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After 9/11, U.S. archivists pulled 1 million pages
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of MSNBC/Associated Press
Posted: March 18th, 2007
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17597711
More than 1 million pages of historical government documents a stack taller than the U.S. Capitol have been removed from public view since the September 2001 terror attacks. Some of the papers are more than a century old. In some cases, entire file boxes were removed without significant review because the governments central record-keeping agency, the National Archives and Records Administration, did not have time for a more thorough audit. The pulled records include the presumably dangerous, such as nearly half an enormous database from the Federal Emergency Management Agency with information about all federal facilities. But they also include the presumably useless, such as part of a collection about the Lower Colorado River Authority that includes 114-year-old papers. After the September 2001 attacks, the records administration signed a secret deal with the Pentagon and CIA to review and permit the removal of tens of thousands of pages from public view that intelligence officials believed had been declassified too hastily. [Some] researchers said the project, while well-intentioned, reinforces a culture of secrecy that became more pronounced after the September 2001 terror attacks.
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