Government Secrecy and Historical Documents

From the Washington Post, a good op-ed by a reporter for the paper who is writing a book about the Cuban Missile Crisis. In the opinion piece, Michael Dobbs writes about the Reclassification Program that is taking documents once opened to researchers are now being kept as classified. Dobbs writes, "It turns out that most government documents on the missile crisis -- including the principal Pentagon and State Department records collections -- are still classified. Hundreds of documents released to researchers a decade ago have since been withdrawn as part of a controversial -- itself secret -- reclassification program. And the backlog of Freedom of Information Act requests to the National Archives has grown to two, three or even five years."

Click here to read the op-ed.

--Tom Hayes