They just don’t know how to handle classified — or declassified — information

February 21, 2006

The irony of the overly-secretive Bush White House is that they have incoherent standards — they’re leaking information that should be classified, but classifying old information that has sat on public book-shelves for years.

In terms of recent, sensitive intelligence, the White House has authorized top staffers to disclose classified information to reporters about Iraq’s weapons capability in June and July 2003. For that matter, the same officials aren’t terribly good at keeping the identity of undercover CIA agents under wraps, and the Vice President doesn’t seem entirely clear on what he can and cannot declassify.

But in terms of decades-old military information that’s already been widely published, the administration suddenly takes the classification process seriously.

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secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

Apparently, in 1999, the CIA decided that Clinton was too willing to make old information publicly accessible, so the agency began restoring classified status to thousands of previously declassified pages. But once Bush took office, the CIA ramped up the effort, and began a secret initiative to keep more secrets.

Indeed, no one would have even known about this reclassification drive were it not for Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian, who noticed that documents he’d copied years ago had been pulled from the 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.”

Among the sillier withdrawals was a 1948 CIA memo describing a plan to drop propaganda leaflets from balloons behind the Iron Curtain. The State Department published the memo in 1996 — and the Bush administration reclassified it in 2001.

This will no doubt do wonders for the administration’s less-than-sterling reputation for its handling of classified materials.

When I first heard that Cheney had “authorized” Libby to leak information from the National Intelligence Estimate that Cheney “declassified”, I thought exactly about this Clinton era program. Look at the hoops he had to set up for the National Archives to declassify Korean War documents. And then the CIA reversed the process.

But Cheney can declassy (selected) portions of the NIE on his own authority?

Bull

  • Animal Farm eh? Get rid of the past and rewrite it as you seem fit eh? Pretty soon they will release documents showing Bush got 10 purple hearts defending the country against Kerry in Nam.

  • Lance, was that Freudian slip, saying Cheney could “declassy” information? Because that is perfect, that’s what slime balls like him do.

    Are you sure Jeremy that Bush never got 10 purple hearts, because I’m sure that’s what bogie probably believes already.

  • DTK,

    Yes, I would properly type “Declassify”.

    But I have to admit, once Cheney got his hands on the stuff and used it to promote an unnecessary war, it was declassed.

    The man can make anything vulgar, just look what he did for the Senate floor 😉

  • What did they do leave the actual choices to interns or others whose critical thinking skills were undeveloped? With some of this – why bother?

  • I don’t spend a lot of time on conspiracy theories, but this does seem very strange. Other than raw stupidity or the need of low-level agents to look busy for the boss, one of the few reasons I can think of for doing this would be that these seemingly innocent documents might contribute to piecing together some sort of trail to a more sinister and potent substrata of government misconduct, and therefore they have to be removed.

    Ignoring the fact that copies do exist in various hands and that calling attention to them this way just waves a big red flag that wouldn’t have happened if they just left them alone.

    So what is it that they’re so afraid of people finding out? Might a little backtracking of the story trail produce something interesting? Is there a common thread between them that a little creative thought might ferret out?

    We conjecture, you decide.

  • I agree with Curmudgeon. I feel like they are trying to hide something. The information is not in all the documents. The amount of documents is a smokescreen for whatever information they are really trying to hide.

    I seem to remember that sometime recently(1-2 years maybe) there was another declassification/reclassifcation issue that came up. After a short search, I first found

    Reclassification reappears

    Federal agents from the CIA, Defense Department and Department of Energy in February 2005 searched the University of Washington’s library archives to reclassify records once donated by the late Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson.

    link — separateNewspaper article

    I can’t remember the speculation as to why right now..I assume something related to the Cheney Energy Task Force.

  • It’s funny how all this stupidity just makes things worse for the morons. It reminds me of a story from WW2, in which a science-fiction writer told a story about how to create an atomic bomb, which was a remarkably-accurate guess of what exactly needed doing. It was published in “Astounding,” then edited by the always-estimable John W. Campbell. When the FBI contacted him about the story, wanting to contact the writer and perhaps “disappear” him – for at least the duration of the war – Campbell managed to convince them that taking any action at all on the story would merely highlight its importance and give the real spies a direction to aim at, while ignoring it would allow it to remain merely an obscure s-f story.

    Of course, back in those days, the kind of FBI agents who got assigned to the Manhattan Project were the smart ones, so they saw the logic of Campbell’s argument and followed it. Campbell never revealed the story until sometime in the 1960s.

    If the current crop of idiots are reclassifying things to try and hide something bigger, all they’re doing is erecting neon arrows pointing the way. But then, if they weren’t drooling idiots, they wouldn’t be working in the Imperial Bureaucracy, since they would have passed the IQ test too high.

  • This is just part of the administrations plan to boost employment…once everything is classified, they go back and declassify it. Then start over again.

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