Now this is a truly amazing and revolutionary development in making progress towards providing for true accountably amongst power, here and throughout the world.

On June 15th, Icelandic Parliamentarians unanimously approved a resolution that contains some of the strongest protection for freedom of speech and freedom of information in the world. The reforms will most likely take effect sometime in 2011, when a revision of the country’s relevant laws and regulations is expected to be completed and approved by Parliament.

The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative ( IMMI ), as the proposal is known, has been welcomed by most Icelanders, who are weary of institutional furtiveness; in April, a special Parliamentary report concluded that the country’s spectacular financial collapse of 2008 would not have been possible without a culture of secrecy that afforded bankers and politicians little oversight. By strengthening protections for whistleblowers and journalists’ sources, and by reforming the judicial system to minimize the abuse of libel law, those behind IMMI are hoping to foster a much more open society on the island.

Nor would we likely have had the clusterf**k of a war in Iraq if we had the same protections and provisions in our media back during the orchestrated run up to that crime back in 2002-03 in America, to name just one of numerous potential examples of power being checked by transparent accountability. Accountability made possible only through the protection of those who serve to provide needed information for informed, rational public discourse and debate.

More here, too, on the brazen hypocrisy and slavish service to empire that is Obama administration…

“If any nation should stand up for [IMMI], it is the US,” she said.

Jónsdóttir does, however, realize that getting the American government to warm to the initiative may be tricky. Despite President Obama’s campaign promises to protect whistleblowers , his administration has decided instead to slap them with criminal charges ; Bradley Manning, the alleged source of Collateral Murder , Shamai Leibovitz, an FBI translator, and Thomas Drake, an NSA contractor, are all examples of whistleblowers who may or may not feel like they’ve been backstabbed by the President ; Drake even faces trumped-up charges of Espionage. Not even George W. Bush threatened whistleblowers with prison throughout his Imperial Presidency.

But it isn’t just President Obama’s betrayal of his campaign promises and the clandestine ways of the US government that bothers Jónsdóttir; she sees the President’s vendetta against whistleblowers as a pointless exercise for a government that trumpets itself as a shining beacon of democracy.

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