The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.
The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.
"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report. " . . . The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before."
The report comes at a time when the Bush administration's penchant for government secrecy has troubled researchers and bred controversy over agency efforts to withhold even seemingly innocuous information. The National Archives was embroiled in scandal during the spring when it was disclosed that the agency had for years kept secret a reclassification program under which the CIA, the Air Force and other agencies removed thousands of records from public shelves.
This is , of course, all just a red herring designed to throw the media off of the trail of the secrets that this administration really wants to keep secret. By re-classifying so many things as secret, it makes it so much easier to hide the documents that you want to keep from the prying eyes of journalists buried in a huge jumble of newly re-classified government papers. It is hiding your potentially embarrassing needle in an information haystack.
This President has talked about making his mark on history over and over again, and I believe that he is aware that if Americans really knew just how many lies and deceptions this administration had used they would damn them in the history books for all time. He is clumsily trying to polish his image for the future generations who do not have first hand knowledge of how bungled this Presidency really was.
However Bush and Co. are making an ignorant mistake. Just like he re-classified this information, a future President may just as easily de-classify it again. No, there is no place to hide from the judgement of history Mr. Bush. The truth will be discovered and you will supplant Nixon as our very worst President ever.
The government has been hiding information for awhile. they deny that they used climbers to put up spy devices on the peaks in India to spy into china and used plutonium to power it. this was during the cold war. they are still denying it even though climbers are talking about it. there is a book coming out about it by Pete Takeda
ReplyDelete