March 03, 2006

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.

2 comments:

enigma4ever said...

pretty sad that is where we have to go to find some journalistic integrity....Parade...How Surreal is that? How Sad is that ? How not-even-shocking anymore is that ?

I think for many Blogs and the Internet are more of a resource at this point , and as many newspapers as I have eliminated over the past year I guess I really am not suprised..just sad...

Thanks for telling us about it...

enigma4ever said...

I forgot to mention that I have Dump story up over at Watergatesummer...you and your wife might "enjoy" ( that is not the right word....but you catch my drift)...best to you two writers...hope it is warmer there than here...Still icey and cold by the Lake....but that is okay- better for writers...