Silly Secrecy?

It turns out that the Bush administration is moving to reclassify information that has not been classified before. What kind of information? Historical information about how many different kinds of strategic nuclear missles we used to have. For example:

In a 1971 appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, forinstance, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird offered a toaster-shapedchart showing, among other things, that the United States had 30strategic bomber squadrons, 54 Titan intercontinental ballisticmissiles and 1,000 Minuteman missiles.

Those numbers, made public on March 9, 1971, are redacted in a copy of the chart obtained by the archive's researchers in January as part of a declassified government history of the U.S. air and missile defense system, according to archive officials. [emphasis mine]

OK, so, outdated information that is useful to no one except historians is now being classified. Several people in this article call this "silly secrecy." Or is it something else entirely?

In general, what's true is that we can only keep tabs on the kinds of things our government is doing with information about it. I don't think that this actual information means anything to them. I think what is important to them is to continually reduce the amount of information available to the people of this country. This is just another symptom of a diseased government. One that seems to continue to want to ignore that it is sick. And, of course, the real people who suffer from this disease is us.

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