I spoke with one person who has known Obama since he was a senator from Illinois who suggested the President is fearful that if he does release these secrets and some negative consequences result that he'll be blamed. In order words, Obama in practice is too scared to live up to his commitment about "transparency."
Another less generous explanation is that Obama is at heart an elitist who likes to surround himself with secrets but doesn't want to share them with common citizens who are best treated like the proverbial mushrooms kept in the dark and fertilized.
Or put differently, Obama is like the character Gollum in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings series who is entranced by the power of the One Ring and obsessively pursues it, what he calls "my Precious." In that analogy, Obama can't part with his precious secrets despite his promises to the American people about government openness.
Surely, Obama does get warnings against letting the public in on what the U.S. government knows about pivotal events. Government bureaucrats can always find reasons to keep information secret. But presidents have the ultimate say in what is kept secret and what is released.
And, except for a flurry of disclosures immediately after taking office, including Bush's legal memos justifying torture, Obama has done less about opening up the federal government's archives than many recent presidents. For instance, President Bill Clinton declassified Cold War-era files on U.S. participation in Guatemala's decades of brutal repression.
Obama has shown less enthusiasm for giving Americans back their history. More importantly, however, Obama has withheld crucial information about current crises, such as the Syrian sarin attack and events that drove the Ukrainian civil war. [See Consortiumnews.com's "The Collapsing Syria-Sarin Case" and "The Danger of an MH-17 Cold Case."]
In both areas, his administration rushed to judgment based on fragmentary information and -- as more detailed data became available challenging the earlier claims -- Obama clamped down on what the American people were allowed to hear.
Much like the Tonkin Gulf case, war hawks in the U.S. government found the mis-impressions useful, so they didn't want to correct the record. All the better to get an edge on foreign "adversaries" and manage the perceptions of the American people.
And, for whatever his reasons, President Obama couldn't let go of his "Precious."
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