Nothing, absolutely nothing, is immune from state interference. Not even in the Land of the Free. Not even the past.
The original story here seems to be the tip of a bureaucratic iceberg. Last weeks further comment from the New York Times (which I can not find online, sorry):
[A]t the [US] National Archives, documents have been disappearing since 1999 because intelligence officials have wanted them to. And under the terms of two disturbing agreements – with the C.I.A. and the Air Force – the National Archives has been allowing officials to reclassify declassified documents, which means removing them from the public eye. So far 55,000 pages, some of them from the 1950’s [sic], have vanished. […]
What makes all this seem preposterous is that the agreements themselves prohibit the National Archives from revealing why the documents were removed. They are aparently secret enough that no-one can be told why they are secret – so secret, in fact, that the arrangement to reclassify them is also secret. According to the agreement with the C.I.A., employees are also prohibited from telling anyone that the C.I.A. was responsible for removing reclassified documents.
Next time you hear that saw about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance, remember eternity is outside time. You do not just have to keep watch on this moment.
It’s so, so, SO secret, the CIA–or somebody–erased all the preceding comments!
The back story here is that the Clinton administration declassified a bunch of stuff over the objections of the intelligence community back in the mid-90’s. Then they reversed themselves and decided that some of it needed to be classified.
Unfortunately, there is no means or reclassifying just the important stuff without signaling that it is in fact important. so they end up reclassifying a bunch of innocuous stuff to hide the critical materials. This makes the entire process look silly to those unfamiliar with how real intelligence works.
None of us viewing the problem from the outside can judge whether the reclassifications are justified or not because we have no idea what pattern the spooks are trying to hide.
Actually, there are some things you can still find online in public hands that are reclassified in government hands. For instance, the official reports on Project Pluto (nuclear rocket propulsion) have been reclassified, as have a number of other reports to do with nuclear technology. But there are other things as well: the wholesale cancellation and suppression of entirely peaceful nuke technologies, like space based nuke-electric Brayton Cycle generators, radioisotope Stirling generators: things which have been developed since the Clinton declassification program of the early 1990’s, were wholly in the public domain, but have since disappeared.
What they are trying to do is obvious, Shannon Love. Whether it is reasonable to permit them to do it is another question.
I submit that how intelligence agencies really work has no direct relationship to real intelligence. Knowledge is power, but the exercise of power is not evidence of knowledge, though the prestige of the security sector depends on its sponsors believing that it is.
Guy, though you’re unable to find online the NY Time article from which you quote in this post, could you possibly cite the date of the specific article?