Well, there he goes again. Yesterday, Bush issued yet another executive order, this time to delay release of historical documents once classified, and to reclassify some already released.


In his continuing effort to ensure the flow of information out of the government is tightly controlled while attempting to ensure the information flow into the government is essentially unrestricted, Bush has dealt a blow to governmental accountability as well as to the historical record. In the administration's continued paranoid behavior, information from foreign governments is presumed classified. Thomas Blanton of National Security Archive describes the move of "making foreign government information presumptively classified drops us down to Uzbekistan's openness norms." (By the way, Uzbekistan is one of the "Coalition of the Willing/Billing")


The really striking idea for me is the order to reclassify already released material. Has he never heard of irreversible systems? Has he never heard of Humpty Dumpty? Certainly, while working on his hardscrabble ranch, he's heard the old saw about locking barn doors. Perhaps it is one more move in his effort to redefine terms. As I mentioned before, Bush defines peace as war; prosperity as greed, freedom as constraint; now I guess efficiency in government is defined as "trying to undo what cannot be undone."