The Public's Right-To-Know

[Mr. Shaman]

Thanks to President Obama, (actual) U.S. History is once-again available.....​

February 21, 2006​

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secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

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was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.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."

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents​

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June 10, 2011​

"The upcoming final release of the Pentagon Papers on June 13 actually may contain new information not previously published, according to expert analysis and documentation posted today by the National Security Archive. This new material would go beyond the diplomatic volumes that the U.S. government first declassified in part in the late 1970s.

The public release next week of the full Pentagon Papers—40 years after their leaked publication in the media—is a welcome event on many levels: including closing a bizarre chapter in the annals of U.S. government secrecy practices while opening another window into one of the pivotal episodes of modern world history, the Vietnam War. The Pentagon Papers are a milestone document in American political history both for their contents and for the legal and political battles that raged over the principles involved in their revelation and the tactics to which the Nixon administration resorted in its efforts to neutralize the leak. In addition, in and of themselves, the contents of the Pentagon Papers have informed histories of the American war in Vietnam for two generations and are likely to return to the fore today with the opening of material previously suppressed in the study.

Upon entering office, the Obama Administration encountered a backlog of over 400 million pages of still-secret documents that had also passed their reasonable expiration dates. Among other actions, it created the National Declassification Center to introduce uniformity into secrecy policy and issued orders that the backlog be eliminated. The release of the Pentagon Papers represents the most substantial achievement to date of the Obama Administration’s effort to reduce the mountain of no-longer useful secrets. The National Security Archive extends its appreciation to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for this action. We look forward to the opening of the remainder of these materials and others as well.

NARA TO RELEASE THE PENTAGON PAPERS!

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[Mad Scientist]

The Obama Administration is less transparent than the previous one:
YID With LID: Transparency Farce By the Numbers, Obama More Secretive Than Bush

 

[LordBrownTrout]

Uh... sure, shaman.

 

[Mr. Shaman]

Uh... sure, shaman.

Uh...O.K., Brownie.