by Matt Barr

Misleading secrecy graphs

Matt Welch has an alarming graph showing that declassification of documents has fallen in every year of the Bush administration. He does not recall, I guess, having blogged about a presentation by Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security archive, just last month. Read about it here.

Blanton's presentation made it clear that declassification initiatives undertaken by President Clinton resulted in a huge spike in declassified pages, which, but for another spike when Bush took office, has been declining ever since. Which makes sense, since the executive orders signed by Clinton made millions of pages of material declassifiable for the first time, and you can only declassify them once. As I wrote last month, "In the years after the federal franchise was extended to women, 18-year-olds, D.C. residents, and so on, there was a spike of new voters, but sadly, that spike petered out after an election or two. Is that because election requirements were becoming more strict again?"

Someone in the comments alerts Welch to the numbers under Clinton, and he laments that Clinton's numbers trended downward, too. Well, no shit.

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