NATIONAL—The Obama Administration has pulled down it’s 2008 campaign promises from it’s Change.gov website. Most importantly the promise to ‘protect whistleblowers’ which has disappeared from the internet just two days after ‘The Guardian’ broke the Edward Snowden-NSA spying scandal.
One of the promises Obama made on the website was on “whistleblower protections:”
- Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.
The White House refused to comment on why the page was deleted. The page can still be viewed on the Wayback archive.
The Obama Administration has made a complete 180 on their policy promises to protect whistleblowers. After the whistleblower Bradley Manning gave classified information to WikiLeaks, the Obama Administration launched it’s Insider Threat program to combat leaks, in part by asking co-workers to spy on their fellow employees and enforcing harsh punishments for not doing so. In fact the Obama administration has become the strictest anti-whistleblower administration in history.