OPSEC - Which secret government documents will be declassified on December 31?

[Ping898]

For those interested in the secrets of days gone by....

http://people.howstuffworks.com/ref/declassified.htm?cid=rss1

This New Year's Eve, at midnight on the dot, hundreds of millions of pages of U.S. government secrets will be revealed. Or at least they'll no longer be official secrets -- it may actually take months or more for the National Archives and Records Administration to make those pages available for public consumption. The NARA is already dealing with a multi-million page backlog.

But in theory if not in immediate practice, what was set in motion by the Clinton administration in 1995 is coming to fruition. Executive Order 12958 declared that in 2000, every classified document 25 years of age or older would be automatically declassified unless the classifying agency had already sought and received that document's exemption (anything that could cause an "identifiable" risk to national security, would violate a person's privacy or involves more than one agency is exempt). After two three-year extensions granted by the Bush administration in response to cries from the CIA, FBI, NSA and other agencies that they didn't have the manpower to review all of their papers in time, the final deadline has arrived. And President Bush is enforcing it.
Scholars of history, conspiracy theorists and freedom-of-information activists everywhere are doing a happy dance like none you've ever seen. We're talking about a treasure trove of historical documents, secrets that have been kept for decades, suddenly stripped of its Top Secret, Secret or Confidential status. According to Michigan State University, the trove can include letters, telegrams, background checks, reports from war zones and cabinet-level meeting minutes, for a start.
Any government agency that has classified documents is involved in the declassification process. Organizations that deal in secrets, like the FBI, CIA, NSA and Department of Defense are releasing the largest volumes of paper: The FBI alone will be declassifying 270 million pages. The NSA is declassifying at least 35 million. So what can we expect to learn when these pages become accessible to the public? We're not talking about small secrets here. Experts says the documents will tell us about the inner workings of such events and periods as World War II; the Cold War; the McCarthy-era search for Communist sympathizers in the United States and the very real presence of Soviet spies in the U.S. government's upper ranks; the Cuban missile crisis; the Vietnam War and the government's anti-war-protestor activities including surveillance and penetration of activist groups; the CIA's secret experiments with LSD; the Camp David Accords that resulted in a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt; the Iran hostage crisis in 1979; and the Soviet Union's attack on Afghanistan that same year.

 

[Rich Parsons]

Hmmm, I wonder about the reports on assasinations and if they will be deemed national security or not?

Thanks for sharing.

 

[MA-Caver]

So one wonders what the FIA will reveal in 25 years about the Gulf Wars, 9/11, and the War Against Terror?

But part of me still has this little feeling of distrust, that these so called secret, top secret documents will have been doctored and key bits of information will have either been removed or changed so that the absolute FULL truth will not be really known. 25 years is a long time for such truths to be known and while I can understand that some secrets must remain secret for the sake of "national-security" 25 years is far too long of a time for such information to become "public-knowledge". A whole generation will have been born and passed and the information becomes relatively useless.
Knowledge is power and with this witholding of information from the public prevents the public from making informed choices about key elected officials and upcoming elections. Thus if (socio-political) crimes were committed or breeches of ethics (i.e. witholding key information from the public at the time it is occurring) these elected ones are relatively safe in their subsquent retirement by the time the public finds out about them.

One wonders how things might be today if say the Grant administration (1869-77) or even the Wilson administration (1913-21) had begun "trusting the people" with bits of information as it occurred and how that might have swayed the effects of public opinion/knowledge towards today's administrations. Would the Vietnam war have carried on so far as it did? Would've we gotten involved at all? Would the Cold War lasted as long as it did? The truth of the Roswell NM incidents and so forth...
The American people are far more intelligent than for they're appreciated. Imagined by the military of public panic should the truth of the Roswell UFO crash be known... (ridiculous) and why the events of the JFK assassination was so muddled soon after it happened that nobody knows the truth at all. Would these events even have occurred?

Still, some information is better than NO information. Thanks to Clinton for initiating the act and thanks to Bush for sustaining it. For with the FIA we at least get a better idea ... of what happened in the past.

 

[TonyMac]

Stuff gets declassified when the culprits are no longer alive.