"National security" seems to be to this administration what "abracadabra" is to stage magicians.
I'm almost 70, and I've never seen an administration so jealous of its secrets, and so aggressive when its attempt to classify EVERYTHING fail. Beat Nixon's White House by a mile.
There are many reasons for keeping things secret. We can imagine, for instance, why Cheney wanted his energy policy meetings to be kept secret. But another reason is that feverishly classifying everything in sight creates a mass of data that the administration can then leak to the press under controlled conditions. It allows the people with the secrets to create a kind of pseudoworld of current events and a more carefully and purposfully shaped version of recent history.
Not that it matters much. Few people seem to be objecting and the press is paying little attention. Most likely, we feel the impact will fall on the other guy -- forever.
Fully a third of documents pulled from the National Archives for supposed national security reasons should not have been removed, the Archives’ audit found. The New York Times reports that even of the remaining two-thirds, there was little to recommend removal.
[R]emoval of the remaining two-thirds was technically justified, though many had already been published or contained old secrets with little practical import.
Even withdrawing those documents that included truly significant secrets may have done more harm than good by calling new attention to the sensitivity of records that researchers had read and photocopied for years, the officials said.
"The irony is that some of these reviews have actually exacerbated any possible damage to national security," said J. William Leonard, head of the archives’ Information Security Oversight Office and the government’s overseer of classification of records.
The audit found that 25,315 documents were withdrawn from public access and that 64 percent met the minimal criteria for classification. Top reclassifiers, in order: the Air Force, CIA, the Department of Energy, the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the presidential libraries, which are part of the National Archives system.
CIA reviewers deliberately classified some "purely unclassified" documents simply to obscure the removal of other documents they judged to be genuinely sensitive. In addition, the audit showed, some records that had always been unclassified were classified by C.I.A. reviewers — "often 50 years later" — because they contained a name of a C.I.A. official who had received a copy.
