Posted on 12/30/2009 11:49:34 AM PST by lowbridge
President Obama declared on Tuesday that “no information may remain classified indefinitely” as part of a sweeping overhaul of the executive branch’s system for protecting classified national security information.
In an executive order and an accompanying presidential memorandum to agency heads, Mr. Obama signaled that the government should try harder to make information public if possible, including by requiring agencies to regularly review what kinds of information they classify and to eliminate any obsolete secrecy requirements.
“Agency heads shall complete on a periodic basis a comprehensive review of the agency’s classification guidance, particularly classification guides, to ensure the guidance reflects current circumstances and to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified,” Mr. Obama wrote in the order, released while he was vacationing in Hawaii.
He also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives to speed the process of declassifying historical documents by centralizing their review, rather than sending them in sequence to different agencies. He set a four-year deadline for processing a 400-million-page backlog of such records that includes archives related to military operations during World War II and the Korean and Vietnam Wars.
Moreover, Mr. Obama eliminated a rule put in place by former President George W. Bush in 2003 that allowed the leader of the intelligence community to veto decisions by an interagency panel to declassify information. Instead, spy agencies who object to such a decision will have to appeal to the president.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I had some comments ready to go, and then I read your retort.
Man oh man was what a timely comment. Just excellent! Good on you.
Our enemies must spend most of their time in thanks to Allah for this buffoon being elected.
Obambi is working on their behalf, either by treachery or ignorance, but they don’t respect him.
He is their useful tool, another useful idiot of the first order.
And a reminder: War requires "Secrets".
Treason?
In other words, he’s destroyed all his papers.
So someday we will see Obamabi's long supressed longform birth certificate? He wrote about how he ran across a copy in his parents papers one time (mentioned it in his book) so even if Hawaii no longer has one, he presumably does.
How about John Kerry's military record?
Obama's school paperwork (including admissions)?
Stateside Climategate memos?
More government bureaucracy is the Democrats' solution to every problem.
i see no problem with this our gov’t servants will provide complete and substantive oversight of the process there is no chance that intelligence information harmful to the US could ever be revealed. Especially when we have a regime that so uniquely wants to protect americas interests S/
How about all the stuff from JFK’s assassination? I think that has a holding period of at least 75 years.
Gotta laugh. Just opened my 2010 Daily Calendar (Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader)for next Monday, January 4. The question of the day, 3rd grade Social Studies:
"True or False? Only people born in the U.S. are eligible to become President."
Good thing for my monitor and keyboard that I'd finished my morning coffee before opening it!
Clinton did one of these and it was a national security disaster. They were concerned with the American Hyperpower and wanted Russia and China to catch up. True story.
It isn’t so much the materials from the JFK assassination that have been supressed, it is materials from the JFK administration (including tapes, it was JFK who installed the White House taping system that later brought down President Nixon).
Some of the LBJ tapes have come out and they were damning. He secured censorship from the press (no negative reporting) in exchange for letting a bank merger go through, for example.
Agreed.
1) Even if no incriminating documents exist, a willfully-spooning Media will pull a Dan-Rather and simply make some up.
2) The wording is carefully crafted so that anything negative about Sambobammy is always "accidentally" destroyed or lost, while anything negative about Republicans is always "accidentally" leaked.
I think we’ll be seeing very selective declassification.
“He also established a new National Declassification Center at the National Archives”
I thought Obama had already established that with the gift of an IPod to the Queen, etc?
And now...Another episode of:
‘Bart Obama, and the “I didn’t do it!” Crew’.
If he can produce such documents, you can bet your arse he will.
Cheney is a pretty sly old dog. I doubt he left many bombs out there waiting to go off.
This guy wasn’t making 25 million per year because he was a country bumpkin.
Obambi is out of his class by light years when it comes to Cheney. Mixing it up with him is like hitting yourself in the face with a shovel..., well much worse than that actually. LOL
Sure Bammy, throw away the lid to the cookie jar and pass them out till they’re all gone. Our enemies will love you dearly. So will the Press. (Same difference) Now they’ll never run out of Republican scandals.
First - Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a state document and not covered by the new Executive Order (EO) that replaces EO 12958 and EO 13292 (Carter & Bush).
I just completed reading the new EO and it is similar in “bottom line” preservation of classified information the release of which would cause substantial harm to the US as did EO 12958. It does require the setting of automatic declassification dates for some information, and we had those back during the Vietnam War era through the early 1980s when Confidential information was automatically declassified after 3 years and most secret information could be automatically declassified after 6 years.
I use to work in the declassification business back when EO 12958 was created and it turned out to be quite usable for us to protect what needed continued protection and to release what no longer needed to be classified.
The bottom line here is going to be the attitude of the declassifier’s bosses on whether to declassify what needs to be declassified or to “play it safe” and declassify as little as possible. When I was doing declassification, most of us declassifiers favored declassify as much as we can and keep classified only what was really vital for national security.
For Mr. Peabody: the entire Energy Dept fiasco of declassifying the nuclear weapons data was based upon the guidance from the Sec of Energy who authorized bulk declassification and also had no sense of security. In that case the declassifiers would open up one box on a pallet, check it and if it was declassifiable, they declassified the entire pallet without looking at the other boxes. That was dumb, stupid, and idiotic. The Army (and other services) began with doing a document by document and page by page review. That was the standard that the Kyle-Lott amendment required of all agencies after the DoE screwup.
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