At the Pentagon, it's all double-super-secret background

Walter Pincus writes in today's Washington Post of a new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) that condemns Rummy's office, and the Pentagon at large, for marking "classified" all manner of documents containing only unclassified information:

The GAO reviewed only a "nonprobability sample" of 111 classified Defense Department documents from the Office of the Secretary of Defense. To understand how minute the sample is, the GAO reported that in the five fiscal years between 2000 and 2004, the Pentagon was responsible for 66.8 million new classified records. That is about 13.4 million a year.

[...]

In a broader administrative criticism, the GAO found that 92 of the 111 documents had some marking error, such as failure to include declassification instructions or the source of the classification as required.

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