Don't like the facts? Just classify them!

To no one's particular surprise, the Bush administration has been secretly re-classifying thousands of documents previously released, declassified and even published by prevous administrations.

Mr. Aid [a historian] was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."....

While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.

I guess that's one way to avoid embarrassing factual revelations. Just classify them. Except, of course, for the identities of intelligence agents whose spouses who fail to parrot the company line.

Thanks to Library Underground and to Louise, who supplies more detail in her blog.

The fundamental difficulty that the Bush Administration seems to have with these documents is that they represent politically-relevant information which is not subject to dictatorial censorship and spin-doctoring. And that's something that would-be dictators just can't tolerate.

I wonder -- will they be confiscating the published volumes of Foreign Relations of the United States from the nations' libraries?