Erasing History. When several times a week some news report about our government makes one think Orwell, Kafka, Kundera, what to think about what's happening to our country? The latest example, and hardly the most outrageous, this Scott Shane story from the NYT Tuesday, "US Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review":

In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

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was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.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." [...]

It's not like this is the end of the world. After all, it's just documents in archives being removed. But the secret order to reclassify and remove the tens of thousands of historical government documents is just one more fact in the accumulation of recent facts that show how these guys choose to behave in ways absurd, bureaucratic and obsessed with secrecy to the detriment of the public's right to know even when there's no remotely good reason. To add insult to injury, the very reclassification order itself is classified, as Shane reports. Is this how a democracy behaves? It has little to do that I can see with partisan politics, nothing apparent to do with current national security concerns, and everything to do with these guys' basic lack of regard for the public, in favor of government operating with increasing powers and less opportunity for scrutiny or even reflection at home. Just one more glint of sunshine snuffed out with a quiet order.

Posted by Laura at February 20, 2006 10:59 PM