How is (historical) truth to be archived?
Scott Shane reports in The New York Times on a seven year old secret program at the National Archives, as part of which Intelligence Agencies have been reclassifying thousands of publicly available documents and removing them from public access. Also see this note edited by historian Mathew M. Aid here, where you could also see a list of some of the reclassified documents; also follow more stories and links here. Quoting historians who have used the archive in the past and now have found documents missing, Shane suggests that many of the reclassified documents were possibly innocuous. This shouldn’t surprise us. Nor should the response of J. William Leonard, the Director of the Archive’s Information Security Oversight Office. Aid and others have also sent a petition to Leonard, who has ordered a review of some reclassified documents but we, both the users of the archive (historians) and those who depend on the users of the archives (non-historians) for information, can not know anything because both the initial reclassification and its review are secret.
Alright, before we go nuclear on the Chosen One’s White House, let us recognize that this program appears to be the brain child of Intelligence agencies and began under the Clinton administration. No doubt, the atmosphere of fear that the Chosen One has engendered only encourages this process. Funny, many historians could now be sent to jail since they already copied and possess some of these newly reclassified documents. I only hope the Vice President doesn’t know about this program. Otherwise, historians are in grave danger.
So it is not only Al Qeida conversations that the Intelligence agencies are interested in but also boring historical documents, which would be read by only ‘grave’ historians, who will then pass on their knowledge to their ‘chosen’ graduate students.
I want to ask two questions in light of this program.
First, what is the value of National Archives and official government documents for uncovering historical truth? As a historian of dissent, I have learnt to read in between the official documents in the best of Subaltern History tradition and make even Ranajit Guha proud. But unlike some other historians, I have never left a truthbursh in the Archives’ restroom. Nor have I ever chosen themes for research that would depend on a great deal of archival research. So it would be nice to get other people comment on the importance of having access to as many documents as possible - both in theory and practice.
Second and related, how is historical truth to be archived? Note that the question of government documents would be a subset of this larger question. My concern in raising this question is to compel us to think about the openness of our soceity. A creative historian (which isn’t an oxymoron, by the way) would still find a way of figuring out what the Clinton or the Bush administration did at any given moment, with or without the documents. But secrecy and suspicion, in our government and amongst ourselves, would eat away the very openness and freedom we claim to cherish. Using this excuse, any embarrassing document could be removed. Anyway, my concern is with a suspicion that arises within me (and in many others) about the entire operation. We would find it difficult to believe that the Intelligence Agencies would be fair in this process. Losing that trust is a bigger loss of legitimacy for the State, even if only democrats and some liberal historians are concerned about this program, at the moment.
So, in the meanwhile, what do we do to show our support to Mathew M. Aid and his colleagues?
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