The other GWOT continues

Bush's Global War on Transparency goosesteps on, perhaps with more success that the official GWOT. What is sinister is not that the Bush regime is classifying documents at an unprecedented rate (which may be justified if the overall amount of covert work is increasing, as presumably it should be in the post-9-11 era), but rather that the Bush regime is constraining access to unclassified information as well. Money:

Once freely available, a growing number of sources are now barred to the public as "sensitive but unclassified" or "for official use only." Less of a goal-directed policy than a bureaucratic reflex, the widespread clampdown on formerly public information reflects a largely inarticulate concern about "security." It also accords neatly with the Bush administration's preference for unchecked executive authority.

Among the unclassified but still restricted sources are the Department of Defense's telephone directory, the Los Alamos technical report library, many of the historical records at the National Archives, the launch dates for "orbital elements," the Energy Department's intelligence budget, aeronautical maps and data, as well as a wide variety of military information which used to be available on the Web. The basic point is that the Bush regime doesn't want you to know what the government is doing. And it's not because of security, because they're not classifying this information. It's because they just don't want to be scrutinized.

Hat tip: RWM