The CIA Is Closing the Office That Declassifies Historical Documents 67
Daniel_Stuckey writes "As a result of the sequester-induced budget cuts, the CIA is closing the Historical Collections Division office, which declassifies historical documents, and transferring the divisions responsibilities to the office that handles FOIA requests. The Historical Collections Division is described on its website as 'an important part of CIA's ongoing effort to be more open and to provide for more public accountability.' It is a 'voluntary declassification program that focuses on records of historical value,' including information on the Vietnam War, spy satellites, the Bay of Pigs and other historical scandals and operations."
No more disagreement.. among .. historians (Score:5, Interesting)
In the 1980's a CIA staff historian wrote a secret history of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Thanks to FOIA, some of the work was released in the 1990's.
One final volume was locked up as the CIA "does not want to discourage disagreement among its historians."
Welcome to a world where the CIA knows that any basic history can "confuse the public".
Thanks to the sequester-induced budget cuts more US history can be kept safe with ever better long term document hygiene.
Expected bureaucractic response (Score:5, Interesting)
Just what did anyone reasonably expect? That in response to budget cuts a bureaucracy would suddenly get religion and root out the fat & waste? Why?
That fat and waste has resisted previous cuts and is remarkably good at protecting itself. Spends all its energy at self-defense. Otherwise it would have been long gone.
Useful activities spend at least some of their efforts at delivering services so has less for self-defense. Besides, they probably think they're too important to cut. And they are -- so what better way to stop the cutting?
Re:Typical (Score:3, Interesting)
Not to mention the fact that FOIA requests are always backlogged, 30 day response requirements be damned.
Well the Historical Collections Division is legally backlogged by at least 25 years. What's an extra 30 days? ;-)
Re:It not about paper (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot of the shit we pulled decades ago with overthrowing foreign governments, which eventually came back to bite us in the ass, that angers me, but I'm not going to demand we jail Regan's administration and CIA officials from back then. Time heals a lot of wounds, and they know this. Why should it concern them if things from the JFK era are declassified? Perhaps it's because the clock is ticking down for some of the current government officials' earlier sins. Like maybe there's a memo that would otherwise be declassified in the next ten years from some underling typed up and put in the record that was the patriot act down to the punctuation, and a note that the next terrorist attack would be a good opportunity to slip it in?
Re:in b4 the liberals... (Score:1, Interesting)