After writing An America I remember, a mini-memoir of the US in WWII, I thought it only fair to explore the flipside: the seven-year old, secret program of intelligence agencies to reclassify and remove documents at the National Archives, a kind of lobotomizing of America’s political memory.

According to his Feb. 20 New York Times article, U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review, Scot Shane says, “ . . . intelligence agencies have been removing thousands of historical documents that were available for years, some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.” He goes on to say . . .

The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.

But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy -- governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved -- it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.

Ironically, Aid was struck by the “innocuous contents of the documents,” dating back to old State Department reports from early cold war and Korean War days. Apparently, one man’s “innocuous” is another man’s poison.

Shane followed this article with another in the March 3 New York Times, Archivist Urges U.S. to Reopen Classified File. Shane reported Allen Weinstein, the US’s chief archivist, announced a “moratorium” on the cutting, i.e., reclassification of documents until an audit could be done to find out which records should be secret and which should not. Good for Weinstein.

When a nation begins to lobotomize part of its historic memory, we create ignorance, stupefaction, a kind of living Alzheimer’s, and that’s not good.

My late father, a staunch Republican, suffered from the big A later in life, from holes in the memory that got larger and larger, until his brain forgot to tell his body to go on living. One of the few things that brought him solace as he languished in his nursing home room was a large framed picture of Ronald Reagan that I brought from his past home. It seemed appropriate that he could ruminate with his smiling hero as they suffered a mutual affliction. But, America doesn’t need that kind of heartache to visit its brain and body politic, on either coast, or anywhere between. Trust me.

Meanwhile, credit should be given to Clinton for signing that 1995 bill that declassified those 55,000 pages, allowing a mentally blocked government to be somewhat more candid.

Maybe Clinton’s right action gave Dick Cheney the misguided idea to tell Scooter Libby to disclose “highly sensitive prewar information to reporters.” The information, reported by Robert Wilkinson at Political Physics, “about Iraq and alleged weapons of mass destruction was used by the Bush administration to bolster its case for invading Iraq." Wilkinson continues . . .

Of course, this avoids the reality that this information should not include the name of a covert agent, as that's a crime no matter which way Cheney tries to spin it. So it seems that Dubya and Cheney are claiming the privilege to "declassify" any information they choose, regardless of whether it violates the law or not.

Cheney also had the chutzpah to say, "I have certainly advocated declassification. I have participated in declassification decisions." Asked for details, he said, "I don't want to get into that. There's an executive order that specifies who has classification authority, and obviously it focuses first and foremost on the president, but also includes the vice president."

So it’s a matter of who has classification authority, mainly the president, who, Cheney claims, extended it to him via an executive order. So if it ends up that Cheney was involved in decisions to out the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame in reprisal for her husband Joseph Wilson outing the yellow-cake uranium from Niger fraud, it seems to me it's his punishable crime and not just Scooter Libby’s boo-boo.

Cheney and Bush are on both sides of the issue here to conveniently fit their agendas for secrecy when it suits them to keep the public in the dark, and for declassification when it can be used to hurt an adversary -- double-dealing from both sides of their collective mouths.

Coincidentally, have you noticed how Internet stories and links are vanishing lately, not just archived documents? Like the link to the original WhatReallyHappened website that had an amazing visual/verbal presentation of what went down and why on 911.

Perhaps the creators took it down for their own reasons. Perhaps some other force snatched it, so a little darkness would fall. The why is important. Because all cases of declassification versus classification, freedom of the Internet versus censure, are about one thing, destroying memory and its truth. And the price of truth and liberty, as we know, is eternal vigilance. But are we prepared to fight for it? Go to the wall legally and every other which way to protect access to truth?

Knowledge begins and ends in human memory. And by extension, we as humans have a deeply encoded spoken and written language, carrying a great range and subtlety of meaning and experience to record the good and bad lessons of history.

Denied the right to view and understand the language of history, that faculty is stilted, lobotomized. We are as stones in the dark, impediments to our own progress, prey to the thieves of information who come like gravediggers in the night to steal the past.

This is not what the Freedom of Information Act, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights were all about. Though in the past five years, they seem to have been forgotten as well.

With corporate media as the anesthetic of inquiry, lulling millions of Americans into a no-pain stupor, the pointed, well-sharpened scalpels of intelligence go to work, leaving just enough brain to keep the public shuffling to work and back and through the steps of ritualized life.

Additionally, Big Pharma, the booze and dope industries, step in with anti-depressants and feel-good potions to keep the post-dumbing pain down. This isn’t Democracy and hardly life, and tellingly long past 1984 and George Orwell, who predicted it all.

Resistance is the only prescription to lobotomy in whatever form. And the time to start was yesterday. The time to continue every tomorrow. And so, good people everywhere, now is the time to come to the aid of your country. As I once wrote in an ad campaign for National Library Week for the National Book Committee, “You’ve got a write to read. Don’t blow it.”