Parade Magazine Warns America

Almost 34 million Americans receive Parade Magazine as inserts in their Sunday newspapers. Somehow I missed this front-page article Are They Taking Away Our Freedoms?.

It is well worth reading and considering that what is usually an inoffensive newspaper stuffer that usually features movie actors on the cover, stories about heroic police officers, and photo contests involving pets, has warned Americans that their freedoms are eroding because information is being increasingly withheld from them by their government.

One highlight:

There are more than 4,000 people scattered across the federal government with the authority to classify documents, from those in the Pentagon and CIA to the Agriculture Department and Environmental Protection Agency. In 2004 alone, 15.6 million documents were classified—about 125 documents a minute—costing more than $7 billion of your tax dollars.

The article contains a sample list of some of the information that is classified or "restricted." Here is one example:

Thousands of boxes of documents captured in Iraq. Many of these came from Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service and may contain information on insurgents fighting today. For the most part, they remain unclassified. Nevertheless, the new office of the Director of National Intelligence is resisting their release and examination, even though some experts believe they could help our forces in Iraq as well as point to what U.S. intelligence got right and wrong before the war.

It's a big thing that this normally neutral and innocuous national magazine has explicitly warned the American people about such an erosion of their freedoms.