The most secretive government in history is reclassifying as secret, documents that have already been declassified. What are they hiding?

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secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

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was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.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 is funny to me that this administration is constantly asking for our trust and all the while they are continuing to operate in a covert manner. The excuse they use is that they don't want to tip their hand to the terrorists, but that is all bullshit! What possible use could a terrorist in 2006 find in declassified documents from the 1950's? This is all about keeping you and me in the dark.

This administration wants to not be challenged on decisions that it well knows will cause most Americans to become alarmed. They are destroying our freedoms behind our backs and they do not want us to turn around and catch them.

But some of the documents being reclassified are just mindboggling.

How is this a threat to national security? One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

Is the goal to convince Americans that America has never made any mistakes? Because that is just ignorant.