Every so often the government declassifies secret documents. In fact, they are required to do so twenty-five years after the document was created, unless, of course, exceptional conditions exist. Well, come to find out, since 1999, the government has been reclassifying as secret documents that they had previously declassified. This has not been a small task as they have reclassified 55,000 documents so far and they have about thirty people reviewing declassified documents every day. If these reviewers made only $50,000 a year, you're looking at another $1,500,000 of our money down the drain.
This whole program is ludicrous as many of the documents were published by the State Department. Copies of a good many are in historian's file cabinets. Some of the reclassifications appear to be attempts to cover embarassing incidents, such as the CIA claiming China would not intervene in the Korean War two weeks before they actually did.
Further, although the law requires reclassification to be reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, this has not been done. What in the Lord's name is going on? We have had an unbelievable increase in the number of classified documents at a very significant cost. Now, we have a situation where what was okay to look at yesterday is verboten today. Sound like 1984 to you?
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