National Lampoon's Animal House

U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review - New York Times:

"Mr. [Matthew M.] Aid [an intelligence historian] said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located."

It seems that Mr. Aid and his colleagues in that grove of academe dedicated to history involving intelligence and diplomacy are now operating under a system of "Double Secret Probation." But this time, it is on the orders of US President George W. Bush instead of Faber College Dean Vernon Wormer.

In the present instance, formerly-classified documents that have been available for reading and copying by researchers at the National Archives, even some which have been incorporated in non-classified official publications of agencies of the State Department, have been secretly re-classified. The agencies doing the work not only do not publish any lists of titles of re-classified documents, they even report that they are under orders not to say whether such a reclassification program even exists. Fortunately for us mere taxpayers, someone forgot to order the head of the Archives to disavow any knowledge of these activities and he plans to complain to the president.

The NYTimes takes the position that the re-classifications are intended to remove embarassing info about past intel failures. However, since the two examples in the article both deal with Red China (CIA assurance in 1950 that the PRC would not intervene in the Korean War that year, and a 1962 assessment of the PRC's nuke weapons program by George Kenan who was then our ambassador to Yugoslavia) one might speculate that the motive might have more to do with placating Beijing.

I believe very little ought to be secret, especially with regard to the Korean War, but you have to have a system that keeps secrets that need keeping. That includes prosecuting people who improperly acquire or keep secret documents.

We are at war and General Gonzalez must act promptly to get warrants and search the files of all historians and prosecute all those who hold copies of these re-classified documents. He should also check all the thousands of government depository libraries to see which ones hold copies of State Department and other publications containing such documents. Imagine the fun of prosecuting thousands of librarians and academic historians for a crime they were forbidden to know they had committed.

A note about National Lampoon's Animal House:
I went to see it in a theater in Rome, Georgia, with another guy who was also doing field work for US Rep. Larry McDonald's Democrat primary run-off when it came out in 1978. I had entered the University of Virginia in 1967 and he had started at Sewanee (aka The University of the South) a year or two earlier. We both were near to leterally ROFLOL at the antics of Faber College's Delta House in 1962 - it was so much like the way we remembered our own college days in the 60s in the South.