Shhhhhh....

Too much secrecy
The New York TimesWEDNESDAY, JULY 13, 2005

The Bush administration is classifying the documents to be kept from public scrutiny at the rate of 125 a minute. The move toward greater secrecy has nearly doubled the number of documents annually hidden from public view — to well more than 15 million last year, nearly twice the number classified in 2001 — as bureaucrats have invented more amorphous categories like ''sensitive security information.'' At the same time, the declassification of documents required under the Freedom of Information Act has been choked down to a fraction of what it was a decade ago, leaving the government working behind an ever darker, ever denser screen.

Thomas Kean, the co-chairman of the independent commission on the Sept. 11 attacks, warns that the official twilight could not be more counterproductive for security. ''The best ally we have in protecting ourselves against terrorism is an informed public,'' Kean said. The government's failure to prevent Sept. 11 was linked to barriers in the sharing of information between agencies and with the public, he said, not to leaks of sensitive information.

The White House has also been increasing the number of offices empowered to classify information, extending the privilege to agencies like the Agriculture Department. Terrorist attacks on agriculture are a legitimate worry, but we somehow suspect that the power may prove more useful for cloaking nonlethal cases of mismanagement and bureaucratic embarrassment. The federal Information Security Oversight Office finds secrecy reaching such ludicrous levels as classifying information already in school textbooks and Supreme Court decisions.

No one questions the need for governments to keep secret things that truly need to be kept secret, especially in combating terrorists. But the government's addiction to secrecy is making an unnecessary casualty of the openness vital to democracy.
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So what else is new? This BushCo administration is so crooked, so filled with lies and evasions and dirty dealing and stealing that the last thing they want is for the public to be able to see what they've done and are doing.
Wrap...