From The Boston Globe, 5/4/04:

Bush team takes hit on secret files

By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff

WASHINGTON --

The Bush administration is coming under fire for allegedly allowing
political concerns to determine what it deems to be sensitive national
security material after a series of document declassifications that
critics contend were timed for strategic advantage.

In several recent cases, the administration first refused requests for
information by saying that releasing it would jeopardize national
security, then released that same information itself at a moment when
it became politically convenient to do so -- leaving the impression
that it was safe to release all along.

After first refusing to allow Congress to see a memo about Al Qaeda
from a month before the 2001 attacks, and then letting only some of
the 9/11 Commission see it in private, the White House released the
entire document to quell rising public pressure.

After the Justice Department fought the American Civil Liberties Union
in court to suppress statistics on how often it used the Patriot Act,
Attorney General John Ashcroft called a news conference and announced
them.

Last week, President Bush himself rebuked Ashcroft for declassifying
Justice Department memos from the Clinton era showing deliberations
involving Jamie Gorelick, the number two Justice official under
Clinton who is now a member of the 9/11 Commission, over how the CIA
and FBI could share terrorism information.

Concern over the integrity of the national security secrecy system
comes as a new oversight report has revealed a surge in secrecy: the
US government classified 14 million new national-security secrets last
year, up from 11 million in the previous year and 8 million the year
before.

Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive project at
George Washington University, said the rising wave of
national-security classifications, coupled with disclosures of
formerly secret information that "doesn't pass the guffaw test,"
jeopardizes the protection of legitimate secrets, such as the names of
covert operatives or the designs of weapons systems.

"If people inside the system see dubious secrets being placed into the
security system or see strategic declassifications being done for
purely political reasons, they are less likely to be bound by their
own oaths," he said.

"It undermines the credibility of the system from both the inside and
the outside. To the extent that we are all American citizens and agree
that there are real secrets that need to be protected, then this is
bad. This is damaging to our national security."

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment
yesterday.

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They never respond. That's characteristic of this fascist gang.

Harry