What if the emperor has no secrets?

Maybe the administration’s problem is that they don’t really have any good secrets but want us to think they do. They were just a little over-zealous faking it in this case:

On Monday, the Washington Post ran a fascinating story based on a report from the National Security Archive, a research library at George Washington University. According to the report, the Bush administration has been blacking out of previously public documents information on the nation’s strategic military capabilities. It is doing this, it says, in the name of national security. Got a question on the Minuteman missile? Tough. Curious about the Titan II? Too bad.

Now maybe you wonder what the problem is. This is sensitive information we’re talking about, right? Can’t have that falling into just anybody’s hands, right?

The thing is, it’s already in “anybody’s” hands: it dates back half a century to the Cold War. We’re talking about memos, charts and papers that over the years have been cited in open congressional hearings, reported in newspapers, used in history books. We’re talking about information our government long ago deemed innocuous enough to provide even to its former enemy, the Soviet Union.

And now — now! — we’re supposed to believe it’s suddenly so sensitive it has to be classified Top Secret? Please.

This is a classic case of locking the barn after the horse has escaped — and died of old age. More to the point, it is a classic and absurd example of the present regime’s mania for secrecy, its obsessive need to control what, when, how and why you and I learn about its activities.

–Leonard Pitts, Jr., The Miami Herald, 25 August 2006
Communication in the Bush age: Mum’s the word
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15355791.htm

Original Washington Post article by Christopher Lee.