[cia_tradecraft] CIA withdraws 55,000 pages from open view

[skews_me]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1715034,00.html

CIA withdraws 55,000 pages from open view 

Julian Borger in Washington
Wednesday February 22, 2006
The Guardian 


The CIA has spent the last seven years covertly sifting through 
millions of pages of decades-old public archives and removing 
documents that the agency deems sensitive or embarrassing.
Matthew Aid, a historian and a visiting fellow at the National 
Archives and Records Administration, stumbled on the secret 
reclassification programme in the course of his research. He 
published his findings on the website of a watchdog group, the 
National Security Archive, saying that the CIA and military 
intelligence had reviewed millions of pages "at an unknown cost to 
taxpayers" and withdrawn more than 55,000 pages that had been in the 
public domain for years.

Documents taken off open shelves included a complaint by a CIA 
director about the bad publicity the agency had received for failing 
to predict anti-American riots in Colombia in 1948, and a record of 
which foreign magazines the state department had ordered on behalf of 
US intelligence agencies in the same year.
The reclassification began seven years ago as a response to an 
executive order signed by President Bill Clinton in 1995 
declassifying large quantities of old intelligence, a process in 
which other agencies released material without CIA approval.

"The CIA has released more than 26m pages to the national archives 
since 1998 - a huge amount of work by a small number of people. Other 
agencies also released CIA documents," Paul Gimigliano, a CIA 
spokesman said. "Though the process typically works well, there will 
always be the anomaly."








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