What IS the Justification for “Re-secretizing”?
Come on, people–what possible justification can there be for re-classifiying ancient records of how many and which kinds of nuclear weapons the US government deployed through 1971? The stuff was made public, widely reported in newspapers at the time, and is completely irrelevant to today’s security concerns.
And as a taxpayer, I can only hope this is a typo: The Department of Energy alone…
…has reported to Congress that 6,640 pages have been withdrawn from public access (at a cost of $3,313 per page)
The cost per page cited here is almost exactly half the number of pages, so I’m hoping someone garbled their statistics. Surely there are better uses for $21,998,320 than to obscure information from a public that already has access, but now has to work much harder; if you’ve never had the “pleasure” of scanning old newspapers on microfilm, I can tell you that the Web is a heck of a lot easier. These are the people that are supposed to be fiscally conservative? What can they be doing to run up three thousand dollars in expenses for every single page?
Is this just a case of Bush Administration paranoia, or is it still another instance of a more disturbing trend to take away the rights of Americans, pull down the curtain on any sort of openness in government, and make it ever-harder for journalists and researchers to do their work?
Unfortunately, I suspect the latter.
