The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) — which has yet to complete a program designed to properly store electronic records even in the shadow of millions of missing White House emails sent during the presidency of George W. Bush — apparently feels a World War II probe is more important.
So does Congress, if their most recent budget is any guide. Congress has just budgeted $650,000 for the declassification of any documents relating to US intelligence agencies and their relationships with Nazi or Japanese war criminals.
Thirty million dollars has already been spent on the Archives’ program aiming to declassify records that explore the web of connections between intelligence agencies and Nazi and Japanese war criminals, according to Congressional Quarterly’s Jeff Stein, who also reported the budget request. The Archives has already spent ten years attempting to sort through their files.
But Congress appears to think $30 million and a decade of time spent isn’t enough.
“There’s a million pages of Army and CIA documents left” to read and catalog, Miriam Kleiman, a spokeswoman for the National Archives and Records Administration, told Stein. She blamed other agencies for failing to produce documents to declassify in a timely manner, and says the Archives plans to hire additional staff to continue the project.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
While the Archives focuses on Nazi-era documents, watchdogs have questioned the agency’s ability to keep up with computer-era files — namely, records of the Bush Administration. A comprehensive program to store electronic data is not slated to be completed until 2011, and has been hampered by delays and cost overruns.
Last September, the Government Accountability Office urged the Archives to create a backup plan should their systems be unable to process incoming records turned over by former President Bush in January of this year.
“If it cannot ingest the electronic records from the Bush administration in a way that supports the search, processing and retrieval of records immediately after the presidential transition, it will not be able to meet the requirements of the Congress, the former and incumbent presidents, and the courts for information in these records in a timely fashion,” the GAO wrote.
In December, a report indicated that the records would not be transferred on schedule for various reasons, among them Bush officials’ court battles and technical problems the Archives has encountered.
Stories on millions of missing Bush White House emails, which the Bush White House said were not backed up by accident, have brought a spotlight to the Archives’ capacity and technical resources relating to electronic data.
The missing emails caused a stir in Congress because of the dates in which they were deleted; they included key dates in the timeline of the outing of CIA officer Valerie Plame Wilson, and were sought in connection with the alleged political firing of US Attorneys.
In a December interview, the Archives’ general counsel Gary M. Stern told The Washington Post, “We hope and expect they all will exist on the system or be recoverable,” even in coming weeks. “We can’t say for sure.”
US government agencies were required by a 1999 law to release “all records” relating to their relationships with German scientists and intelligence agents. An agency set up for the task published books on their findings in 2004 and 2006, Stein notes.
“I thought this was concluded years ago,” secrecy expert Steven Aftergood told Stein. “$650k is a good chunk of money in the declassification world. At roughly $1 per page declassified — it could be $0.50 or as much as $3.00 per page declassified, depending on the need for multiple reviews or for detailed redaction of individual pages — that would pay for more than half a million pages that could be declassified. At this point, the Nazi and Japanese Imperial (Government) records should be completed, and other initiatives funded.”
March 4th, 2009 at 8:53 am
I wonder, will these documents include info on the Nazi flying saucer-programs that where based on Nikola Tesla’s invention; electromagnetic propulsion system??!!! ..and i wonder who flies those crafts now-a-days?
http://www.tfcbooks.com/tesla/1911-10-15.htm
“The flying machine of the future—my flying machine—will be heavier than air, but it will not be an aeroplane. It will have no wings. It will be substantial, solid, stable. You cannot have a stable airplane. The gyroscope can never be successfully applied to the airplane, for it would give a stability that would result in the machine being torn to pieces by the wind, just as the unprotected aeroplane on the ground is torn to pieces by a high wind.
“My flying machine will have neither wings nor propellers. You might see it on the ground and you would never guess that it was a flying machine. Yet it will be able to move at will through the air in any direction with perfect safety, higher speeds than have yet been reached, regardless of weather and oblivious of “holes in the air” or downward currents. It will ascend in such currents if desired. It can remain absolutely stationary in the air, even in a wind, for great length of time. Its lifting power will not depend upon any such delicate devices as the bird has to employ, but upon positive mechanical action.”
“You will get stability through gyroscopes?” I asked.
“Through gyroscopic action of my engine, assisted by some devices I am not yet prepared to talk about,” he replied.
“Powerful air currents that may be deflected at will, if produced by engines and compressors sufficiently light and powerful, might lift a heavy body off the ground and propel it through the air,” I ventured, wondering if I had grasped the inventor’s secret.
Dr. Tesla smiled an inscrutable smile.
“All I have to say on that point is that my airship will have neither gas bag, wings nor propellers,” he said. “It is the child of my dreams, the product of years of intense and painful toil and research. I am not going to talk about it any further. But whatever my airship may be, here at least is an engine that will do things that no other engine ever has done, and that is something tangible.” – New York Herald Tribune, Oct. 15, 1911
dave Reply:
March 5th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Don’t forget free energy too which he also discovered – that’s a topic severely lacking in news on PP and needs some hammering out on here to get peoples arse into gear over developing it. It and will completely destroy the new world order carbon tax scam on solar system wide climate change.
The illuminati are dying anyway because they no longer serve any anyones purpose, whatsoever. The people will be in charge of our own new world order where everyone has equal opportunity.
peace
March 4th, 2009 at 11:04 am
i wonder how many times the name Bush shows up in the Nazi documents.
Dave Reply:
March 5th, 2009 at 4:41 am
Those will probably be the $3.00 pages with multiple redactions.
March 4th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
I wonder if the suspicious collapse of the national archive building in germany this week leading to the destruction of all the historic documents has anything to do with this??
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/t.....846343.ece
scalar weapons anyone?
MiyokoGoto Reply:
March 4th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
Wow… Any suspicious building can collapse by itself like WTC.. without harming nearby buildings. I’m not blaming BND for any terrorist activity or inspection missed ending up the building corruption.
March 4th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
They need to look at the documents linking the Bush family to the Nazi’s.
March 5th, 2009 at 1:58 am
i would have done it for a lot less