The Pentagon Is Spending Your Tax Dollars to Keep You in the Dark About Its Sprawling Empire Requests for info from the Pentagon on its activities across the planet are met with obstruction and obfuscation - Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Snags, Snares, and Snafus of Covering the U.S. Military | TomDispatch

Tom Dispatch / By Nick Turse

The Pentagon Is Spending Your Tax Dollars to Keep You in the Dark About Its Sprawling Empire
Requests for info from the Pentagon on its activities across the planet are met with obstruction and obfuscation.

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The 30-year-old history of U.S. foreign policy: now, there’s a dynamite issue! Explosive, in fact. Far too dangerous, it turns out, for Americans to be informed about or have access to basic documents about -- so you might conclude from a recent report at Steven Aftergood’s website Secrecy News.

According to him, “A 1991 statute mandated that the State Department publish the documentary record of U.S. foreign policy (known as Foreign Relations of the United States, or FRUS) no later than 30 years after the events described.” They were years behind when President Obama, still in his sunshine mode, hit the Oval Office and ordered State “to complete the processing of the backlog of 25-year-old records awaiting declassification by the end of December 2013.”

Didn’t happen, of course. And that, it turns out, is the least of it. A State Department historical advisory committee (HAC), a “panel of distinguished historians,” has just weighed in with its own fears that “a substantial percentage of those records that have been reviewed by the NDC [National Declassification Center] have not been cleared for release to the public. In the opinion of the HAC, the relatively high number of reviewed documents that remain withheld from researchers and citizens raises fundamental questions about the declassification guidelines.” The historians wonder, in fact, whether the majority of the FRUS volumes will ever see the light of day. READ MORE... Tomgram: Nick Turse, The Snags, Snares, and Snafus of Covering the U.S. Military | TomDispatch