A federal appeals court has ruled, 2 to 1, against a Freedom of Information Act request for the release of the history. Citing a FOIA exemption that protects secrecy deemed essential to preserving government agencies’ deliberative processes, the court held that even after more than half a century the history is “still a draft” — never mind that its author retired in 1984 and died in 1997 — and hence is “still predecisional and deliberative.” So, documents can be kept forever secret by government agencies declaring them “drafts” or otherwise “deliberative.”
Nations need secrecy to protect deliberative processes and to conceal from adversaries the sources, methods and fruits of intelligence-gathering. However, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued in his book on the subject, secrecy is government regulation, but unlike most regulations, which restrict what people can do, secrecy restricts what they can know. Secrets are property, and covetous, acquisitive government bureaucracies hoard them from rival bureaucracies, thereby making government even more foolish than it naturally tends to be because it has no competitors. For example, the U.S. military reportedly kept from President Harry Truman its proof, derived from what are known as the Venona intercepts of Soviet communications, that Alger Hiss and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were spies.
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