Secret Again

The absurd scheme to reclassify documents.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006, at 7:00 PM ET

Those who control the past control the future, Orwell famously wrote in 1984. In the realm of national-security policy, the battle for this control is heating up.

The latest skirmish started last December, when an independent scholar named Matthew Aid went to the National Archives to re-examine some declassified documents that he'd copied several months earlier and learned that they'd been removed from the public shelves and reclassified.