Slashdot Mirror
CIA Secretly Reclassifying Documents
SetupWeasel writes "The New York Times is reporting that the CIA is secretly reclassfying documents. How did we catch on? Historians have some of the documents. From the article: "eight [of the] reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, 'Foreign Relations of the United States.'" Are our intelligence agencies rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both? We do know that they are ignoring a 2003 law that requires formal reclassifications. It puts that whole Google censorship thing in a whole new light. (Americans aren't allowed to see that video.)"
It puts that whole Google censorship thing in a whole new light. (Americans aren't allowed to see that video.)
Thanks to Websense, neither can I (UK).
PHP
For interested Americans, the 'big boom' video censored by Google may be viewed here.
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
In Russia Secret Documents Reclassify you!
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: February 21, 2006
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 -- In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.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 Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
But because the reclassification program is itself 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was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.
Mr. 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 early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."
After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.
Mr. Leonard 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," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."
If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.
A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.
Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.
Another 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.
Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean Wa
.. are given cart-blanche to declare their own secrets, they will forever be out of control.
America: your country has been usurped by your CIA and its masters. The American Public no longer control that agency.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Everyone is always worried about governments "rewriting history" i.e. from the post "Are our intelligence agencies rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both?" This here is not an example of that. The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it. Whether that is as bad is debatable.
This poster in no way agrees with what the CIA is doing, just pointing out an oft made error. This here is not some Orwellian nightmare.
quis custodiet ipsos custodes
Doesn't sound very secret to me. Isn't secret when nobody knows about it? And why does slashdot assume the only possible explanations are A) the government is evil and rewriting history or B) the government is stupid or C) the government is evil? Watch out! Sounds as big as the wiretap scandal! Oh wait, nobody cares about that anymore either.
The google video is 17 s of an explosion taped from far away with the description:
"Detonation of Improvised Explosive Device used against Coalition forces. We found this one before they could use it against us."
Are Americans actually not allowed to see it? Doesn't make much sense.
Uttering logically derived and empirically supported truths to the disciples of the orthodox establishment.
Should we worry that people are doing this (although I suspect others in the past have) or that they are being caught doing this? Maybe we're trying harder to catch these people, but if your average newspaper can catch these people, what does it say about the security we've got in place to cover tracks?
In some ways I'm glad that my civil rights can't be screwed because such lax idiots are in control, but at the same time I fear all my personal information is being held by people I wouldn't trust with my TV remote.
I like muppets.
I would hate to see what could be done with a little more time.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
... aren't Americans allowed to see, and what are the links to it? I'd, personally, like to see as much war footage as possible, without censorship.
..
Anyone know of an online archive of Iraq War footage? Lets see the reality of it all, not what the media-lapdogs are 'privileged' to be allowed to show us
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Documents are always getting reclassified, both up and down. If you will all recall a number of previously accessible public works documents concerning dams and power plants were removed post 9/11.
The thing is that something that wasn't secret before may become sensitive in the future due to changing conditions. Also things that are secret now may become less critical in the future and thus be released. This is the whole reason for review procedures.
Only people who are constantly willing to believe the worst in the government are going to see a grand conspiracy here.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Any sufficiently advanced man is indistinguishable from God
Yeah. Google won't let me watch it. I get the message:
This video is not playable in your country.
And yes, I do live in the Land of the Free (TM). And my civil rights like taking it up the ass. They enjoy it.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Google has censored videos from Iraq before.
I'm shocked that a well-thought-out group of folks like the current Bush administration would be obsessed with secrecy and a cover of past bureaucratic bungling.
This doesn't fit their profile at all!
There is no such thing as "stupidly paranoid" when it comes to intel agencies.
Anyone who has held a security clearence can tell you - the government over-classifies. From my brief stint with a security clearence, I can honestly say I didn't learn anything from the documents I viewed that one couldn't reach by common sense or looking around on the internet.
While I think most will agree that classification is important to basic security - protecting sources and methods saves lives - there is little doubt that the US government uses it too much and always has. There is always a fear that even a slight mention in a report or stating information that we shouldn't know and only know through a secret source or method will blow the program and potentially waste millions or, worse, put someone's life in danger.
Most of the time this is unwarranted and, in the case of these specific documents, one has to wonder a great deal about it. That said, from time to time, it's absolutely necessary. (Following is an anecdote from a professor I had who worked for Senate Intelligence Committe for a while and, yes, was a Democrat) In the late 1970's, an FBI author of a book on the Rosenburg incident, for example, was angered by what he believed to be censorship regarding important information on the case. After going through the motions to allow him to print that part what he wanted, he found the reason - the information he wanted to print came from a source who, after more than 30 years, was still reporting from the USSR. Putting it in his book would have, without doubt, led to his death.
The "missile gap" of the late 50's - early 60's is another example - it existed only in public perception, and this had been confirmed by secret intelligence programs. But, rather than divulge this information and risk intelligence-gathering the programs, Kennedy was allowed to use it as a political plank.
Don't get me wrong - the government absolutely over classifies data, something I know perfectly well from experience. But, from time to time, it has been extremely important to keep what we know under wraps.
http://www.cryptome.org/ They archive all kinds of stuff that was being pulled of the Internet in the post 9/11 world.
Is anyone able to explain why in the world we can't see this video in the US?
I know google censors in china, please for the love of god tell me they aren't censoroing in the US.
Just why IS this video "not playable"?
Happiness does not come from having much, but from being attached to little.
Prostituting yourself for karma. Eat balls, tripmastermonkey.
"Only people who are constantly willing to believe the worst in the government are going to see a grand conspiracy here."
And if at this point you're not willing to believe the worst in the government, you haven't paid attention in the slightest, and need to widen the range of your sources of information.
Stupidly paranoid? The intelligence establishment of today is run by war criminals like John Negroponte. This reclassification scheme is covering illegal activities of the past, and is part of a wider strategy of making the intelligence services less and less accountable to scrutiny both by the public and by the judicial branch of the government.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, 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. ooops.
I find it surprising just how far off reality the intelligence community can be. I am not sure why this is. So much money is spent, yet the best answers they can come up with are still so often just plain wrong.
I am sure it is very difficult to do, but given the amount of resources thrown into these efforts, it is surprising we don't see better results. Even with the recent Iraq war it really does look like the intelligence was bungled, and, even worse, people who pointed out that the intelligence was bungled were ignored. Perhaps they should outsource their whole intelligence operation.
They want to cover up what was done and said historically in order look better now. I wonder if the handshake between President Saddam Hussein and Donald Rumsfield will be reclassified, or, how long it will take for someone to dig up a photograph of him hugging bin Laden.
FREE - Java, J2EE and Ajax Audiobooks for Software Developers - www.DeveloperAdvantage.com
This just in:
In the latest step to protect us all from terrorists, the bill of rights has been re-classified.
Dick Cheney revealed that he has been given the executive power by the president to classify specific portions of the constitution. "If they know their rights, it will give them an edge in the war on terror. Agents have shown time and again that they can move much faster and more effectively without any constitutional entanglements. Americans understand that this is a necessary measure."
Rumors that a secret house-to-house gun collection program is underway have been vehemently denied by Whitehouse spokesman Scott McCleanone. Mr McC also deflected a question about the house's mysterious inability to find procedural documents relating to the drawing of articles of impeachment.
Lurking in the desert
As for historians who have access to these documents, having already made copies of their contents - what's their legal status now?
What if they were using some of these documents for a paper or thesis; presumably they'll have to re-write that part? How about if they've already published a paper quoting parts of those documents verbatim - would the classification then extend to their paper? The documents are being reclassified while the information is already public domain... while it's going to be as ineffective as closing the door after the horse is long gone, does the classification thus legally extend to the information too?
My, that was a yummy potato!
Read about Frank Snepp and his book about Vietnam "Decent Interval" http://www.franksnepp.com/, particularly this http://www.franksnepp.com/court.htm/.
CIA? That should now be pronounced CYA.
It's becoming very hard to believe in a "government for the people, by the people" when "the people" have no idea as to what people are up too.
"Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it", or in our case "We the people are doomed to repeat the past, because almost all the people still don't have the clearance to view the classified history".
There is always a fear that even a slight mention in a report or stating information that we shouldn't know and only know through a secret source or method will blow the program and potentially waste millions or, worse, put someone's life in danger.
Unless that person happens to threaten your war profiteering...
btw all that video is FAKE.
The people recording it are demo, they was detonating a roadside bomb, it was not used against anyone.
The people talking in background had southern drawls, english, and are laughing. Plus its a freakin humvee they are recording from with peices on hood from previous explosions that same day they used the humvee. lol
People are so naive
The head of the national archives and records administration (NARA), a supposedly independent administration, has been replaced at the request of top levels of the Bush regime. Not only is that rather unusual, but there are some big issues with the new appointment, Weinstein. All that means is that NARA now has a politcal appointee at its head, unlikely to stand up for freedom of information.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
When a normal person doesn't follow the law, then he's "breaking" the law. When the government doesn't follow the law, then it's "ignoring" the law. Why isn't the same word used in both cases?
While I'm all for civil liberties and freedom, rather than the apparent post 9/11 rollbacks that we are undergoing, I was incredibly amused by the options available: ... rewriting history, stupidly paranoid, or both?
Same argument, if you ask me.
That being said, there is an inordinate amount of secrecy in today's government. I don't trust them with my tax return, let along the wellbeing of the American public in general. They keep spouting things like, "Releasing those torture pictures just emboldens the terrorists!" Oh, really? And what does limiting freedom of the press do? What does rolling back one of the pillars in the Bill of Rights do?
Exactly what is someone suppose to say? My goverment acts like 'the evil empire' I've seen in bad movies, except it's true.
You've got a goofy leader being played by a puppetmaster.
Invasions of other countries on false pretenses.
Holding people against their will in remote prisons.
Torturing people, and then deciding what is, and is not torture.
Massive "homeland" security, but not enough ability to defend against a hurricane.
Crony zealots getting into key PR positions in a scientific organization.
Secretly reclassifying documents.
Monitoring it's own populous with no judicial checks or balances.
So...
all you need is unwilling human experimentation to make super soliders...
anything else?
I too find registration a PITA, and worrisome because there are no guarantees about how the information will be used. But I'm growingly worried about NOT registering. Here's why...
A friend of mine is an editor for a large newspaper in a major US city. He tells me that newspapers are in serious trouble financially, significantly because of decreased ad revenue. People are reading paper newspapers less and online news sources more. From what I can tell he's not just bellyaching - newspapers are laying off lots of reporters.
I'm afraid that if newspapers get poorer and poorer, we citizens lose one of our country's main forces against political evils - skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth. By not registering for sites like the NYT, we make it harder for that newspaper to get ad revenue, which ultimately jeopardizes its ability to investigate the Bushs, Rumsfelds, and Nixons of the world.
The reason that they want to re-classify stuff is simple. The US gov has a policy of 'plausible deniability' meaning that everything they say is considered true ("because we say so") until someone finds evidence to the contrary. Remove the evidence and you got a new 'truth'.
This is part of a larger trend that is developing at a rapid pace in the US which embraces secrecy in place of open government, and propaganda instead of news. To think we used to scold the old USSR for this very same bullshit. It's shameful that so many Americans are comfortable with this new form of 'freedom'. It really is true: You don't really appreciate what you have until it's gone.
When all else fails, run.
The original parent is correct. The article is not describing an effort to rewrite documents, only to reclassify documents that were released. We can argue about whether that is a dumb idea (I think dumb), but it has nothing to do with rewriting history. Your example is a strawman.
Suddenly the Bill of Rights and the Constitution become "classified" too!
</tinfoil hat>
DEAD DEAD DEAD DELETE ME
>The "American Public" could remove the CIA from existence in the next pair of elections if it wanted.
I'm glad you think so. The american military could wipe the american public off the map in the next two minutes 'if it wanted to'.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
1. To keep someone from knowing something that he could use against you.
2. To keep someone from finding out something that would incriminate you.
3. To keep someone from finding out something that would be embarrassing for you.
4. To keep someone from knowing something that would turn their opinion against you.
Glad it's done by the feds, if I'd do that it might be illegal.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'm an American living in the continental United States and I can watch that video.
What is going on here is that the Clinton Administration did a blanket order to un-classify truckloads of documents without properly reviewing each one to see if it was appropriate to de-classify. It was a purely political and ideological decision about "open government", "right of the people to know", etc, etc, etc without any real review of the propriety of releasing each document. So the Bush Administration is reacting to reclassify them on the basis of being prudent (better safe than sorry, in their view). Unfortunately, the Bush Administration is not properly reviewing them either to see if they need to be reclassified. It all boils down to there not being enough government officials with enough time (and authority) on their hands to review each document and make an intelligent decision on whether it should be classified. This is not a case of being "evil", but a case erring on the side of caution, when you are too short-handed to do anything else.
Errr? We actually had those at one time?
Not trying to knock your friend or anything, but if the "quality" of reporting I'm seeing in any one of the major metro papers in my area are any indication of the "skilled investigative reporters" of which you speak, I'd be better off with some tin cans, some string, and those X-Ray glasses I got in a box of Cracker Jack as a kid. That way I could investigate them myself with the same level of "thoroughness". The only way to get decent coverage of any story is to use five or six different sources and try to piece together a coherent image of what the actual story should be.
People are stupid, sensationalism sells, and the people who are looking for actual news are being disenfranchised by things such as the Jackson trial and the latest political "scandal". If the papers want money, maybe they should improve the quality of their stories, eh?
Other elected governments get compared with Hitler by the neocons in the administration when they consolidate power. (for example Rumsfeld or Bush referring to Chavez or the Iranian leader, apparently in the desire to run up to another war).
Many interpret the acts of Bush as not much different, even some real conservatives.
When French King Louis 14 (1638-1715) famously said "l'etat, c'est moi" (the state, that's me), he meant that the king incarnates the state. Anything the king does is legal, official policy. No "separation of powers". Anything the kind doesn't like is a threat to national security, because the king's security is the state's security.
Making documents already circulated in public makes it harder for the public to know about them. It doesn't really stop determined researchers, like foreign intelligence agencies, from knowing about them. But it sure does make it more likely that embarassing info, evidence of crimes, and plans for goverment actions unacceptable to the public will be ignored by our fat, lazy corporate media.
This action by Bush's government is independently a demonstration of a King's privilege. But of course it doesn't stand alone. Over the past 5 years, there is a long list of individual actions by Bush's government to do thinks like an absolute monarch, including ignoring Congress, lying us into war, leaving the Gulf Coast unprotected, leaking CIA/WMD agent identity to protect a lie to send us to war, with only the TV spokesmodel facing any repercussions when the government is caught. It's obvious that the Bush doctrine of the unitary executive is Bushspeak for "the state, that's me".
--
make install -not war
I do not mind driving traffic to sites, or clicking through to read articles. But requiring a registration to do it means that they can track what articles you read. For advertising revenue, they should be able to gather statistics on page views. Registration should not be required. If they are interested in locations for demographic purposes, just require a click showing state. The trend to forced website registration is one more slide in privacy, and incurs spam. Just say no!
10 years of pleasuring the Queen... GAK!
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
Quoth matt martin:
Rumors that a secret house-to-house gun collection program is underway
The funny thing is that most of the NRA's "pry it out of my cold dead hands" types would support such a maneuver, if the word "terrorist" was (carefully?) applied to the pitch of the program.
Now that the War on Drugs has practically eroded the Fourth Amendment, and that the War on Terror is effectively neutering the First, there's not really that much left to prop up the Second.
It should be relatively easy to convince most gun owners that a "soldier in the War on Terror" (a.k.a. a policeman) should be given free reign to check any citizen's "potential weapons of mass destruction" (read: guns) to prevent "possible attacks on America" (read: using weapons in any way), and that only "those who hate America" and have something to hide would ever obstruct "our troops on the domestic front".
(To put it another way: "If we can take your voice, and take your privacy, we can also take your toys.")
For the record, I grew up around deer hunters, and I honestly don't care if anyone wants to own a gun legally -- even if most of the hunters I've met were, well, not the shiniest dimes in the jar.
But I really do wish most of the gun advocates in this country would understand that the ten articles of the Bill of Rights are all First Freedoms.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
"It puts that whole Google censorship thing in a whole new light. (Americans aren't allowed to see that video.)" Anyone who has ever actually posted a video to Google Video knows that you can specify which country you would like this viewable in. The option under advanced settings when posting is: ----------------- Regional restrict: -Do not restrict (your video will be seen by the largest audience possible) -Select countries where the video won't be shown: (LIST HERE) ----------------- Now quit playing the blame game on google for censoring.
Overall, I'm very pleased they want to reclassify. I expect errors in declassification, and more of these beta errors help convince me there are fewer alpha errors.
Or maybe that's what they wanted me to think all along :) But that would be crediting them with competence, which is nowhere in evidence.
would be good read.
Lem
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Nothing to worry about, move on. The documents in question are just being upgraded to the latest version of newspeak. Ignorance is strength. http://www.studentsfororwell.org/
"I'm afraid that if newspapers get poorer and poorer, we citizens lose one of our country's main forces against political evils - skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth."
But we lost that years ago when newspapers found that parrotting PR guff is a lot cheaper that employing real reporters. The dearth in solid investigative reporting is not just due to the Internet - the decline began long before the net was in everyone's home.
This is what happens when the State Department outsources its reclassification program to the lowest bidder. In this case the patent office was the lowest bidder. The same people that grant all the ridiculous patents are now doing the reclassification work. Don't be surprised when they reclassify the Declaration of Independance as top secret. Their reasoning being that the signers might be prosecuted by the King of England.
In other news port operations for 6 major ports on the East Coast of the U.S. will be turned over to Hamas. They submitted the lowest bid for the contract. Fall out from this contract will start figuratively immediately and literally in about 6 months, about the time Iran completes their first nuclear weapons.
This is still another example of outright lies and deceptions coming from the Bush Administration!
Instead of posting a google video of something exploding wouldn't it be better to post a link to the reclassified documents so we can see if there is anyting interesting and get a better idea of what the CIA is hiding?
"Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
So, if a document is reclassfied, is it a crime to have a copy that you got while it was 'open'? Is it 'forbidden knowledge'?
Centralized DRM management would help them in this, as they could magically delete any documents that you arent supposed to have anymore. And if you try to read it, you get snitched on by your own PC.
Yet another reason to retain dead-tree books.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
the sniping of 50 american soldiers? Are you allowed to view that, or is it censored?
I don't see what it is even news that the CIA is doing things secretly. They are a frickin' secret intelligence agency, their entire job is to do things secretly. Why are we surprised that they do things without alerting the New York Times? Why do we care?
I understand that now days alot of people are rightfully concerned about anything being done without public oversight, but we have to make some compromises... and we have to let people like the CIA keep to themselves as that is the only way they can do their job.
Oh and would people please get the fuck over that google video... that's not censorship you idiots. Go add a video to google video yourself and see that there are checkboxes for what countries you want it to be available in. Whoever added it just decided to exclude america.
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
I first heard about this program back in 02 on Jello Biafra's spoken word album "Machine Gun in the Clown's Hands". They're reclassifying documents all the way back through Regan's regime...possibly more.
At any rate, this is the first I've seen US media report on it. I was pretty sure the guardian (guardian.co.uk) had a report on this a long time ago.
"The american military could wipe the american public off the map..."
This is dumb for two reasons.
1) the military IS the American Public
2) Why hasn't such a wiping off the map occurred in Iraq? Do they have some magical powers that make them impervious to the military?
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
Virtually nobody in the general public understands how intelligence collecting works or how classification schemes are intended to thwart them. Hollywood and novels have conditioned us to think of vital information as being a small discrete units, say a single document, that must be protected. In truth, this is a mere plot device to create what Hitchcock called a "McGuffin", some single thing the characters can run around trying to obtain in order to drive the story. People believe that only a small amount of the "McGuffin" information honestly needs to be kept secret and that the rest is just dishonesty.
However, real-world intelligence does not come in discrete units but rather it arises from an analysis of broad patterns. It comes from data mining. Many separate and seemingly innocuous pieces of information are stitched together to create a picture of something hidden. The reason that the military (or even corporations) "over-classify" is to prevent the data mining of otherwise trivial items. The 1947 balloon program sounds historic and trivial but that program fit into a budget and organization somewhere and that effected the form of other, perhaps more interesting and relevant, programs.
Only someone from the inside, with a broad picture of how all the pieces fit together, could possibly judge whether the classification of any particular piece of information is justified or not. Anyone else is doing so based on ignorant hubris.
...you just need a direct link:
0 &secureurl=jAAAAGHT5VLfLfbNQCWwJUFBOtdp3LeC34rRwZm X2B74y_qsfJ4HU01ilqqG7HWG1IWH9r2rpmDG4YMgqQieiQ-W_ j4MHxbCeH62VyIO_iHQ4NTcON62mCjAOto8gryxTtbaGQVh85C 0Fmby4N24oYfP1NrFZOp5TgRd29dH6HIhVQM_7rxCZ3CBofige Sm2c0oE6Q&sigh=VQfw6ubr6TQlXIqv7affMg1LRCc&begin=0 &len=17429&docid=2053731645001034711
http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=
(sorry for the massive URL, I can't do anything about that)
"Neither, and these are the only real choices. (ie. choices of voting that might actually change the government in power) That, my friend, is a real grade AAAAA+++ fallacy."
I think it's called a false dichotomy, but why you use it then point out your use of it has confused me.
How pathetic are you that you follow me from topic to topic and waste all your mod points at once modding me down?
How have the newspaper reporters really been doing lately, however? I mean, they have practically allowed this administration to pass on lie after lie without real opposition and online news sources have been more willing and eager to go for the throat of the truth. I get my news online not just because it's easier, but because I find that it's more of a free press than the supposed "free press" of the NY Times or something which is at times easily becomes just another extension of corrupt politicians.
Judges and senates have been bought for gold; Esteem and love were never to be sold.
The "American Public" could remove the CIA from existence in the next pair of elections if it wanted
No, the "American Public" could vote in another candidate. Actually, they could pretty much vote *the* other candidate. Do you honestly think that given what's pretty much a choice between two candidates, voting one way will bring "peace and prosperity" whereas voting the other will bring "tragedy and despair?"
The chances of somehow getting a truely good candidate, managing to get him elected, and having him right-away use sweeping power to clean up decades of corruption and idiocy are pretty slim indeed.
The bottom-line here is that there are certain things worth keeping secret
Do you get the gist of RE-classifying? That means those documents were declassified, and for most intents and purposes therefore already viewable outside of classified channels. Now they've decided to make them secret again.
Nobody doubts the need for classified documents at times, but there's a difference between making something classified initially and classifying (or re-classifying) docuements that have been until recent publically viewable... especially when doing without proper process is breaking various laws.
"But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy -- governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved..."
Uhhh, yeah. The program that makes things secret is secret itself. It has always been this way.
This whole "super secrecy coverup what are you trying to hide" movement in the media is a *little* overboard. Do all administrations have secrets? Yes. Do administrations inherit secrets from the previous administrations? Yes. Are some more secretive than others? Yes. Should this be a cause for concern? Maybe. I don't know what the secrecy is about, but if we are in a state of war then I would expect some things to be more secret than others - even those things which may be previously unclassified.
Just my 2 cents, FWIW.
ConsultingFair.com
I checked with the Ministry of Truth and apparently this information is incorrect. These documents have always been classified. And we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Sure, at the level of individual documents nothing is being changed, but when you look at sets of documents, taken together as a whole, omitting some of them is essentially changing their meaning, _as a whole_. The example is not a straw man, it is still valid when you apply it to the level of sets of documents, rather than an individual document.
I linked to the wrong page above (it's related, but not what I wanted to link to). Here> ois the page I meant to link to.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
This proposes that the American Public is some sort of soveriegn quality unaffected and uninfluenced in its opinions by the policies that the elected "masters" and their CIA underlings support -- an assertion that is clearly not true.
Saying that the public can vote is not the same thing as saying that the public can think for itself. In point of fact, it can't. The public relies on information supplied to it by media, by historians, by talking heads, and by the government itself in order to make voting decisions.
If this information is in fact misleading, incomplete, inapplicable, or simply inaccurate without check (as can be the case in selective classification, or as we have seen from the Bush administration in relation to nearly every policy decision they've made), then the public's basis on which votes are made is flawed, and votes can be made to easily serve the master rather than the public.
Duh.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
The person who posted the video selected the so called censorship. Also, simply use a proxy to access the video: http://www.publicproxyservers.com/page1.html
just punch it into firefox's connection settings and watch away!
(I used the swedish one: 192.165.166.4 8080 anonymous Sweden)
This is either a diversion (something to keep your mind occupied with so you don't notice something really important slipping thru the door) or smokescreen - reclassifying specific target document would reveal some interested party clue of what is going on. We can assume it is very small number of documents that are critical.
Given the timing and keywords that surfaced, I'd say this has to do with now actual process of pulling mineral treasurechest of Balkans, Kosovo, out of Serbia, which was traditionaly a Russian ally - therefore you can conclude which side is backed up by US government.
Deeper into the subject and considering the 1950-1960s period, I guess that reports that document systematic fleeing of Serbs from Kosovo during the post-WWII period of communist rule are the target documents, because of anticipation that Serbian side will argue that so largely prevailing ethnic majority of Albanians of today's Kosovo was achieved thru similary objectionable means as was 1999 wartime expulsion of Albanians by Serbs.
I can imagine, given the war and postwar american simpathy for Serb nationalists' (anticomunists') cause that acquiring such information had been deemed worthy. Now, after the fall of Soviets and rise of nationalistic Russia, the Serbs are no longer american darlings. They may have hated Soviets, which made them useful for United States, but to them Russians without communism are another story. Well, in GEOGRAPHY, especially global political geography, To US, Russia is yet another Too Big Country in Northern Asia with Nukes (hot porridge) and it HAS TO be an Evil Empire. Therefore, Serbia is percieved as an (at least potential) proxy to it and therefore its whatsoever strategic importance (material sources, position controling certain routes, conscriptable manpower) must be neutralised or closely conrolled (i.e. by means of strategic military base in Kosovo).
You don't want to put your new allies into tough position yourself, do you?
Example: Once you (presumably inadvertently) "declassify" your private PGP key, you don't even bother trying to reclassify it (if you have a clue) -- you write it off as forever compromised and generate a new key. Continuing to act as though the previous key is still secret only reveals further info about you: that you are an idiot.
-- Old Man Kensey
Aside from that, free elections alone do not make a country a democracy. Governments must be accountable to the public: if the people who are supposed to vote do not know what the government does, how can they decide if they want to vote them back into office?
Or are we just supposed to vote whoever looks fatherly and reassuring on tv?
The USA was founded on the premise that all government is stupid and evil.
There is no option under the "Options" button to specify such a thing. I checked on the Mac version.w er=31701&topic=1488
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans
So, just how *do* you do what this guy is suggesting? Or is he wrong and Google intentionally not allowing it to be played?
"You're not a paying cutomer or willing to whore out your identity?
Well, you're not authorized for that story then, mate!"
There is no option under the "Options" button to specify such a thing. I checked on the Mac version.w er=31701&topic=1488
http://video.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?ans
So, just how *do* you do what this guy is suggesting? Or is he wrong and Google intentionally not allowing it to be played?
I hate to break it to you, but Robert Fisk carries his own biases and lets them affect his reporting.
I recall looking at the Independent's website one day and seeing two columns next to each other. One described a sweep made through Baghdad but a column of US armour and the other was a column by Fisk in which he stated that this sweep did not take place (or that the US forces had begun the sweep and retreated at the first sign of problems). His evidence for this: he saw one burned-out US armoured vehicle along the route.
So: we know that the sweep did take place. Fisk wrote a column based on almost no evidence that proved to be 100% incorrect. That's not what I call "factual".
If you can control what people know, you control what they beleive, and thus how they act. Right to the point where they're not even aware that they're being played.
The Iraq Invasion is a wonderful demonstration of the US Ministry of Truth. There are people in the US currently running around thinking the US invaded Iraq to "liberate" the people, not go after WMD which wasn't there.
You 1st worlders can't see it firsthand, it is so scary to watch.
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The newspapers will be forced to keep the skilled investigative reporters when they lay off all of their dead-weight reporters. Market forces determine that the lower quality reporters will find something else to do. In the information age we live in today, there is no reason to say more information -> better information. In fact, hiding good information with bad information makes it less accessable.
Come to think of it, maybe the CIA is trying to obfuscate their classified database by adding useless historical documents?
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
If I walk into a area where classified information is held or processed with a cell phone, PDA, or iPod I get in trouble.
If a senator - or just about anyone, actually - leaks information to the press, no problem! They're a brave whistleblower! Nevermind that people's lives are on the line or that they've broken the law.
The press has little stake in national security, just in scooping each other and selling papers. If programs like, say, new secret stealth satellites to replace our easily detectable ones make the news, all the better! Hooray! Who cares if our enemies now can predict when they're being observed and cover up projects that could cause great harm to our security. It's their right to know!
The government is not rewriting history, just denying access to it. Whether that is as bad is debatable... This here is not some Orwellian nightmare.
One of the examples from the story is a 1950 assessment by the intelligence folks to the effect that the People's Republic of China was unlikely to intervene directly in the Korean war that year. As anyone who watched an episode of two of "MASH" could tell you, the red Chinese did come across the border in 1950.
In that case, the history the CIA (and whatever other agencies -- we're not allowed to know who's even involved ) is erasing is the history of their own mistakes. If that's not "Orwellian" what is? Seriously.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Oh yes. I see your point. Deciding that it was embarassing that the CIA didn't think China would interfere in the Korean war is just the same as classifying detailed plans of power stations. Becuase you know, the Korean war is of vital, vital interest to Al-Qaeda.
I too say "fuck the papers". The editorial tenancies of most major American papers are so poor that people would probably be better off getting no news than laboring under the incorrect assumption that they are "well informed". Nowadays, we must turn to international papers in order to understand America's role in the world. Google News is a nearly perfect tool for this purpose. Stories that matter to the world as a whole get major coverage there, whereas they are typically shunned by American papers in favor of 'human interest' garbage or whatever else. The NYT is no exception here. People who wanted to stay up on world affairs have always turned to small journals for the real facts, where stories are researched in depth and typically well reported. Those journals aren't going away anytime soon. They don't have to worry about staying in the mainstream, and so they don't have to worry about having non-subscribers as part of their web based readership.
So the newspapers go away, and the reporters get jobs where the market needs them, not where the market has traditionally had them. That's how it's supposed to work.
Your business model will not be viable forever. Figure out how to make it work or someone else will.
The source story, with links to the documents, via coral.
Someone has the answer and he's buried half way down the page :(
A Cube, includes all devices to torture anyone who objects to the Occupation without needing large amounts of staff, also cleans up pesky evidence before declassification. Also can be used to program difficult people with desired mindset, with penalties of burning death, or various other implementable traps. Cost: $30bn + imprisonment of any dissenters, employment of a staff of 5(2 low level + 2 high level operators, + overseer).
However, in reality, we have Gitmo coming in a close second due to lack of ability to obtain private interviews (for all we know, the conditions are probably the same as the Cube with the lack of evidence. That is, the kind not from Occupation sources.). Abu Ghraib and its disillusioned people due to conditions going from evil, to a hair less than evil (same tainted sources!).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Of course there are going to be crappy newspapers and reporters--it's an industry like any other industry, and the crappy companies go out of business and the crappy reporters lose their jobs.
Parent's point is that even the best American newspapers--NYT, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, etc, are facing financial problems and may not be able to do the job they once did of reporting. Press really is an integral part of our process of government, as the founders recognized when they provided the press with the freedom to operate free from government control.
It's trite I know, but I think there is some truth to saying that if you think you can do a better job as a reporter, why don't you? Freedom of the press is not reserved to card-carrying reporters; anyone can start a newspaper or Web publication or blog.
But it's a fact that the big newspapers still break big stories, and (much more importantly) give them deep, multi-week attention, with detailed reporting, analysis, and opinion. And perhaps most importantly, big newspapers are still printed and archived and stored in libraries. Who archives the blog-o-sphere? Without newspapers, what will serve as the "first draft of history"?
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The reason these "seemingly innocuous" documents are being reclassified isn't because any one of them has a major significance; it's because they are all tiny little pieces of disparate information that may not mean much of their own, but taken in context with many other documents and facts they can be be put together to "paint a bigger picture."
This is by far not the only example, but here is one: In some cases that picture could show something like what the reality of some US policies (both acknowledged and unacknowledged) are/were - and that reality many times is much more harsh than they would like to lead the public to believe - and many times shows that some policies or events (especially US foreign policy in relation to places like centrel/south america as well as things which occurred as far as back WWII and the post war period)are/were completely opposite to things which are considered core "American values" (like promoting freedom and democracy, etc). This is just one aspect.
What these agencies have realized is that things have changed in regard to research; that how the internet and access to multitudes of documents and other sources/streams of information have made it possible for both credentialed and arm chair researchers alike to find, relate, assemble and analyze massive amounts of information in a way that (for the most part) was only available to intelligence agencies, governments and those with access to research libraries just 10 to 15 years ago.
People are stupid, sensationalism sells, and the people who are looking for actual news are being disenfranchised by things such as the Jackson trial and the latest political "scandal". If the papers want money, maybe they should improve the quality of their stories, eh?
Quality doesn't matter. What matters is that people want the content for free. If it was the most incredible awesome stupendous quality in the world, people would still want it for free. Digital property has no monetary value. The newspapers are starting to find that out.
The easy way to get around all these registrations is to use BugMeNot
http://www.bugmenot.com/
Steve
A work that expires before its copyright never enters the public domain and thus enjoys eternal copyright protection.
The reason that stories such as this one aren't broken BY INVESTIGATIVE reporting, rather than an old chap with a conscious at the national archives is that major institutions like the NY TIMES are now simply propaganda arms of major corporations, politically powerful families and other special interests. When our media is fat and happy, they could care less what their viewers want or need.
But people voting with their dollars is a good way to get their attention. Personally, I hope that the current mistrust and even revulsion to major media becomes epedemic. When the bottom line is really threatened, major media will attempt to renew it's trust with the public and will chase after the real scandals (such as 9/11) rather than sensationalism (such as OJ Simpson). If they fail to live up to that challenge, they deserve to go extinct. The net will evolve a means of mediating and refereeing the investigative reporting that is going on already in personal blogs and whatnot. It is certain to happen.
I imagine a future where the distribution of information and the act of investigating is so decentralized that it cannot be effectively harnessed, controlled, corrupted or subverted by powerful special interests. That future probably doesn't have major media in any significantly central or powerful position. IMHO
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
Reporters (in general, there are of course exceptions) are just glory mongers, waiting to pounce on a story that will make headlines and give them glory and prestige. They no more care about the public than terrorists. I can't tell you how many times I see a news story where the address and name of a person are given where that information should be kept private (for safety of the person if nothing else). Most of them hide the identity of their source, not because of what might happen to the person, but so that no one else can get the story. We all know how many times a source has be a figment of the reporter's imagination. Why? Because they can't make the story without making up the source.
Show me a good reporter, and I'll show you a dead one.
That doesn't mean that everything they do is detrimental to public interest, but their motive is usually just for their own aggrandizement.
The New Standard.
Female Prison Rape in NY
If they are laying off the reporters then they are laying off the wrong segment. They should be looking at the cost of paper and trying to figure out how to get away from the printing press alltogether.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
People are also driving horses and buggies less and driving cars more. If newspaper companies had a clue, they would stop printing paper editions altogether, and eliminate their immense printing and distribution costs, not to mention saving millions of trees.
Newspapers have to be the single greatest waste of paper outside of government. And today, with news spreading around the world almost as soon as it happens, anything that is printed and distributed is old news. How many gigawatts of energy are wasted every year to bring people 'news' that is hours old, and has already been analyzed to death on a thousand websites?
Newspapers need to reinvent themselves. They need to do what the first major newspapers did when they got started: Get people the news they want, faster than anyone else. Today, that means going beyond websites to RSS feeds, mobile device subscriptions, etc.
Imagine this scenario: A reporter is on his way somewhere when news happens. He pulls out his PDA, activates the live feed to his personal RSS-enabled website (which is a sub-page of a major newspaper's site), and starts dictating the story, using the built-in camera to stream video. The editor sees the feed coming in, classifies it according to topic, and an alert goes out to anyone who has subscribed to those topics. The reporter's PDA, in addition to streaming live video and audio, automatically transcribes his voice into text. People see, hear, and read the story on their computers, PDAs, cell phones, and RSS-enabled TVs.
Soon, a TV crew arrives, sets up their cameras, raises the dish on the van, and starts transmitting higher-quality video, but they have missed the start of the story, beaten to the scoop by a newspaper reporter.
That is the future of news reporting. And if the major newspapers don't set it up, someone else will.
Find environmentally and socially responsible products on http://buy-right.net
Poster1: "skilled investigative reporters with the resources to pursue stories in depth"
Poster2: "Errr? We actually had those at one time?"
Yes, we did, but the 1990s were a hallmark in the die-off of investigative journalism. Several books have been written about the subject. The 1990s produced a corporatized media system that tipped over a hump in concerns of financial controls, corporate ownership, and the vast background hum of elite influence. The end product is that major media outlets are streamlined to produce consumerist news (HappyNews{tm}), not anything else. Investigating financial topics, for instance, not only takes a while, but tends to cross some corporate donor or owner somewhere.
The (in)famous meta-story of the Fox News / Monsanto story is an outstanding example of how highly-corporatized ownership of news (and in fact all industries, as well as corruption of government) kills investigative journalism.
An American is much more likely now to find investigative journalism from independents like Greg Palast, and foreigners (notably, the BBC). His domestic media otherwise has been completely subverted and simply cannot be trusted.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
It comes to my mind that, censorship needs not always be the "hard" type as employed by the Chinese government.
By choosing what information to release and withhold, you can create a "soft" type censorship. Which, BTW, may be more useful since the censored has a more difficult time realizing that they're being censored.
The government may be able to make soldiers and other employees swear to secrecy, but if a civilian gets ahold of information there is no legitimate state power to prevent them from speaking or writing about it.
Wasn't this part of what the Pentagon Papers case was about? Once info has escaped the classified arena, the government has to meet a much heavier burden of proof than "that's classified" to enjoin its further dissemination.
See also the case where Tom Clancy claims he was visited by men with very thin watches after printing a photo of a foreign installation of some sort in Cardinal of the Kremlin. The photo in question was obtained through a foreign commercial satellite service (which at the time basically meant the French one, whose name I forget -- SPOT?) The spooks (allegedly) got the same photo (presumably from the same place) and someone unaware of its provenance marked it "classified". Came the day he published CotK, they were Not Amused that this "classified data" had been "leaked" to the best-seller list by an unclassified civilian.
-- Old Man Kensey
Perhaps *all* real conservatives.
The Trotskyite red-diapers who are currently using our armed forces as a cheap toy and conducting the most immense transfer of wealth in history, from the US to Europe, are disqualified from that category.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Sounds like the basis of democracy has been reduced to "ignorant hubris". No need for the government to inform citizens about government activities - it would just be "ignorant hubris" for an Ordinary Joe to try to make sense of their government activities. Gotta leave those to the experts with the right clearance.
to save them.
That being that online news source do not hold the same credibility as print. Especially in the eyes of the goverment, and particularly the White House.
Until online source are garaunteed that same order of protections as a newspaper, we need newspaper reporters.
This is why the blogger issue is so important. Imagine if there where no newspapers and bloggers and other online news sourse could be yanked, shut down or censored without anyone thinking twice about it?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Unfortunately you are all too correct in this. Having lived overseas for years and years I was surprised how controlled the US media. In fact almost all headlines are just bad news. Something which affects one family gets headlines and something which concerns all is hidden away on some late page.
The sensationalism has killed all including decent journalism.
Agreed. If I was going to be a journalist today (which I am not) and if I was interested in being one of those hard-hitting investigative reporters, I sure as hell wouldn't look for employment at a print newspaper.
I think there will always be a place for the wire services (Reuters, etc.), and reporters that they send out to various places to report facts, maybe they'll take up the investigative-journalism side. There's no reason why they would be put out of business, if they're actually a source of new information (instead of just parroting back information that's already available elsewhere).
Or maybe radio networks will start hiring journaists themselves in order to generate stories, if they can no longer just read the paper news headlines on the air and rehash them every morning. NPR, for example, probably has the resources to employ quite a few real journalists, if they really wanted to. (And might very well do so already.)
But like I said, I'm not a journalist. Why am I not? Other than that I'm just not sure it's my forte, there's precious little money in it compared to other careers. There's no money in it because there's really not much demand for "good journalism" by the public. The Internet isn't going to change that. You can't make people care about "hard-hitting journalism," when really all they want to see when they get home from work is a few feel-good, human interest stories about dogs saving people from burning buildings. And if the Internet and other new forms of media allow people to choose what they want to see, more power to them. It's not anyone's right to force information down anyone else's throat, no matter how ignorant or uninformed they may be.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Our newspaper, The News & Observer, had an expose last year on our elected state leaders (North Carolina) passing exemption after exemption over the last 12 years to certain specific industries to allow them to use overweight trucks on state roads. It was so bad that when the series of articles were published the author of one of the pending bills for a new industry to exempt defended the bill with something to the effect "it's available to all the other industries, it's unfair to not exempt this one".
This was a very good example of investigative reporting because it's also widely known that NC is only funding it's highway maintenance a fraction of what it needs to in order to maintain good roads. They published a substantial amount of analysis by road experts to show that the roads are heavily damaged by overweight vehicles.
These vehicles allowed on state roads were even overweight for federal roads and state roads are made substantially thinner than federal roads (thus saw more damage than an interstate would).
I think this was the best example of investigative reporting but it's not the only one. Articles like these are well worth the price of a subscription even if they occur infrequently.
Five years ago I'd have shouted something like "Americans, wake up!!!!".
I'll just go with "Oh well, fits right in with your objective press".
I think, therefore I am...I think.
What about the Clintons? Cmon, lets be fair here. They were/are pretty messed up.
"I have neither the wit, nor words, nor worth to stir mens blood, I speak only right on". Billy Shakespeare
http://www.cia.gov/robots.txt
/_notes /Templates /includes /javascript /scripts /graphics /search
# Disallow any type of crawler.
User-agent: *
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
Disallow:
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
"This video is not playable in your country."
Holy crap.
And here we were all worried about Google censoring things in China.
The quality of the "major newspapers" in the area in which I live is such that I only subscribe to strictly local papers. If the audience of the paper includes a lot of people who can check the story, the papers seem to do a better job. Otherwise...I can find better and more interesting fiction to read.
Which papers doubted the Iraq invasion? Which were skeptical about the evidence claimed for WMDs? Which made clear that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11? Garbage! Their intent is to distract people with a surfeit of useless and irrelevant information, so that when they DO slip in something both real and important, it gets lost in the garbage heap.
Is the times any better? I don't know. Perhaps...but I notice that around here they sell a different edition than they do in New York. "Tailored to local tastes"?
Gaffla appears to be the mot juste. (Sorry, that's a Dune reference, but I can't think of anything that expresses it more precisely.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Note that it's inconsistent to both claim that you want to read the articles without registering, and that the articles are too bad to be worth reading.
Yeah, I know different people said these things. Just pointing it out.
Ya know... instead of Google spending all the time and money digitizing copyrighted books, maybe it would be good if they spent those resources digitizing the government documents which are available today. That might allow that we - the citizens that fund this government - would have access to these documents when the government decides to reclassify them.
It seems like in 10 years that I will be able to go to the library and look at a work of fiction - but I won't be able to see govt. docs that are on the shelves today. Which will be more important to preserve for public access?
It used to be that major media outlets funded news departments at a loss, because they still thought that being honest and thorough was important to the American ethos. Once they made news departments responsible for turning a profit, you started to get sensationalism and editorialism, rather than true investigative journalism. It's a lot less expensive to have talking heads argue over why someone did what they did than actually go out there and find out.
Next time you watch the news, ask yourself: are they presenting facts, or are they presenting viewpoints? I don't watch Fox 'News', because nine tenths of it is editorializing and not reporting facts. CNN is slightly better on this count, but they're showing a disturbing trend towards fluff pieces, rather than actual substantive issues that really affect people.
On a side note, one of the last real, honest journalists was Peter Jennings. Every one of his reports was pure gold. He never gave his opinion, he presented the opinions of the people who the facts affected. He could get interviews with Israelis and Palestinians alike, because people simply didn't question his motives. Ask yourself if Bill O'Reilly, Tucker Carlson, or Jack Cafferty could get interviews like that. Until American news departments stop editorializing, the news will continue to suck.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
Well, I finally do one of the In Russia comments, where there is actually some relievance here and the moderator missed the irony.
A government's Secret Documents may often Classify people who are threats, and we should be mindful of that and fear abuse.
I have been doing some research on some historical documents on the and notice some of them were missing. I still have the downloaded copies but I have been referencing the URL and now they are gone. I think the US is trying to cover up mistakes of their past and removing the documents doesn't work. This is just like book burning of the Nazi era. Reality will still exist and there is no covering up or classifing that.
There is something rotten in the state of America.
It's ok to lie to software, man. You don't give your real name when you perform a Windows installation on your PC, do you?
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
quick, they know too much, get the black highliters out!
Because of the emphasis on coverups, we find out about the failures when they become disasters too big to cover up. (Katrina, Enron, Iraq, Abramoff, and the "no child left behind" mess come to mind.) For each of those, there was enough advance warning to deal with the problem, but that didn't happen. For each, there were official denials of the problem in the early stages. For each, appropriate corrective action wasn't taken in time.
This is what happens to organizations that believe their own spin.
Apparently history is like onions and ogres. It has lay-ers!
Cool. Then here's the deal. If you (generic "you") think that the NYT and Washington Post and London Times, etc., have unskilled reporters and publish unreliable crap ... then don't fucking read those papers.
But it is completely cynical to say "Fuck the Registration" (because all you're getting is "unskilled reporting") while at the same time violating copyright law and reposting content you have no legal right to so (presumably) that others can more intelligently discuss the matter at hand.
If the NYT is publishing crap, there's nothing to discuss and no reason at all to repost it. If it's not publishing crap, then for fuck's sake, register and get to the content legitimately. Playing it both ways is sickenly hypocrytical.
Even though there are a number of replies, I want to mention something. Local newspapers will continue to do fine, as in my rural county, they are the _only_ news outlet. However, national newspapers are, rightly, being bombarded by massive on-line competition. Well, that's just life. I think the NYT and the Wall Street Journal will continue to do okay, because they are just the biggest and baddest out there, while others are mostly fluff with badly designed websites.
As far as investigative reporting goes, I've been consistently impressed with Frontline on PBS. I watch that show occasionally, and see just how lame the weak 'investigative reporting' is on the big TV networks. Also, The News Hour kicks some serious ass. Just last night, they had a pro-Israel guy and pro-Palestine guy on, and Ray just moderated while they argued back and forth like children on the playground. That speaks volumes about the Israel and Palestine conflict (both sides are a bunch of grown-up babies--and flagrant bigots) that isn't represented much elsewhere.
Did you expect them to re-classify them and THEN tell you about it?
This is more media generated nitwittery from the NYLies^H^H^H^HTimes.
Read the book "Rouge State".
I personally also suggest that every American reads "Killing Hope" to get the picture of what their own nation really has been up to in the past.
I think this reclassification is all about hiding every connection to the bloody past.
I'd stay away from the News Hour with Jim Lehrer though. It's just another factoid news show, trying to get the audience to nod in agreement with silly ideologically motivated summaries and 'analyses' of the day's events. They interview smart people, but they just don't give them enough time to say anything substantive.
After all, I am strangely colored.
So you can't directly compare that maximum 10 year sentence with criminal penalties in the United States.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Get a blowjob from an intern.
That's the AP / CNN / Sunday morning cartoon version of that story and it's a great example of how emasculated the US media really is. Endless front pages were dedicated to minor but salacious details of the scandal while the disturbing details were swept under the rug. The actual story was relegated to political rags and highbrow gossip magazines read by fewer than 0.1% of the population. Do you even remember who Paula Jones is? Did you know that Clinton systematically harassed her for more than a year, simply because she refused to have sex with him? The details are far uglier than Clinton's crooked member. Don't you find it ironic that a story of abuse like that would be buried by a supporter of "women's rights" like Hillary Clinton? What's not surprising is how easily big company owned media can be silenced by the US Federal Government. There are only three or four hands to tie and the vast majority of the US population remains clueless.
The lesson to learn is the power of the government to quash embarrassing news and that it's not related to party affiliation.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I will enthusiastically support this reclassification of previously declassified material if someone will please explain to me how this will help us find Osama bin Laden.
Nowhere in anything I have dealt with for the government when classifying information, does it ever mention to alert media outlets that I am doing so. Is this some new procedure I am unaware of? Quick, we all have to be trained on it....
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
That said, an author of such a book with a Top Secret clearence and a need to know about the Rosenburg case could easily have clearance to the files and the data without a knowledge of the actual source. The author easily could've argued for declassification when he filed the book for approval with the Bureau, only to find out that he was later unable to use it.
As to this:
How hard would this have been: "Intelligence sources confirm that there is no significant missle gap between the United States and the Soviet Union, and in fact, the United States has much more capability than the Soviet Union." What "programs" are risked by this statement? None. You're just blaming this on the Kennedy campaign when it's pretty obvious than the intelligence community conspired to sell the "story" of the missle gap so that weapons manufacturers could make shitloads of money. Dissenters were threatened. Read the public statements of military officials (who definitely knew better) at the time.
Your evidence? You're making some interesting claims here, and ask me to study up on it (hint: I have, intelligence and security studies are an academic focus of mine).
As most conspiracy theorists, you blame everything on the defense industry. Sure, it has something to do with it, but you're ignoring the obvious other issues:
Now, moving on, why would stating we know how many missiles and bombers the Russians had caued a problem? It reveals both sources and methods for overhead observation - in this case, the U2, a still classified program made extremely sensitive due to the well-documented incident involving Gary Powers - and Soviet agents who knew the actual capability of missiles beyond what photographic imaging experts could bean count. These agents included Colonel Oleg V. Penkovsky (who would captured in 1962 and executed in the following year), English access agent Greville Wynne, and Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Pyotr Popov. (please see Richard Helms, "A Look Over My Shoulder", chapter 20 for further information).
I hate to burst your bubble, but loose lips do sink ships. Look no further than Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen for more recent examples. Brush up on your history while you're at it.
As a humorous aside, the confirmation image text is "knolls"... I thought there was only one grassy knoll?
Online you get a lot more primary news sources. You get bloggers who were at events, you get links to articles from Taiwan on Chinese oppression of the Falun Gong, you get police reports on criminals. It is biased, it is gritty, it is real, and ironically it is more reliable. 20 years ago if something happened to someone in Taiwan news reporters would be flown out to investigate. Today, with major newspapers you get the newspaper's version of Reuter's version of an article that appeared in an newspaper in Taiwan based upon a phone interview with them. Online, you get to read that guy's blog.
Maybe the decline of the newspaper isn't soley based upon the rise of the internet, but the fall of the newspapers themselves. Maybe the years of forced double-digit profit growth and stripping of all vestigial content really has reduced newspapers to something hollow and not worth reading.
Maybe if the internet wasn't there at all, we would still be talking about the death of the newspaper.
Why do they expect to remain relevant in people's lives if they can't even touch the quality of a public television station in the country that invented Benny Hill?
The ______ Agenda
Removal of English language publications, and the dumbing down common folk won't slow things much. The time to clear out books from universites and rare book shops will take longer...
English, French, Indian, German, and even Russian libraries will all have copies of much the same stuff, and who knows, maybe even a few Arabic contries, Maybe go north to read stuff in Canada, or send a mail order 'how to request' to China.
What we have here, are spineless sycophants without moral fortitude, doing a Pearl Harbour on US history. Superman was for truth, justice and liberty, but we can see some people don't get it. Maybe it is a Clinton vendetta.
Yet provide none yourself.
You fail to consider that the US simply stating, "no, don't worry, we have more and better weapons," with only a wink and a nod would, probably, not be taken seriously by anyone, least of all in a political campaign. Stating we know something begs the question of how we know it. You obviously haven't thought this out.
You failed to mention the human assets whose lives are at risk and the problem with burning a human asset - it makes it very difficult to recruit more in the future. But hey, who needs HUMINT, right?
Forgive me if I don't take you at all seriously. Post some sources.
This is a current article in the washington post:c le/2006/02/21/AR2006022101947.html?referrer=email& referrer=email/
s c_sec_18_00000794----000-.html/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/arti
Here is the US code relevant:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode18/u
" 794. Gathering or delivering defense information to aid foreign government
(a) Whoever, with intent or reason to believe that it is to be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of a foreign nation, communicates, delivers, or transmits, or attempts to communicate, deliver, or transmit, to any foreign government, or to any faction or party or military or naval force within a foreign country, whether recognized or unrecognized by the United States, or to any representative, officer, agent, employee, subject, or citizen thereof, either directly or indirectly, any document, writing, code book, signal book, sketch, photograph, photographic negative, blueprint, plan, map, model, note, instrument, appliance, or information relating to the national defense, shall be punished by death or by imprisonment for any term of years or for life, except that the sentence of death shall not be imposed unless the jury or, if there is no jury, the court, further finds that the offense resulted in the identification by a foreign power (as defined in section 101(a) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978) of an individual acting as an agent of the United States and consequently in the death of that individual, or directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, early warning systems, or other means of defense or retaliation against large-scale attack; war plans; communications intelligence or cryptographic information; or any other major weapons system or major element of defense strategy."
If the NSA is reclassifying these docs, there's a chance at least one would give away at least one identity, making the publishing of it an offense punishable by any length jail term or death.
from Secret and Confidential downwards, I've found in my time that most overclassifications and reclassifications were mostly the result of people trying to CYA and hide things that should have been unclassified or less restricted.
Par for the course. You're doing a great job, Bushie.
Where's the sarcasm key on my keyboard?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I finally remembered one of the great books I had read about this topic:
:^)
Into the Buzzsaw
by Kristina Borjesson
Don't deny yourself. Go and get it from your library immediately.
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
That's quite a book!
And people think there's no such thing as conspiracies. When in fact most offices tend to have at least some people planning to get something done covertly. The more power you have the more there is to defend. Unless what you do is really helping more than it is hurting in which case you got too many friends to get attacked.