Some people caught a glimpse of what the Bush administration considers top-level secrecy priority last week. I'm speaking, of course, of the fact the vice president shot a guy in the face and then didn't tell anybody for a whole day. But, it goes much, much deeper down the rabbit hole.
But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.
Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."
Things that are published in books that, if you are a nerd like me, you may even have on your book shelf are now classified. That means you cannot go to the National Archives and read them, but you can possibly see photocopies on the Internet.
And it is documents that don't really need to be secret. Maybe someone should let the federal government know that we know there was a war in Korea in the 1950s.
Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.
So, some of this is about covering up bloopers. Now we know where Cheney gets his habit: He gets it from watching others. Just like drugs.
Someone, should tell them that in a free and open society, we're supposed to have more information, not less. I'm not going to tell them. Nobody listens to me anyway. But someone should.
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