On December 31 at midnight, hundreds of millions of pages of secret government documents were automatically declassified -- the result of President Bush's Executive Order on Declassification, which covers all national security documents 25 years old or older.
They included 270 million pages of FBI files, according to the New York Times, covering, among other topics, the civil rights movement, 1960s anti-war protests and organized crime up to 1981. In all of American history, there has never been anything like this avalanche of information.
But if you called the National Archives on Wednesday, as I did (it was closed Tuesday for the national day of mourning for President Ford), you would have been told that none of these newly declassified documents are available -- and won't be, maybe for years.
Automatic declassification is a wonderful idea. "Our democratic principles require that the American people be informed of the activities of their Government" -- that's what President Clinton wrote when he ordered 25-year automatic declassification in 1995. The target date for compliance was extended several times, but then, in 2003, Bush surprised his critics by setting a firm deadline. Over the years, some documents were released in anticipation of the deadline.
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