The Daily Caveat has written on this issue before. For the past six years, a 1995 executive order signed under the Clinton administration designed to correct the ill-advised declassification of some older national security related documents. This is one Clinton-era policy that the current administration has embraced with a ruththless efficiency, which has used the executive order as an open mandate to re-classify vast swathes of previously public documents as secret.

Dating back more than a year, increasing attention has been brought to the clandestine practice, most recently when New York-are investigator, Matthew M. Aid who took his turn at whistleblowing, upon discovering that the CIA and the Airforce had been removing documents from public availability - with the complicity of the National Archives itself.

The Archives claims that it will no longer enter into any such secret agreements, and Allen Weinstein, the Chief Archivist of the United States and a (somwhat controversial) Bush Administration appointee has also, somewhat surprisingly, pushed for the re-opening of some reclassified documents.

However, despite protestations to the contrary, the document blackout continues unabated. Via The Washington Post:

Cold War Missiles Target of Blackout - Documents Altered To Conceal Data

By Christopher Lee
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 21, 2006; A01

The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War.

The Pentagon and the Department of Energy are treating as national security secrets the historical totals of Minuteman, Titan II and other missiles, blacking out the information on previously public documents, according to a new report by the National Security Archive. The archive is a nonprofit research library housed at George Washington University.

"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report. " . . . The Pentagon is now trying to keep secret numbers of strategic weapons that have never been classified before"...

They are stealing your history, people! Read on...and then call your congressman.

-- MDT