For 7 Years, A Secret Program to Reclassify Documents
by TChris
Recoiling from the open government philosophy of the Clinton administration, intelligence agencies have reclassified more than 55,000 documents since 1999 that had previously been declassified and, in some cases, published by the State Department.
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.
Historians worry that the reclassification program will prevent them from accessing materials once available at presidential libraries and the National Archives. Some reclassification decisions may be based on the historian's nemesis: "an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago." Some historians see "a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act."
Reclassifying documents that scholars have already reviewed is pointless.
"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."
Get your reclassified documents here:
The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv, on Tuesday.
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