Editorial: Government hiding a time bomb

Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2006 | 7:12 a.m.

As if trying to keep its current dealings secret isn't bad enough, the federal government is pulling from public access and reclassifying as secret thousands of decades-old documents that historians characterize as "mundane."

According to The New York Times, U.S. intelligence agencies have been quietly working for seven years at the National Archives to reclassify as secret previously open documents, many of which date from the Korean War and the Cold War. The effort has required about 30 full-time employees working in a specially designed secure room that cost more than $1 million to build and equip.

The work started in 1999 after half a dozen agencies, including the CIA, objected to the release of formerly sensitive information under a 1995 order that was signed by President Bill Clinton. The effort to hide historical documents from public view stepped up under the Bush administration. Of the 9,500 documents from which access has been revoked, more than 8,000 have been yanked since President Bush took office, the Times reports.

A surprise? Not hardly. The Bush administration has more secrets than Colonel Sanders. It's what they're seeking to hide that's mystifying - such as a 1962 telegram from then-U.S. Ambassador to Yugoslavia George F. Kennan that contains an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article about China's nuclear weapons program.

Admittedly, documents revealing information that could trigger national security breaches should not be released. But some of the documents seem to have been withdrawn to save the government from embarrassment - such as the CIA's Oct. 12, 1950, analysis stating that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Two weeks later 300,000 Chinese troops invaded Korea.

Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of George Washington University's National Security Archive, told the Times, "It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has."

At the least, it seems a colossal waste of time and taxpayer money to pay 30 people to work full time covering up government's 50-year-old missteps. If embarrassing correspondence and actions are what they're trying to conceal, the Bush administration has plenty to keep these reviewers busy.