An affinity for secrecy

By Creature

More ridiculousness and absurdity from the administration that has set a new standard for ridiculousness and absurdity. This latest silliness is brought to us by the Washington Post:

The Bush administration has begun designating as secret some information that the government long provided even to its enemy the former Soviet Union: the numbers of strategic weapons in the U.S. nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. [...]

"It would be difficult to find more dramatic examples of unjustifiable secrecy than these decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," wrote William Burr, a senior analyst at the archive who compiled the report. [...]

"Is that now going to be reclassified?" asked Norris [senior research associate at the Natural Resources Defense Council]. "I would say that the horse is out of the barn and they are only making themselves look ridiculous. At someone's direction, declassification reviewers have gotten carried away and are applying the rather vague and open-ended guidelines to the point of absurdity."

So much for a free and open society.

Read more, because in a few weeks the Bush administration may classify the article from which this came.

(Cross-posted at State of the Day.)