The secret bureaucracy

Forget that smaller government thing, the Bush administration seems to be creating an entirely new bureaucracy devoted solely to classifying otherwise public data.

During the Cold War, the United States devoted substantial manpower and money to counting Soviet missiles, experts said. At the same time, U.S. officials sometimes were quite open about the number of American missiles, using the data to illustrate the deterrent power of the U.S. nuclear arsenal and to make the case for more defense spending. Indeed, such numbers were routinely disclosed in annual reports to Capitol Hill by secretaries of defense dating to at least the 1960s, according to Burr.

In a 1971 appearance before the House Armed Services Committee, for instance, Defense Secretary Melvin R. Laird offered a chart showing, among other things, that the United States had 30 strategic bomber squadrons, 54 Titan intercontinental ballistic missiles and 1,000 Minuteman missiles.

Those numbers, made public on March 9, 1971, are redacted in a copy of the chart obtained by the archive's researchers in January as part of a declassified government history of the U.S. air and missile defense system, according to archive officials.

"It's yet another example of silly secrecy," said Thomas Blanton, the archive's director.

In another case, Burr cited two declassified copies of a 75-page memo on military policy issues that Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, one obtained from the National Archives in 1999 and the other from the Pentagon this year.

In the 2006 copy, Pentagon reviewers blacked out numbers that were left untouched in the earlier version, including the number of ballistic missile launchers and the number of heavy bombers the United States expected to have in 1965, 1967 and 1970. (Comparative numbers for the Soviet Union were left alone.)

Burr also compared two copies of a memo that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger wrote for President Gerald R. Ford for a 1974 National Security Council meeting on arms control negotiations.

One copy, obtained from the NSC through a Freedom of Information Act request in 1999, has visible references to "200 older B-52 bombers" and 240 Trident missiles, among other weapons data. In the second copy, released by the Gerald R. Ford Library in May 2006, such information is blacked out -- as is similar data for the Soviet Union.

Experts say there is no national security reason for the administration to keep such historical information under wraps -- especially when it has been publicly available for years.

Could it be that they're trying to resurrect the argument for a missile gap? Why not? Islamofascism is proving too wily and intangible an enemy; why not convince Americans of the need to build more bomb shelters? Fear never really strikes out.