Mikaela says:
Intelligence agencies with the support of the Bush administration have been reclassifying previously de-classified documents. These are documents that were sitting on open shelves in the National Archives -- available to all and photocopied freely by historians for years. Some documents were even published in histories by the State Department! As a rule, documents are to be declassified after 25 years unless they pose a significant risk to national safety.
Now, 9,500 documents (8,000 of them just since Bush took office) have been "disappeared."
When Clinton took office, he issued an order to declassify a massive amount of previously secret material in the interest of an open society. Transparent government. Accountability, some might call it. John Podesta was personally involved with this effort, and you can hear him talk about it in a story aired on This American Life.
When Bush took over, he issued a contradictory executive order to re-classify many documents, and as a whole, his administration has balked at providing information -- even to Congress -- requested under the Freedom of Information Act.
Information is power. Clinton knew it and gave it to the people. Bush knew it and kept it for himself. Strange days, indeed.
From today's New York Times:
The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. ...But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.
Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.
"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."
"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."
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