Transparancy And Obama Asserting Executive Privilege

 

Photo from Huffington Post

As a civil libertarian, as well as a believer that an Obama presidency would have brought about greater government transparency with regard to the affairs of the Executive branch, President Obama's decision to exert executive privilege in order to deny requests in Congressman Darrell Issa's (R-CA) investigation into the Fast and Furious gun running program is a complete disappointment.  First, in case you don't know what the Fast and Furious program was:

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) ran a series of "gunwalking" sting operations^[2][3] between 2006^[4] and 2011.^[2][5] This was done under the umbrella of Project Gunrunner, a project intended to stem the flow of firearms into Mexico by interdicting straw purchasers and gun traffickers within the United States.^[6] "Gunwalking" or "letting guns walk" was a tactic whereby the ATF knowingly allowed thousands of guns to be bought by suspected arms traffickers ("gunrunners") working through straw purchasers on behalf of Mexican drug cartels.^[7]

The stated goal of allowing these purchases was to continue to track the firearms as they were transferred to higher-level traffickers and key figures in Mexican cartels, in theory leading to their arrests and the dismantling of the cartels.^[8][9] The tactic was questioned during the operations by a number of people, including ATF field agents and cooperating licensed gun dealers.^{[10][11][12][13][14]} Operation Fast and Furious, by far the largest "gunwalking" probe, led to the sale of over 2,000 firearms, of which around 700 were recovered as of October 20, 2011.^[15] A number of straw purchasers have been arrested and indicted; however, as of October 2011, none of the targeted high-level cartel figures have been arrested.^[7]

Firearms "walked" by the ATF have been found at violent crime scenes on both sides of the Mexico–United States border, including scenes involving the deaths of many Mexicans and at least one U.S. federal agent, Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. The "gunwalking" operations became public in the aftermath of Terry's murder.^[2] Dissident ATF agents came forward to Congress in response.^[16][17] As investigations have continued, the operations have become increasingly controversial in both countries, and diplomatic relations have been damaged as a result.^[2]

Representative Issa has been hovering over this issue like a vulture whenever he first became Chairman of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.  He has submitted numerous document requests, has engaged in some cantankerous questioning of Attorney General Eric Holder in the committee hearings, and is now pushing to hold Mr Holder in contempt.  I have no doubt that one of his main motivations, if not his main motivation, in taking such a publicly strident interest in this case is politically calculated.

But as far as I can tell, Representative Issa also happens to be absolutely correct in the being so stringent in his requests. 

Could he, perhaps, scale back on the sullen-tone during committee hearings? Or to put it another way, could he not be such a dick when talking to Mr. Holder?  Absolutely.  His interactions with Mr. Holder in the Committee hearings are nothing more than cheap political theater.

But Representative Issa is absolutely doing the right thing is his insistence on investigating the Fast and Furious fun-running program, as his duties require that he does as the Chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.  It is with significant disappointment that I am aligning myself on the side of Congressman Issa over the Obama Administration on this, or any issue.

It is also disappointing that Obama is once again fighting steps for a more transparent executive branch.  The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf recently said this about Obama's openness to transparency (or lacktheirof) regarding leaks surrounding Obama's drone programs in the Middle East:

There is no way that this can possibly turn out well for anyone who values transparency. Either President Obama will get away with dispensing classified information in a way that advantages his side in various national-security policy debates, or there will be a crackdown, and Americans will be even less likely to get even the small amount of information we now have about U.S. actions abroad.  

As a liberal who voted for Obama in 2008 (and who hopes he wins again in 2012), I am deeply ashamed with Obama's record regarding transparency (not to mention issues surrounding civil liberties and the military, which I will address another day).  Below is a video of Obama shortly after becoming President regarding the issue of government transparency entitled "Obama: Transparency Will Be Touchstone"




My, how things do change.

2011 Person of the Year

I know I am a couple of weeks late writing on this story, but I would just like to take a moment to give credit to Time Magazine's choice for the 2011 Person of the Year: The Protestor.

 

Photo from Huffington Post

Clearly the biggest news story of the year were the protests that arose in the Arab World, and that soon spread to other parts of the globe as well (including in the United States with the Occupy Wall Street movement).  Discontent at those in charge is something that so often gets talked about, but very little ever get's done about it.  Sometimes, a person get's kicked out of elected office, and the next person to replace them is either just as ineffective, or worse than the person they replace.  Occasionally, you see a massive uprising against one's government in a foreign country, but that ultimately falter via government crackdown through brutality and fear (e.g. Iran, 2009).

But this year was different.  Why this year, and not any other year?  It is hard to say.  Time Magazine writer Kurt Anderson writes this:

It's remarkable how much the protest vanguards share. Everywhere they are disproportionately young, middle class and educated. Almost all the protests this year began as independent affairs, without much encouragement from or endorsement by existing political parties or opposition bigwigs. All over the world, the protesters of 2011 share a belief that their countries' political systems and economies have grown dysfunctional and corrupt — sham democracies rigged to favor the rich and powerful and prevent significant change. They are fervent small-d democrats.

For most years, Time would bestow this distinction to one individual, but in more recent years, it seems they have given the "person" of the year (singular) to groups of individuals.  Examples include "The Peacemakers" (1993; represented Yasser Arafat, F.W. de Klerk, Nelson Mandela, and Yitzhak Rabin), "The American Soldier" (2003), and the lazy and pandering "You" in 2006 (representing people who post things on the internet).  Of course, this year falls under that category of multiple winners as "Person of the Year", and "protesters" they couldn't have picked a more appropriate choice.

But what if you did have to pick just one person to represent the whole protest movement?  Quite a daunting task considering that the number of individuals involved in protest movements around the world this year are (at a minimum) in the hundreds of thousands, if not in the millions.  In addition, there is not one person who is primarily in charge of any of these movements, nor one individual that is the "face" of any of these movements, other than the faces of some of the despots who the protestors are demonstrating against to begin with (e.g. Mubarak, Gaddafi, Putin, etc.).  These were truly democratic movements in every sense of the word.  But there is one person, however, that can earn this distinction, because without him, all of these demonstrations may have never even started (or had the impact that they did).

Many people have suggested (and I happen to agree) that the Person of the Year for 2011 is the man in the picture at the top of this post: Mohamed Bouazizi.  Who is, or rather, who was Mr. Bouazizi?  Here is a description from an article on him from the website African Success, where I also copied the picture from above:

Mohamed Bouazizi  was a Tunisian street vendor born March 29,1984- died January 4,2011, poured petrol over himself on December 17, 2011 and set himself, alight in front of the office of the Governor of his region, life turned upside down in Tunisia and the fires that he lit has burned until it engulfed the entire country from town to town.

 Photo from African Success

He was a student from Sidi Bouzid and upon his father’s death, was obliged to stop his studies and find a job.Faced with the difficulty of finding a job, he ended up becoming a street seller, without official authorisation and desperate he plied his trade as best he could.

His plight echoed the hapless fate of so many thousands and thosuands of young Tunisians, seduced by the promises of western education, yet frustrated and thwarted by a visionless, un-productive, corrupt power structure which dominated the country and suffocated creativity and innovation.


In Tunisia, the President Zine el_Abidine Ben Ali and his family rules his country with an iron bar.

Papers to do this and that, land to build houses on, authorisations of all sorts were obtained by the ‘kind patronage’ of the President and his family.

Mohamed didn’t have the right papers and on the 17th December[2010] the police confiscated his good and threw him out of the market because he wasn’t paying the right dividends to the people the President had put in place. Apparently slapped on the face by Faida Hamdy, it has been upheld that the indignation was the 'spark' that led to him setting fire to himself. Her family have always upheld that she never touched him and a witness who had originally affirmed that she did slap him and has since added that it wasn't true that she didn't slap him.

Mohamed decided to protest by the only means he knew and poured petrol on himself, took out his lighter and burnt himself, becoming the hero and initiator of the ‘Jasmin revolution,’ which brought down the President and his family on 14 January 2011 and made him a martyr and hero of the nation.

The tragic story and suicide of Mr. Bouazizi lead to the ousting of Tunisia's president, and that could have been the end of the story.  A small story of and tragedy and triumph for justice in a small African country took place, but the rest of the world kept going along with business as usual.  But that did not happen.  Here is a piece from an article Reuters on why the The Times of the United Kingdom named Mr. Bouaziz their Person of the Year:

Bouazizi' death from his wounds in January prompted protests across Tunisia, forcing autocratic President Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali to flee the country. Soon afterwards, millions took to the streets in Egypt, Libya, Syria and elsewhere to protest against repression, corruption, poverty and joblessness.

The uprisings unseated despots in Libya, Egypt and Yemen as well as Tunisia, while Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad's writ is disintegrating and other authoritarian rulers in the region are eyeing the tide of public anger with nervousness.

Tunisia has since elected new leaders through peaceful democratic elections.

In an October interview with Reuters, Bouazizi's mother Manoubia urged the new leaders to honor her son's sacrifice by helping poor people like him.

"Nothing would have happened if my son had not reacted against voicelessness and a lack of respect," she said.

"But I hope the people who are going to govern will be able to keep this message in mind and give consideration to all Tunisians, including the poor."

 

Photo from Reuters

Without the death of Mr. Bouazizi, not only would there have not been an uprising in Tunisia, there probably would have been no Tahrir Square, no Arab Spring, no Indignant's protest in Spain, no austerity protest in Greece, no protests on the Kremlin and no Occupy Wall Street.  Without Mr. Bouazizi, both Hosni Mubarak and Moammar Gaddafi would probably still be in power, and it is possible that no one in America would be talking about the wealth disparity between the 99% and the 1%.

While I sincerely hope that no one ever imitates the drastic actions that Mr. Bouazizi took, we who care about these protest movements need to realize what he did, why he did it, and pay tribute to him and what has happened since then.  May the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi live on.  And may the movements around the globe that he helped create continue to gain momentum in 2012 and beyond!