Selective Declassification To Undermine the Bush Administration

When Carl Levin asked the DIA to declassify a report stating that an Al Qaeda source was likely a "fabricator," the DIA took eight days to grant his request.

Steven Hayes wants to know why it's taken years of constant requests for declassifcation to get important documents into the public view which support the administration's case for war... and as of yet, more stonewalling.

There is a permanent government in Washington of bureaucrats, liberal in their politics but conservative in the sense that they want desperately to protect the status quo -- their way of doing things, their preferred policies -- from "meddling" by outsiders like the duly elected President of the United States.

This would seem, at first blush, to be another example of that. The low-level staffers in charge of classifying and declassifying documents seem to move with lightning-quick alacrity when very liberal, very anti-war, very Democratic-partisan Carl Levin makes a request, but stonewall and double-talk when it comes to documents that may tend to support an Al Qaeda-Iraq connection.

Rumsfeld, Porter Goss, and Robert Mueller should look into this and make it clear to their underlings that "helping the Democrats" is not a criterion in favor of declassification, nor is "this helps Bush" a criterion in favor of keeping documents secret from the public.

posted by Ace at 12:40 PM

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