Government's penchant for Secrecy Turns Obsessive...

Public Documents Now Private...


Talk about being obsessed by secrecy!

It seems that there's never enough secrecy for the Bush folks.

Now, they're taking documents that were public and making them private.


We all know how this government works!

We've learned painfully about government snooping. We've discovered that prisoners are being tortured in foreign countries. And we know that things are not always the way the government would like to believe they are. Witness the Clean Air program that puts OSHA on hold for ten years. Or the Clean Water Act that doesn't mandate the cleaning up of rivers or streams. Or the economic stimulus program that consists of giving tax breaks to millionaires, money that never trickles back to the economy. And we know if you violate their modus operandi, secrecy can be inverted to make public items that are secret as in, for example, the leaking of the name of a CIA station chief because her husband didn't play ball.

But this seems to be going just a little too far!...

As a result of a secret program instituted by the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from the public record historic documents that had been in the public domain.

The restoration of classified status to documents previously made public may apply to as many as 55,000 documents that had been previously photocopied or otherwise used by historians, writers and others...

This ongoing effort actually accelerated after Bush took office and the events of 9/11.

This program was discovered by Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian who discovered that documents he had referred to before or photocopied were no longer available. Many of these dated back to the Korean war or even before to embrace the Cold War.

After receiving complaints from Aid and others concerned about having access to such records, the Information Security Oversight Office of the National Archives J. William Leonard authorized an audit of the missing records. According to Mr. Leonard, "if those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed."
He went on to add, "It just boggles the mind."

Mr. Leonard does not have the authority to reclassify records classified now as secret but as the Chief Adviser to the White House on Classification, he could urge the White House to reclassify them....

To this writer it seems that would be akin to someone suffering from black lung asking the White House to reverse the burning of coal...

Les Aaron