Editorial: Unleashing America's secrets

At the stroke of midnight Dec. 31, American history buffs can raise a toast to the new year and also to the release of hundreds of millions of pages of once-secret documents that will be instantly declassified.

The release is the result of a Clinton administration rule that, astonishingly, is being enforced by the secrecy-loving Bush administration. The rule calls for documents to be automatically declassified once they are 25 years old, rather than waiting for someone - usually a history scholar - to request the information. The only documents to be excluded are those for which agencies have requested exemptions because they believe the information to be of a sensitive nature that should remain secret.

Even with such exemptions, there are millions upon millions of pages to be released that contain once-secret details about such events as the Vietnam War and the Cuban missile crisis and information about the FBI's Cold War-era investigations of people believed to be communists.

According to a story by The New York Times on Thursday, President Bill Clinton in 1995 ordered that the automatic declassifications be done annually starting in 2000. The deadline was extended to 2003 after agencies said they couldn't possibly be ready by 2000. President Bush gave the agencies a second three-year extension, which ends Dec. 31.

Undoubtedly, many of the documents would make for dry, dull reading for most of us. But scholars and historians will be able to cull from these pages the previously clandestine background of the Cold War period - which, one historian told the Times, contains the roots of such modern issues as nuclear weapons proliferation, Middle East conflicts and Latin America's dictatorships and democracy.

However, while these millions of pages will be available legally, actually getting a look at them still could take several months. An American University historian told the Times that the National Archives, where the records will be made available, has undergone budget shortfalls and staff cutbacks that make it ill-equipped to handle the reams of documents.

The Bush administration may have enforced the release deadline, but that means little if the agency charged with making the records available doesn't have the resources to do so.

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