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America Blog: Obama 'has indicted more people for leaks than all previous presidents together'

SkinsHokieFan

By SkinsHokieFan
in The Tailgate

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SkinsHokieFan

SkinsHokieFan

Posted
Posted
Daniel Ellsberg is asked to comment on a clip of press secretary Robert Gibbs complaining about the leaks:

KING: Daniel, do you understand why Mr. Gibbs, representing the president, is so upset?

ELLSBERG: Well, he's very upset in part because
he's working for a president who has indicted more people now for leaks than all previous presidents
put together. And two of those people -- Thomas Drake and Shamai Leibowitz -- have been indicted for acts that were undertaken under Bush, which [the] George W.
Bush administration chose not to indict
.

So this is an administration that's more concerned about preventing transparency, I would say, than its predecessor which I'm very sorry to hear.
As somebody who voted for Obama and expect to vote for him again, despite all this.

http://www.americablog.com/2010/07/ellsberg-obama-has-indicted-more-people.html

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ACW

ACW

Posted
Posted
When Obama called for more government transparency, he didn't mean that the government shouldn't maintain secrecy regarding matters affecting national security. No reasonable person would argue otherwise.
Radley Balko made some point about how Obama's forgiving the torturers (Cheney, Woo, Addington) yet trying to prosecute those who REVEALED the torture.
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Bang

Bang

Posted
Posted
Transparency?:ols:

Transparency? :ols::ols::ols::ols::ols:

I would bet that you don't know what those indicted leaked. I don't, the article only mentions two people, but doesn't say what they did, except that Bush didn't indict them. (I googled them. ONe of them handed classified communication intelligence to a blogger, and got less than two years sentence. The other one leaked NSA papers to the news for over a year.

If they caught the person who leaked 92,000 classified military papers last week, should they hand him a medal for achieving transparency?

I know it may be hard to fathom when someone who is not of your ideology is in power, but not everything is supposed to be meant for public consumption.

They should put a warning labhel on these partisan pom poms,, they're easy to shake around but they'll put your eye out.

~Bang

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Beans

Beans

Posted
Posted
I would bet that you don't know what those indicted leaked. I don't, the article only mentions two people, but doesn't say what they did, except that Bush didn't indict them. (I googled them. ONe of them handed classified communication intelligence to a blogger, and got less than two years sentence. The other one leaked NSA papers to the news for over a year.

If they caught the person who leaked 92,000 classified military papers last week, should they hand him a medal for achieving transparency?

I know it may be hard to fathom when someone who is not of your ideology is in power, but not everything is supposed to be meant for public consumption.

They should put a warning labhel on these partisan pom poms,, they're easy to shake around but they'll put your eye out.

~Bang

No. I was laughing about the transparency part. This administration is anything but...48 hours to read every...

The article claims even Robert Gibbs is upset about this. Although in all fairness, this was second hand.

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Posted
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No. I was laughing about the transparency part. This administration is anything but...48 hours to read every...

The article claims even Robert Gibbs is upset about this. Although in all fairness, this was second hand.

Come on, you mean that I am to believe that you don't know the difference between transparency of government programs and stealing classified information?

Surely you jest

If it turns out that they're prosecuting people to shut them up for trying to out actual wrongdoing (as opposed to digging dirt for political purposes) , fine, but based on what I just read in the OP there's no way to make that distinction.

~Bang

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Madison Redskin

Madison Redskin

Posted
Posted
Come on, you mean that I am to believe that you don't know the difference between transparency of government programs and stealing classified information?

Surely you jest

It's unlikely that he'll address the topic at hand (i.e., indictments of people who leaked classified information). Instead, he'll likely ignore you or raise off-topic "facts."

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Beans

Beans

Posted
Posted
Come on, you mean that I am to believe that you don't know the difference between transparency of government programs and stealing classified information?

Surely you jest

If it turns out that they're prosecuting people to shut them up for trying to out actual wrongdoing (as opposed to digging dirt fopr political purposes) , fine, but based on what I just read in the OP there's no way to make that distinction.

~Bang

Look, sorry for getting off topic. I just thought the fact that a "perceived" lack of transparency from this admin was so...nevermind. My bad. Sorry for taking a cheap shot.

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Beans

Posted
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It's unlikely that he'll address the topic at hand (i.e., indictments of people who leaked classified information). Instead, he'll likely ignore you or raise off-topic "facts."

Are you profiling me?:ols:

I'm so glad you know what I'm likely to do, because I don't. :silly:

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Bang

Posted
Posted
Look, sorry for getting off topic. I just thought the fact that a "perceived" lack of transparency from this admin was so...nevermind. My bad. Sorry for taking a cheap shot.

See, and Madison thought he had you all figured out. :)

I'm all for transparency,, mostly i want to see where all our money goes.

~Bang

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Prosperity

Prosperity

Posted
Posted
When Obama called for more government transparency, he didn't mean that the government shouldn't maintain secrecy regarding matters affecting national security. No reasonable person would argue otherwise.

I'm going to sound snarky, sorry about that.

"national security"

Thats a very useful phrase, it sounds so vague, important, and dangerous. You could hide alot of stuff by just labeling them by that. Then what reasonable person would argue.

I don't know really, but it does sound like a cop out

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Beans

Beans

Posted
Posted
I'm going to sound snarky, sorry about that.

"national security"

Thats a very useful phrase, it sounds so vague, important, and dangerous. You could hide alot of stuff by just labeling them by that. Then what reasonable person would argue.

I don't know really, but it does sound like a cop out

It can be and is abused. Materials are oftentimes classified (over-classification costs taxpayers billions every year I'm sure) just so people can cover their asses. When in doubt, classify! :ols:

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Madison Redskin

Madison Redskin

Posted
Posted
I'm going to sound snarky, sorry about that.

"national security"

Thats a very useful phrase, it sounds so vague, important, and dangerous. You could hide alot of stuff by just labeling them by that. Then what reasonable person would argue.

I don't know really, but it does sound like a cop out

I agree. My only point was that no reasonable person would argue that, by promising to run a transparent government, Obama meant that the nothing would be classified or that he would let people leak classified information without fear of prosecution.

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elkabong82

elkabong82

Posted
Posted

you'd get in similar trouble if you leaked a company's classified documents, which is part of a non-disclosure agreement they all require and I assume so does the President for his employees.

Obama is holding his own people responsible, yet Bush gets praised for rarely, if ever, holding any of his members responsible? Bizzaro World.

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Mad Mike

Mad Mike

Posted
Posted
I'm going to sound snarky, sorry about that.

"national security"

Thats a very useful phrase, it sounds so vague, important, and dangerous. You could hide alot of stuff by just labeling them by that. Then what reasonable person would argue.

I don't know really, but it does sound like a cop out

"National Security" sounds vague to you? Really?

Let me help. It means pertaining to the security of the nation and it's people. It means stopping the bad people and nations of the world from harming the United States, it's citizens and in some cases, it's allies. It's actually a very specific distinction. Unfortunately, the reality is there are a large number of threats from a variety of sources. And if events like the Oklahoma City bombing and 9/11 don't convince you that the danger is real, then well... to paraphrase Jeff Foxworthy... You might be a moron.

(I'm assuming you understand that the danger is real.)

If you can show a specific case where the term national security was misused as related to these indictments, I'm all ears.

An on a related note:

MSNBC - U.S. scutinizes leaks for risks to Afghans (misspelling theirs :ols: )

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon is reviewing tens of thousands of classified battlefield reports made public this week about the war in Afghanistan to determine whether Afghan informants were identified and could be at risk of reprisals, American officials said Wednesday.

A Pentagon spokesman, Col. David Lapan, said that a Pentagon assessment team had not yet drawn any conclusions, but that “in general, the naming of individuals could cause potential problems, both to their physical safety or willingness to continue support to coalition forces or the Afghan government.”

A search by The New York Times through a sampling of the documents released by the organization WikiLeaks found reports that gave the names of dozens of Afghans credited with providing credible information to American and NATO troops.

The Times and two other publications given access to the documents — the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel — posted online only selected examples from documents that had been redacted to eliminate names and other information that could be used to identify people at risk. The news organizations did this to avoid jeopardizing the lives of informants.

The founder of WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, has said that the organization withheld 15,000 of the approximately 92,000 documents in the archive that was released on Sunday to remove the names of informants in what he called a “harm minimization” process. But the 75,000 documents WikiLeaks put online provide information about possible informants, like their villages and in some cases their fathers’ names.

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Prosperity

Prosperity

Posted
Posted

FML, I hate it when MM responds to National Security posts

Let me help. It means pertaining to the security of the nation and it's people. It means stopping the bad people and nations of the world from harming the United States, it's citizens and in some cases, it's allies.

it pertains to the security of the US and its interests

our interests are everything

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