Freedom of Information Act?

What information? What Freedom?

One is tempted to see it as the stuff of comic opera: demented latter day Mikados on the D'Oyly Carte stage classifying a 30 year old laundry list, vacation postcards and a 1956 phone book found in the office supply closet.

I keep reminding myself that most “Slippery Slope” arguments depend on a hidden non-sequitur and just because we approach some point beyond which it may be difficult to recover the balanced and functional democracy held hostage by its current caretakers, it’s still not inevitable.

The paranoid Poobah's in charge are doing all they can to rewrite logic, history, science and the Law, but they are so aware of their own ineptitude, or perhaps so consumed by Stalinesque paranoia that they have gone to extremes. Perhaps they simply don’t care that some of us catch on, perhaps they have come to believe that we are all well trained or just stupid, but a more subtle cover up might have been more successful.

According to today’s New York Times, intelligence agencies have been combing the National Archives, removing from public access more than 55,000 pages of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians. Is this dangerous information that the public should have? What about a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets? Public knowledge for a decade, It’s been erased from history.

Historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program. Another document gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.

The National Archives are not allowed to tell us who is doing this or why, but apparently more than a million bucks have been spent reviewing documents that have been available for 25 years or more and scholars who have file cabinets full of public information are afraid they may suddenly find themselves accused of espionage.

Where are Gilbert and Sullivan when you need them?