It’s no secret that the Bush II administration is the most secretive in history. But now, evidence indicates that Bush attempted to reclassify declassified information that’s been publicly accessible for years. With the help of the National Archives, no less. So writes Christopher Lee in a Washington Post article this morning. The Air Force and CIA, among other federal agencies, were aided by the National Archives to withdraw “thousands of historical documents from public access.”
Lee quotes Thomas Blanton, the executive director of the National Security Archive, a nonprofit research library at George Washington University, as saying this is an attempt by Bush to revise history:
“... the National Archives basically aided and abetted a covert operation that whited out the nation’s history by reclassifying previously released documents.”
Some 9,500 records—more than 55,000 pages, many dating from the 1940s and 1950s—had been reclassified since 1999, according to Lee’s report.
At the same time, according to Ryan Singel’s report for Wired News, AT&T is trying to recall documents detailing how the company helped the government “set up a massive internet wiretap operation in its San Francisco facilities.”
“The documents which the [Electronic Frontier Foundation] filed under a temporary seal last Wednesday, purportedly detail how AT&T diverts internet traffic to the National Security Agency via a secret room in San Francisco and allege that such rooms exist in other AT&T switching centers.”
Mark Klein, a former AT&T technician, alleged last week that the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program extends to “wholesale monitoring of the nation’s internet communications.”
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