Data Dump
Some people use every excuse to tell the world that the Bush administration is "the most secretive" ever to exist. Most of this stems from the fact that the administration has stopped governing by leak to a large (but not total) degree. So how do you explain this? The Bush administration has enforced an executive order by Bill Clinton that automatically declassifies any secret record after 25 years unless specific exemptions are claimed in advance. On January 1st, 2007 enormous numbers of secret records will become freely available.
At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many F.B.I. cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government’s first automatic declassification of records.
Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.
Historians say the deadline, created in the Clinton administration but enforced, to the surprise of some scholars, by the secrecy-prone Bush administration, has had huge effects on public access, despite the large numbers of intelligence documents that have been exempted.
And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request.
Many historians had expected President Bush to scrap the deadline. His administration has overseen the reclassification of many historical files and restricted access to presidential papers of past administrations, as well as contemporary records.
Bush allowed two extensions for agencies to figure out what couldn't be released, but told everyone three years ago that there would be no others.
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The Anchoress » Some links to make you happy — December 22, 2006 @ 3:49 pm
By Ray, December 22, 2006 @ 4:56 pm
Your equation is wrong.
8 + 9 x 8 = 8 + 72 = 80
By Ray, December 22, 2006 @ 4:58 pm
5 + 6 x 0 = 5 + (6 x 0) = 5 + 0 = 5
By Gaius, December 22, 2006 @ 5:01 pm
Every once in a while it seems to get it wrong – it is generated randomly, I didn’t put it in myself.
By Ray, December 22, 2006 @ 5:07 pm
So now that we have that out of the way, where was I?
You do realize that this material is 25 years old? The “most secretive” designation is because of current information that Bush administration is not releasing. Examples are legion (like that, I throw you that bone since you seem to like the Romans, me too, I wish they had succeeded in defeating the Christian menace).
Just the latest example is classifying the violence statistics from Iraq beginning in September. Why? The data wasn’t classified before, but suddenly it is.