non-officers, are trained through very intense programs to always obey orders without question. They are not taught to get in arguments over their orders. What's more, they can face charges for refusing an order.
The military isn't a big committee. It isn't something where you sit down and discuss what is going to be done until everyone is happy with it. It is a very rigid organization where you are told what to do by those above you and you do it. This is especially true at the enlisted "grunt" level. You are taught to do what your commander tells you, not ask why, and you are told that failure to do so may have serious consequences.
I get real tired of people who are willing to tell others in tough situations how they "should" act. Think it's that easy? Try it then. Enlist, go through basic, see the kind of mental and physical conditioning soldiers are subjected to. See what the culture and rules are like. Then see if you think it's so easy to just say "Nope, don't like that order, not going to do it."
Now please understand, I'm not saying you can't criticize the military's actions or that the people in charge shouldn't be held accountable. I'm saying that the people who were simply obeying orders can't. All logic aside, there's international law on the issue too. You can prosecute a low level soldier who was just doing what they were told to do.
Re:Not only that... (Score:4, Insightful)
Good point, and not only that, but if the ugly isn't out in the open, eventually people will forget.
Forget? How about fucking knowing something in the first place!
There are plenty of Americans who still think that the entire abu Ghraib situation involved nothing more severe than barking dogs, panty-hats, and naked man-piles.
They don't know about the detainees being beaten with table legs, repeatedly kicked in the groin, asphyxiations, male prisoners raped with broomsticks, female prisoners simply raped, and so on.
Probably because to know about these things, you'd have to have actually read one of the various military reports which by their own admission cover only a portion of the abuses that went on. The TV news just focused on the pictures, particularly the one of the guy covered in a hood standing on a box, and a lot of the viewing public went "So what? That doesn't look so bad to me." A callous view to begin with, but tempered by the fact that they simply haven't seen or heard about the things that anyone would call torture.
In a way I almost agree with the poster before who said that these other images shouldn't be released. I don't see any need to subject U.S. soldiers and victims to the judgement of the mob. But also, as far as repairing our image goes, I'm not sure it would do much good. We've already released many prisoners in Iraq, so all their family and friends around the country already know what went on, they don't need to be reminded with more pictures. Repairing our image means repudiating the policies that lead to the scandal, with action.
On the other hand, releasing the videos and getting them on the news may at least inform more Americans as to why exactly we should feel we have to make up for this.
Re:What about the pay freeze? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does anyone else think his executive order freezing the pay of those White House workers making more than $100,000/year is a frightening preview ...
No.
Re:That shows amazing ignorance of the military (Score:3, Insightful)
Amen, brother. My own military training was minimal and in the very distant past, but arguing and thinking were just not part of the equation.
Imagine this: You're on guard duty in front of a hospital, at an entrance that opens to a wide pedestrian square. The crowd is light. You see a woman, dressed locally, about 40 feet away, walking rapidly towards you. On your radio, a command is barked, from your CO: 'woman in dark clothes 12 o'clock walking towards you corporal shoot her NOW NOW NOW'.
There are fifty ways we could think of this as a terrible tragedy, and fifty ways we could think of it as a terrible tragedy averted. In that exact moment, that soldier can't work it through in his head, just to accommodate civilian analysis in hindsight.
This will help in the blame game (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the orders are technically legal but immoral, then it's up to the soldier's conscience as to whether to follow them or to respectfully refuse to. . . . If it's any consolation, the officer or NCO will probably face court martial.)
Trials were strictly for the little man under Bush. To give the military credit, we know from the many leaks that plenty didn't like it, but that was the way it was.
It's scary how effective a President can be when he aims for unaccountability, isn't it? Except, there's no unaccountability to history, Bushie boy.
Re:Not only that... (Score:5, Insightful)
I say the only way we can achieve peace if we stop remembering who did what to whom.
No, we can achieve peace by not blaming people for what their parents did. Forgetting it was done at all is a good way of inviting it to happen again. You can't learn from other peoples' mistakes if you don't know about them.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:3, Insightful)
While there might be a SMALL danger of vigilante justice, I consider that a small inconvenience compared to the great harm of the People's government keeping secrets & covering-up abuses.
Re:can we request the torture vids? (Score:3, Insightful)
When did they release evidence to the public? Did they release the dna results to the LA Times? hmm? It is NO different from OJ's case. Prior to him being charged show me where the prosecutor was releasing evidence to the media. Had there not been enough evidence to convict do you really believe they would have released ANYTHING to the media? They would have held onto it in the hopes of obtaining evidence in the future to convict. I seriously doubt they would have released much of anything if they could not charge or convict OJ.
Who has been charged here? Has the investigation even been started? We have the potential for an investigation and we already have a witch hunt before any investigation has even started. Let them investigate and charge someone first, then release everything they feel will not prejudice their case and the remainder after someone is convicted. In the meantime, obscure the pictures to protect the innocent as well as the guilty and only release those pictures that will not hinder your investigation.
Major sticky point (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, I agree with the principles and concepts in your comment, so this is not an attack on you or your comment.
Try this: insert the word 'lawful' before the word 'orders' in both your comment and all of the other comments here. See the difference and clarity?
I may seem like a pedantic nit-picker, but it does make a huge difference in this discussion.
For example, compare these two:
1.]"...wartime refusal to obey orders could result in summary execution..." == depends on the order given.
2.]...wartime refusal to obey lawful orders could result in summary execution...==yes!
An important distinction if you are the one being 'ordered', don't you think?
BTW, the 'lawful order' phrase is pounded into your head during training repeatedly. I was even issued a pocket sized version of the Uniform Code of Military Justice [wikipedia.org] in boot camp.
" If a given order is believed to be unconstitutional, the soldier has a duty to disobey it."
Most definitely, but as you said-it can be problematic.
For those interested, the oath enlisted troops take is different than the officer's oath:
oath for enlisted [wikipedia.org]
oath for officers [wikipedia.org]