To: unclewest who wrote (56490 ) 7/27/2004 6:30:45 PM From: KLP Respond to I would guess that organizations like this are precisely a good part of the reason that the CIA reports are so "whited out".....Wonder if there is anyplace else in the world that so openly displays the workings, secret and not, of the Government other than America......? In the process of developing its extensive collections, the Archive has become the leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act. The Archive has inherited more than 2,000 requests from outside requesters who donated their documents and their pending requests to the Archive, and initiated more than 20,000 other FOIA requests over the past fifteen years. The Archive's work has set new precedents under the FOIA, including more efficient procedures for document processing at the State Department, less burden on requesters to qualify for waivers of processing fees, and the archival preservation of electronic information held by the government. Archive lawsuits under FOIA have forced the release of previously secret documents ranging from the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters during the Cuban Missile Crisis to the diaries of Oliver North during Iran-contra. The Archive's expertise in the U.S. FOIA, as well as in archival and library practices, has brought delegations from South Africa, Russia, Hungary, Germany, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and various Latin American countries to the Archive to learn from this innovative model of a non governmental institutional memory for formerly secret government documents and the Freedom of Information Act. The Archive is currently working with non governmental institutions in more than a dozen countries to expand open government laws and practices both here and abroad. gwu.edu gwu.edu
