Associated Press
October 16, 2003
Pentagon Restores Online Access to Documents
By JIM KRANE, Associated Press WriterThe Pentagon restored Internet access Thursday to hundreds of unclassified documents that it recently took offline, including directives on myriad topics, from defining policies on conscientious objectors to displaying flags at half-staff.
The Associated Press reported Wednesday that TheMemoryHole.org, a Web site that archives documents and news stories that have disappeared from the Internet, posted the directives shortly after the Defense Department removed them earlier this month.
Steven Aftergood, who reported the developments in his Secrecy News newsletter, said before access was restored that the disappearance was the latest example of public documents being taken down from government Web sites after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The directives are freely available in printed form and are used by contractors, job seekers and people with family members in the military, said Aftergood. He said his organization, the Federation of American Scientists, would invoke the federal Freedom of Information Act to challenge their removal.
"If we want an open and accountable government, we need this type of information in the public domain," Aftergood said Wednesday.
On Thursday, Aftergood credited the Pentagon with getting the message after being challenged.
"An optimist would be entitled to conclude that it is still possible, even under current conditions, to effect change in official secrecy policy, at least in a modest way," Aftergood wrote in his newsletter.
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col. Ken McClellan, said he wasn't sure why the site was taken down or restored, but suggested it may have been part of a review of the Defense Department's Internet presence.
"After 9/11 there was considerable consternation about what's on the Web, and about 10,000 documents were pulled behind the firewall and off the Web," McClellan said. The combined information from those removed documents were "greater than what we wanted al-Qaida to have access to."
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On the Net:
Pentagon directives: http://www.dtic.mil/whs/directives
Secrecy News: http://www.fas.org/sgp
Copyright 2003 Associated Press