http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/3673370.html
Feb. 20, 2006, 11:11PM
Thousands of papers secretly reclassified
By SCOTT SHANE
New York Times
WASHINGTON - In a 7-year-old secret program at the National Archives,
intelligence agencies have removed from public access thousands of
historical documents that had been available for years, including some
already published by the State Department and others photocopied years
ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously
declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency
and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of
sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by
President Clinton.
It accelerated after President Bush took office and especially after
the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
But because the reclassification program is shrouded in secrecy -
governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National
Archives even from saying which agencies are involved - it continued
virtually without outside notice until December.
That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew Aid, noticed that
dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the
archives' open shelves.
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 Cold War.
After Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information
Security Oversight Office began an audit of the reclassification
program.
J. William Leonard, director of the office, 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after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should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," Leonard
said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."
If Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his
office could not unilaterally release them.
As the chief adviser to the White House on classification, however, he
could urge a reversal of the reclassification program.
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TC