But what interests me is this blog announcing video from Budget Director Peter Orszag:
If the Obama Administration leaves us with nothing else, may it please leave us with fiscal transparency, everywhere possible. Orszag understands that blogging is now the fastest and most direct form of mass communication, with little time for artifice or room to avoid accountability. This is the big change of our age, we're all citizen journalists or at least citizen columnists, when we drop a status update on Facebook. Messages of this size have never in the history of the world traveled so far so inexpensively, and so unmediated.
This is the ball to keep your eye on and yes, torture photos do count. The next Administration may be a step backwards in transparency, but I'm thrilled by how much more citizen access to information, even the in-the-mix thoughts of the darn Budget Director himself, we are increasingly receiving under Obama's change, and I hope that we, the citizenry, avail ourselves of the access, like the Congressional Budget Office blog and (yep, still live) the Recovery Act site.
"But you must remember, my fellow-citizens, that eternal vigilance by the people is the price of liberty, and that you must pay the price if you wish to secure the blessing. It behooves you, therefore, to be watchful in your States as well as in the Federal Government." -- Andrew Jackson, Farewell Address, March 4, 1837Overdue, Andrew.
2 comments:
I'm not too worked up about the torture photos -- we now know what was going on, we know that GWB/DC and their surrogates lied about what they had authorized, and the pix will only outrage those who are already outraged and be ignored by those who've ignored the first batch.
I'm much more interested in the docs, like those that detail the actual intelligence output from the torture sessions, and the questions asked.
If it turns out (as it is beginning to appear) that torture was purely about forcing prisoners to fabricate a qaeda/Saddam link so that Cheney could mislead the American public into the most disastrous and murderous foreign policy blunder in history, then we're talking about a crime that's of a different nature and order of magnitude than just torture, and the victims were not just a handful of Iraqi badguys, but 300 million Americans.
What I'm kind of concerned about is the fact that these were even an issue to be released? If you're not going to release them, why even bring it up. Now the world knows that they're bad.
A huge blunder by all administrations. Starting from the military up. If the military is going to handle this let there own judicial system handle the problem.
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