SM Gibson

March 18, 2015

(ANTIMEDIA) Obama and his self declared “most transparent administration in history” has indeed achieved a new historic milestone. The opaque Obama administration censored government files or just outright denied access to them more often in 2014 under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) than at any time in the history of the United States.

This statistic comes just days after the White House exempted itself from FOIA altogether.

The administration took longer to turn over files, said more frequently that it couldn’t locate documents, and refused to record the number of request filed under FOIA. There is also a backlog of over a staggering 200,000 unanswered inquiries, which is a 55% increase since the end of last year.

Of the 714,231 requests made by citizens for information in 2014, the government responded to 647,142 of them. 250,581, or 39% of all responses included redacted information. In some instances, only a few words were blacked out, but on many other occasions, entire paragraphs were marked out leaving only a handful of unrelated words on a page.

The government responded 215,584 times by saying they couldn’t find any records or decided that the request made was unreasonable.

This data was pulled from all FOIA filings made in 2014 to 100 federal agencies.

Miraculously, the White House is patting itself on the back in light of these new figures.

“We actually do have a lot to brag about,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Calculations by the administration claim they responded to 91% of requests made. It is worth noting that the White House more often than not does not include when it couldn’t find records, a person refused to pay for copies, or the request was determined to be improper under the law in its computation. Even at the perverted and skewed 91%, the number is still a a record low since Obama has been in office.

Ironically, these numbers have been released during Sunshine Week, which is a national initiative with the intention of educating the public about the significance of transparency in government and the hazards of an unrestrained veil of secrecy.

This article (US Sets New Record For Censoring or Denying Government Files) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and TheAntiMedia.org. Tune in to the Anti-Media radio show Monday through Friday @ 11pm Eastern/8pm Pacific. Help us fix our typos: edits@theantimedia.org.

