Barack Obama Quotes
In an age where there's so much active misinformation and its packaged very well and it looks the same when you see it on a Facebook page or you turn on your television. Where some overzealousness on the part of, you know, a U.S. official is equated with constant and severe repression elsewhere.
Obama, Barack. "Remarks by President Obama and Chancellor Merkel of Germany in Joint Press Conference." The White House, Office of the Press Secretary, 17 Nov. 2016.
Wikileaks had just released 400,000 classified American documents relating to the Iraq War. Many accused him and Wikileaks of endangering the lives of not only soldiers, but Iraq civilians who might be identified as cooperating with the coalition forces by the released documents. The heart of the problem is that governments tend to use classification to hide embarrassing facts or policies that might be controversial as well as to protect legitimate national security secrets and sources and methods of information. The majority of the 400,000 leaked documents, when examined, were clearly not protecting any legitimate people or secrets but just staved off criticism or embarrassment; in many cases, there was no value to the contents and the maw of the censorship and classification process was applied indiscriminately to many documents. A much better argument than Assange made, can be gleaned from the vast number of WWII documents that America, England, France, Russia and others still keep secret, when the people who might have been protected have already died and the methods are long since obsolete.
Barack Hussein Obama II is an American politician and attorney who served as the 44th president of the United States from 2009 to 2017. A member of the Democratic Party, Obama was the first African-American president of the United States. He previously served as a U.S. senator from Illinois from 2005 to 2008 and as an Illinois state senator from 1997 to 2004.
