A nice Friday
article from the San Francisco Chronicle to piss off anybody who wasn't already pissed off.
Washington -- The federal government under President Bush is classifying more information as secret, spending more to do it and falling further behind in dealing with the public's requests for information, a coalition of groups trying to combat secrecy in government reported Thursday.
Sure, we all knew this. But did we know that Chicken George, Chest Pain Cheney, and the rest of the true axis of evil have wasted
billions and billions of dollars of our money (apologies to Carl Sagan) to keep their secrets ... well, secret?
The article continues:
"Secrecy has increased dramatically in recent years under the policies of the current administration,'' the 30-organization coalition called
Openthegovernment.org said.
That tendency toward secrecy has increased since the 2001 terrorist attacks and was criticized in the Sept. 11 commission's report. It called for lifting the veil of secrecy surrounding the budget for the federal government's 15 intelligence agencies, which is widely estimated at $40 billion, although the official figure is classified. It also said that secrecy between the intelligence agencies hampered the war against terrorism by "stovepiping'' information within individual agencies rather than encouraging sharing across the intelligence community.
Openthegovernment's report said costs for classifying information and maintaining secrecy at federal agencies excluding the CIA hit $6.5 billion in 2003, when 14 million documents were classified. Figures from the National Archives' information security oversight office and elsewhere show that the number of documents being classified has jumped 40 percent from 2001.
The figure for how much the CIA spends on classifying information isn't available. It's classified.
Mmmm ... irony.
Edward Epstein, the Chronicle scribe who wrote this piece, also pointed out that the Bush League is so adept at keeping information secret and at dragging their feet about disclosing public information that "requests for information made today from the Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley (Los Angeles County) would probably be filled in 2008." Probably.
So why all the secrets? You guessed it:
The House subcommittee chairman, Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., said declassifying more information while keeping genuine secrets classified would help the war against terrorists. "Fewer people classifying fewer secrets would better protect national security by focusing safeguards on truly sensitive information while allowing far wider dissemination of the facts and analysis the 9/11 commission says must be shared,'' Shays said."
Grrr.