Classification Threatens Democracy -- President Obama Is Moving to Declassify Millions of Irrational "Secrets" from Cold War Era

“That’s classified – I could tell you but then I’d have to kill you.”
Tom Cruise, “Top Gun”

Signs like the one above were posted in 1982 along East Fork Poplar Creek, but the U.S. Government told the Tennessee government it could not know how much mercury was in the creek.

In 1982 and 1983, I had the opportunity to put to the test the declassification procedures I had learned about at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service.
Our Appalachian Observer publisher, Ernest F. Phillips, and I requested that all documents on Oak Ridge mercury pollution be declassified. In that document lay the future cleanup of the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex.
One letter. One page. 182 days later, DOE announced the largest mercury pollution event in the history of planet Earth – 4.2 million pounds of lethal mercury in workers’ lungs and brains (no respirators) and in creeks and groundwaters and aquifers (no signs or warnings or prevention).
As Tennessee Valley Authority Chairman S. David Freeman said, "there's a damned coverup out in Oak Ridge."
Classification did indeed kill – there are dead workers and residents in the cemeteries in eleven states thanks to the likes of Union Carbide, which treated workers and residents as expendable.
If we’d waited until George Bush was president, we might have never learned the truth about mercury.
If President Carter had been told of the classified mercury documents in 1977, the cleanup might have begun under an honest, Democratic president.
President Obama returned to first principles – open government – in yesterday’s declassification order.
What an exciting time. Soon we will know the truth about other evil government actions, such as the moving of all African-Americans in Oak Ridge, Tennessee (on U.S. Army orders) to an area (Scarboro or Gamble Valley) just downstream from the polluting Y-12 nuclear weapons plant.
Environmental racism. Environmental crimes. Coverups. We deserve the truth – from Capitol Hill to the White House to St. Augustine City Hall.
In our polluting City of St. Augustine, Florida, this blog has been speaking the truth to power since April 2006 -- 44 months. We're here to stay. In Folio Weekly’s Person of the Year cover story on 93-year old KKK-buster Stetson Kennedy yesterday, Editor Anne Schindler wrote that “cleanupcityofstaugustine.blogspot.com is ground zero for lefty activism in the Ancient City.” (see below).
We shall overcome.