Our best military minds at work!
America is re-classifying information about its nuclear arsenal, much of it decades old, that has been in the public domain for several years.
Researchers at the National Security Archive, an independent library that belongs to The George Washington University, found that officials from the Pentagon and US Department of Energy have been trawling through reports that have been released to the public and deleting numbers of missiles, despite some of the statistics being decades old.
Dr William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive, said that figures released in the 1960s and 1970s, including some in annual reports published the Secretary of Defence, had been re-designated as secret.
A…report published by the National Security Archive in March, for instance, found that a faulty CIA intelligence estimate published 12 days before the Chinese army entered North Korea in 1950 was re-designated as secret in 2001, despite being written about by historians for years.
The National Security Archive estimated that the Department of Energy has spent $22 million re-classifying the nuclear information, reviewing around 200 million pages of released documents and removing 6,640 from the public record, at a cost of more than $3,300 per page.
Your taxpayer dollars at work!
Well I wonder what they are up to now.
Hey, who was Secretary of Defense in the 70s….
Better days will come… It’ll just take decades to undo the damage done by this administration… but better days will come…
We have all become enemies of our own government. We have become a psuedemocracy. A government that is run by elected officals that are really just puppets of a power structure everyone pretends does not exist.
wow, this has 1984 written all over it…
control the present -> control the past -> control the future
ISNT this
Locking the barn AFTER the horse got away???
Locking hte Barn after the Tractor got stolen??
Locking then Hen house AFTER the fox got in??
I’m sorry…but I THINK all that info has been copied and shipped out.
I for one welcome our new …
All of you have a right to know everything and the government reclassifying information must be a sign of a grand cover up and the theft of our rights. Get over yourself your not that important. If you want to know classified matarial and the reason why stuff is reclassified, classfied, or unclassified join the military or work for the DoD or DoD Contractor where youll get a clearence and develope need to know. Until then stop bitching about stuff that is NOT your right to know. Just because your a citizen and you live in the US does not give you the “right” to know everything about the government and military and to think it does shows just how far off base you are. Also as long as we’re doing a civics lesson Bush, Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld and other Republican figure heads you hate dont make decisions on what is reclassifed they have more important things to do. This decison was made by either a Civil Service employee who works for no administration or a Military officer who also works for no administration. Both will keep their job no matter who is in office and many have served under bush and clinton. To try and politicize this as some republican cover up is rediculous.
9,10….
My comments above STILL stand, uncontested..
Reclassifying already declassified material just makes them look stupid. You can’t get the toothpaste back in the tube but that not going to stop them trying.
9, 11, 12 – What do the documents say? You have no idea sure if they have already been copied then the cat is out of the bag but the idea of reclassifying them is to prevent future copying because they have become relevant in a way that was not identified when they were unclassified. A great example of this is if the military were to redeploy a certain older technology or if they had information that was made public regarding Iran in the 1980s but now given current events they wish to take this previous military knowledge back out of the public domain. There are a million different reasons why documents can/are reclassified, this is common practice. Also even unclassified matarial is treated with certain percausions as to who it can be released to. The article does not say if the documents were publicly releasable but if they werent then you still have to have a reason to access the documents. A person off the street can not just walk in and ask for them. For example a document might be unclassified but releasable only to the DOJ and therefore a civilian cannot just walk in and ask to see that information.
#1, you’ll never find out. It’s since been classified.
#2, Don Rumsfeld (75-77) springs to mind! Then there was Dick Cheney (89-93)…
#3, so long as The Party doesn’t get a lock on the elections, the system has the opportunity to correct itself. What I really wish we had is approval voting.
#6, yes. Freightening.
#9, #13
Slow down there cowboy chris. The article does say they were publicly released, to wit: ‘..found that officials from the Pentagon and US Department of Energy have been trawling through reports that have been released to the public….’
Frankly it is the pointless idiocy and the wasteful way in which it is acomplished that makes it most certaintly an issue we as citizens should be concerned about. It is goverment by the people and for the people, least it is supposed to be. Are there ‘secrets’ that not everyone should know? Of course there are. But responsible citizens will question why these actions are being taken. It is our duty to do so. If the documents are so sensitive that they must be re-classified after years of public display, why were they released in the first place? These and other questions need to be asked. The present administration may not have made these decisions, but they are responsible never the less, they are our leadership and must be held accountable for the actions of that in which they lead. Citizenship in the United States is an obligation you have to work ‘at’ and ‘for’, to maintain the common standard spelled out over 200 years ago. You would do well to remember that.
Greymoon. Thanks i cant read obviously or i would have seen they were publically releasable. To counter your point documents are often made publically releasable and unclassified in broad sweeps by the government. For example all documents having to do with a certain subject from a certain time will be made public. It is impossible to catch all documents that may contain a small bit of classified material or reference a document that the US wishes to keep classified. Many documents produced by the military, DoD, DoD Contractors and many other contractors are classified and then converted after a period of time to unclassified. This equates to millions of documents being produced by/for the government per year. If the government was to follow the industry standard of six sigma that would mean for every million documents there are 3.4 defects. To put that in terms of this that would mean for every million documents released 3.4 would contain classified matarial. When you consider the multiple sources of the reports and the pure size of the government when it comes to these reports six sigma is impossible to achieve so therefor it is 100% within the realm of possibilty and most likely that it is not waste of tax payer money or a government cover up but instead just a common mistake. A mistake that steps should be taken to correct in the future sure but mistakes are going to happen. The simple way to correct this is to just not release anything but then people get all up in arms about big government hiding information that is their “right” to know. I feel a little understanding and acceptance that the government cant be perfect would go a long way. Seems to me in modern society your damned if you do and damned if you dont. If they didnt release documents regularly they are hiding something. When they do and they mess up and correct their mistake they are wasting money and covering something up. Furthermore where Americans now in days have gotten the idea that they have the right to know Government secrets (Not you just in general) is beyond me. If you want access to classified matarial take a job that will grant you that just be prepared for the backround checks and stringent rules that are in place to protect that matarial.
While the administration is responsible for what happens under its watch blaming them for reclassifying documents is a stretch. This is like a stop light goes out in your home down so you scream that the governor and mayor are corrupt and attempting to hinder the flow of traffic for their own good. This is rediculous. Is the Governor in charge of road maintance, Yes, but is he really responsible for the traffic light being out, no. A little understanding would go a long way espicially if people werent so eager to blame the administration for everything. They have made their share of mistakes and should shoulder blame where it is deserved. This is just not one of those times.
#16six sigma is impossible to achieve
Comment by Chris — 8/22/2006 @ 11:40 am
It would easier to achieve if you’d breath for a second and create paragraphs and use better grammar.
How do you expect me to be able to criticize you for being a lapdog to the neo-conservative movement if I’m not actually able to fully comprehend what you are ranting on about in the first place?
This is about as stupid as:
The USA, thinking THEY ALONE, were smart enough to make an A’ Bomb, H bomb, Neutron bomb…
THAt we alone have the ABILITY to make an ICBM…
That WE ALONE can make cars…
And to THINK that Napalm has killed more persons then the A bomb.
#16, chris, the Six Sigma program is a fraud. Using that as an example to explain why the government is taking an action is crap. The only correlation between Six Sigma and the Bush Administration is trying to fool people with numbers pulled from a hat.
A Governor (or the Mayor) may not be responsible if the stop light fails. He is ultimately responsible if it repeatedly fails because the state purchased cheap bulbs that have a short life. He would also be responsible if the light wasn’t repaired for a significance length of time. He is also responsible if his administration puts its repair low on a list.
I know most neo-cons have a difficult time with the responsibility concept. It has always been so much easier to blame Clinton. The responsibility always has and always will remain with the dude in charge.