On March 25, President Bush signed a directive that delayed until the end of 2006 the release of millions of government documents slated for declassification this year. The amendment to Executive Order 12958 also permits officials to redeclare public documents as classified if officials find “significant doubt” as to whether their accessibility compromises national security—reversing a 1995 Clinton administration executive order mandating a document’s release whenever there is no evidence beyond a significant doubt of a negative impact on national security.
“Our nation’s progress depends on the free flow of information,” Bush stated, adding, “Nevertheless, throughout our history, the national defense has required that certain information be maintained in confidence in order to protect our citizens, our democratic institutions, our homeland security, and our interactions with foreign nations.”
“This will put a damper on agency willingness to release information when it is first produced to the depository library program either in paper format or on GPO, LC, NTIS, or agency electronic Web sites,” Bernadine Abbott Hoduski, who represents the American Library Association’s Government Documents Round Table, told American Libraries. The directive forces librarians “to download and preserve much of the information on Web sites just to know what is being denied to the public,” she said, adding that the action “will also allow the government to cover up previous actions that some may consider wrong.”
However, federal officials were recalling sensitive information long before Bush’s executive order. In 2001, librarians thwarted the State Department’s effort to pull from government-depository libraries Volume 26 of its monographic series Foreign Relations of the United States by interesting the media in the story. The book documented U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Indonesia’s first president, Achmed Sukarno.
Posted March 31, 2003.