Fixing Our Leaks

Julian Assange, like him or hate him, is at least reliable. You may dislike his propensity to expose our secret service and clandestine agents and schemes, which is bad for the U.S., but whatever he has done has never-the-less been accurate.

He is making the case that American's must awaken to the destructive actions that lame duck administrations take upon leaving the office of the Presidency.

He is worried that the Obama team will destroy tons of documents before anyone can see them. That in doing so, his administration is effectively whitewashing history. The voters do not know what they do not know, and if history shows us anything, it is that virtually all administrations have done their best to keep it that way.

“Our philosophy is that such information is a part of history. It belongs, legally and philosophically, to the American people and more broadly, insofar as the United States interacts with the world, it belongs to the people of the world. It is part of human history and the destruction of major archives of human history, frankly, should be formally listed as a crime against humanity because those archives belong to humanity,” noted Assange.

As we as a nation embark on the Trump-lead effort to 'drain the swamp' of self interested bureacrats and insistutions of corruption and waste, we must take measures to assure that the history of what went on in the White House during any administration, is recorded accurately. 

This was what was at the heart of the Watergate Scandal that forced Richard Nixon to resign the office. If we aren't careful, all of the lessons learned from that painful period in American politics will have been lost.

It is apparent that over the past eight years, President Obama has taken lots of liberties with what he considered his mandate. He has often stretched or even overstepped the boundries of his executive powers. The questions that have been raised by the loyal opposition could remain unanswered if his transition team is successful in purging the history of his reign.

In order to get where you want to go, you have know where you came from. Understanding what went down during the past eight years should be helpful in reducing the propensity of politicians to make the same mistakes over and over again. There is so much at stake, we can't afford to venture into new waters until we have fixed the leaks in our nation's ship of state.