Bradley Manning Hearing: Judge Refuses To Dismiss 'Aiding The Enemy' Charge

Some of the promises Obama made as a candidate—televising healthcare negotiations on C-Span, making White House contacts with lobbyists more open—and compared them with reality. The administration promised in 2009 to release visitor logs to the White House. According to a report by the Center for Public Integrity, to date only 1% of 500,000 meetings from the president's first eight months have been released, and thousands of known visitors (including lobbyists) are missing from the lists.
Sterns also cited news stories that explain how administration officials purposely met with lobbyists at a nearby coffee shop to avoid official records of meetings. The C-Span recordings never happened, of course, and the White House has also hid much of its work behind its "czars."


Equally damning criticism came from some of the outside groups called to testify. Judicial Watch's Tom Fitton, a frequent critic of Bush administration policies (it pushed for Bush visitor logs related to convicted felon Jack Abramoff), said the Obama administration had been even worse.


"To be clear, the Obama administration is less transparent than the Bush administration," he said, noting that his group had filed more than 325 Freedom of Information Act requests, and some 45 FOIA lawsuits in federal court. Even Anne Weismann of the Center for Responsibility for Ethics in Washington—a left-leaning group that tends to assault Republicans while ignoring ethics-tarred Democrats—was forced to acknowledge that the White House hasn't kept its word. "The policies for disclosure are in place, but the applications of the policies do not exist," she said.


Democrats groused that this hearing was unfair since no one from the White House testified. Mr. Stearns noted that the administration had been invited but refused to send anyone, leading him to quip: "The failure to send any witness to a hearing about White House transparency . . . is revealing in its own way about the administration's true attitudes."

Critics, no matter which side of the aisle they're on, have a point.  We didn't like it under Bush-Cheney and put Democrats into power to disinfect with sunlight.
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