Molly Ivins: The Great Bush Reclassification Project

[Jack Rabbit]

From TruthDig.com
Dated Wednesday April 26

The Great Bush Reclassification Project
By Molly Ivins

It’s nice to know that the investigative reporter Jack Anderson is still under investigation, although seriously dead.

Anderson died last year, and for 19 years before his death he suffered from Parkinson’s disease and was increasingly less active as a reporter. Now that he’s safely deceased, the Federal Bureau of Investigation wants to go through nearly 200 boxes of his files to see if there are any classified documents in there. If it’s classified, they want it back—even though Anderson was in the habit of printing anything he ever got that was of any interest.

This is apparently part of the Great Bush Reclassification Project, in which government information that has previously been declassified and offered for public consumption is now being reclassified as secret so nobody can find out about it. Those who saw government documents between declassification and reclassification are just going to have to forget what they saw. That, or some Man in Black will be sent around to zap your memory with a little thingamajig.

For some reason, the FBI thinks Jack Anderson, despite Parkinson’s disease, had some papers involving two employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who have been criminally charged with receiving classified information. That case is a crock in itself, and to use it to dig through Anderson’s archived stuff is just ludicrous.

Read more.

[ninkasi]

1. I always love to read Molly, she doesn't shy away from the truth

I'm a native Texan, and hear a lot of criticism of Texas, just as there is criticism of Florida, and other red states. Two words are all it usually takes to remind people that there are good people here, as well as the bad. Molly Ivins.
<snip>
"Anderson’s son Kevin said family members are willing to go to jail rather than let Anderson’s papers be confiscated. “It’s my father’s legacy,” he told The New York Times. “The government has always, and continues to this day, to abuse the secrecy stamp. My father’s view was that the public is the employer of these government employees and has the right to know what they’re up to.”

<snip>
Meanwhile, the Bush administration is so hopelessly confounded by the problems of secrecy, it has now fired a CIA agent for allegedly leaking the truth concerning a gulag of “black site” prisons we keep in Eastern Europe (remember when only the Soviets did that?). And of course Bush claims he has the right to instantly declassify anything in order to back up a phony charge against a political opponent. How lovely."

I'm sure that Bush is very, very interested in getting his hands on Anderson's files. Who knows what Jack had related to Reagan, and Poppy? This administration has an obsession for secrecy. Bush wants pretty much everything classified.

[Lisa]

2. not to worry -- there are people who fawn over Bush, even in Canada!

If anything, I have noticed that the Texas people who have seen "Dubya" and his cronies for what they are, will be much more likely than the rest of us to provide well-documented criticism (often first-hand). I live in a West Coast city, and the other day I saw a hybrid car with a Texas license plate (and Sierra Club and rainbow GLBT bumper stickers) going past me. Of course I waved and smiled. I bet the driver -- a rather good-looking woman in her 20s -- would have something to say about the White House!