8/21/06
Proving there’s nothing the Bush Administration hates more than public information, they have inexplicably begun classifying old documents. “But Ryan,” you may be saying, “didn’t they do that like six months ago?”
“Oh,” I say, “you must be referring to 55,000 pages of documents previously free and open to the public that were suddenly yanked from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), and reclassified as secret. Those included terribly secret and sensitive information like: the 1948 State Department’s map and foreign periodicals procurement programs.”
No, these are new ones! The agency which is doing all this is shrouded in a cloak of secrecy so retarded that it doesn’t even have a name, but you can bet the CIA is on board. What information is now so hush-hush that nobody should have access to it? The number of weapons in the US nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. Just to remind you, that ended about fifteen years ago. And even President Reagan’s administration, which held the previous record for secret paranoia, routinely released this information to our enemy the Soviet Union. But now, nearly two decades after that regime ceased to exist, we need to “keep it on the D.L.,” apparently.
William Burr, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, said
"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons... The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before."
I fail to see how this info, if it didn’t help the über-powerful Soviet machine, could be of any damage now that the Cold War is over and the reports are wildly out-of-date.
I’ll grant you that the sheer ridiculousness and outright hilarity of reclassifying documents that have already been public anywhere from 10 years to forever seems like innocuous government idiocy, especially when you consider that most of the information is totally boring and completely unreadable, but it doesn’t speak well of intentions. Why doesn’t the Bush administration just get it over with and go ahead and don black cloaks and have secret police goose-stepping around the country? If not an ominous sign of the hatred of our evil overlords for an informed public, than it is at the very least a massively wasteful government program from the party that supposedly wants smaller government. Ohhhh man. What a bunch of schmucks.
Sources: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/4129838.html
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB179/
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