For Their Eyes Only

Every year, tens of thousands of children are paraded through the Romanesque museum of the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., to view the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. While the symbolism is likely lost on most youngsters, it's appropriate that these egalitarian blueprints, motivated in large part by the desire to keep the business of governing transparent, were placed in the care of NARA. Considering the current administration's little-known policy of information suppression over the past six years, one could also view these exhibits as more than a little ironic.

NARA, whose slogan is 'Democracy Starts Here,' was established in 1934 to ensure that the public has access to documents that track the actions of federal officials, including those in Congress and the military. Some of the papers in the agency's care, especially those with a military history, are classified. And keeping that information secret is not cheap-in 2005, according to the Information Security Oversight Office, it cost $7.7 billion to, among other things, pay for storage and security.

In 1995, in part because of these sorts of costs, President Bill Clinton signed an executive order mandating that all documents under NARA's purview and over 25 years old be made public, unless they met strict national security requirements, such as a paper tracking a foreign spy or information on atomic energy secrets. An op-ed piece in the New York Times (Jan. 3, 1996) hailed the move as 'a landmark victory for open government.'

Some four years later, the U.S. intelligence community was embarrassed by a leak of U.S. nuclear secrets to China. In reaction, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a congressional amendment to severely limit declassification. Shortly after the legislation took effect, a number of government agencies, including the CIA and the Department of Defense, pulled 55 boxes of State Department documents off the shelves in the National Archives and reclassified them as secret.

When President George W. Bush took office, one of his first acts was to further amend Clinton's executive order and delay the declassification of Reagan-era documents. The original intent was to protect military secrets, but between 2000 and 2006 the program expanded to include anything embarrassing to the government, including information on unsanctioned CIA programs and military intelligence blunders that occurred more than 40 years ago. The reclassifications were effected in secret with little to no oversight.