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The National Archives will no longer enter into secret agreements with federal agencies that want to withdraw records from public access on Archives shelves and will do more to disclose when documents are removed for national security reasons.
The new policy cannot guarantee full disclosure, however, because in some cases federal regulations limit the Archives' ability to reveal which agency is reviewing records and why, said Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the Archives....
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Allen Weinstein, the archivist of the United States, announced the policy change yesterday after the release of a second secret classified memorandum, this one between the CIA and the Archives. In it Archives officials agreed in 2001 to conceal official CIA efforts to withdraw thousands of historical documents from the Archives, even though the records had been declassified.
The memo, similar to a 2002 agreement with the Air Force, spelled out procedures the CIA and Archives staff would follow in withdrawing records that the CIA believed may have been improperly declassified. In a background paper yesterday, Archives officials said they sought that agreement because a CIA and State Department review of 56 boxes in 1999 "resulted in a significant mishandling of the records, such that the order of the documents in many boxes was lost."
In return for stricter handling, however, the Archives agreed to help the CIA and the Air Force keep the public in the dark. That was a mistake, said Weinstein, who became the archivist in 2005....
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