Librarian's Rant

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review

... it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."

"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."

After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.

Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.

"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."

While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

Climate Expert Says NASA Tried to Silence Him

James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff to review his coming lectures, papers, postings on the Goddard Web site and requests for interviews from journalists.

Dr. Hansen said he would ignore the restrictions. "They feel their job is to be this censor of information going out to the public," he said.

..."Communicating with the public seems to be essential," he said, "because public concern is probably the only thing capable of overcoming the special interests that have obfuscated the topic."

Message forwarded from LAW-LIB archive
http://lawlibrary.ucdavis.edu/LAWLIB/Dec05/0165.html

The Lovesong of A. Radical Militant Librarian
From: Robert S. Ryan
Date: 12/16/05

The Lovesong of A. Radical Militant Librarian

Oh, I am just an RML
I'm militant. I'm radical.
I plot to thwart the FBI
When I am on sabbatical.

I hold the most bizarre beliefs,
Perhaps they are exotic -
Due process, law and privacy
Can still be Patriotic

That there are ways that we can fight
Fanatics and their wrath
And still stay free and not eject
The baby with the bath

When panic strikes, the pendulum
Will often swing too far
Like Robert Frost, I think we should
Choose something like a star

Let's not, with hearts as pure as snow
Destroy what we would save
You can't preserve our way of life
If freedom's in the grave

Our history will clearly show
We often go to far
McCarthy and the Black List
And the camp at Manzanar

Our saving grace - with passing time
We recognize our sin
This time, let's anticipate
And not go plunging in

Let's avoid the smallest step
Upon the slippery slope.
As corny as it sounds, we are
Still mankind's greatest hope.

We blunder, stumble, make mistakes
Yet somehow, we still try.
And many eyes still dance
To see that banner in the sky.

So let's be proud to be among
The many who say "Wait,
Let's think this through, let's not be rash."
Before it is too late.

If we and the FBI do not
Agree, well, that's our right.
It doesn't mean we don't support
Our country in this fight.

The disagreement is the thing that shows
Our country's worth the cost.
The blood, the lives, the tears, the sweat
That we and ours have lost.

So wear your button proudly
Beause you're an RML
And if some folks don't like it, well,
They can go to...someplace else where discussions like
this aren't permitted.

Bob Ryan
Hill, Farrer & Burrill
Los Angeles
(And, as always, the opinions expressed here are mine
and not those of
Hill, Farrer or Burrill, all of whom are deceased. Yet
still patriotic.)

"While radical militant librarians kick us around, true terrorists benefit from Office of Intelligence Policy and Review's failure to let us use the tools given to us"

Other papers, such as The Kansas City Star, removed the strip entirely, replacing it with an older one.

"We thought it was in bad taste and probably unclear to a lot of people why we would be using the term," said Steve Shirk, the Star's managing editor/news.