The CIA deleted the amount Iraqi agents paid for aluminum tubes from page 96 of a Senate report on prewar intelligence. The report quoted the CIA as concluding: ''Their willingness to pay such costs suggests the tubes are intended for a special project of national interest."
That price turned out to be not so high. On page 105 of the same Senate report, the security reviewers let CIA's figure -- up to $17.50 each -- be printed twice, along with other estimates that the Iraqis paid as little as $10 apiece.
''There are too many secrets" and maybe too many secret-makers," said Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut and chairman of the Government Reform Committee's national security panel. There are 3,978 officials who can stamp a document ''top secret," ''secret," or ''confidential" under multiple sets of complex rules.
No one knows how much is classified, he said, and the system ''often does not distinguish between the critically important and comically irrelevant."
The problem is growing, said J. William Leonard, director of the Archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which monitors federal practices. Officials classified documents 8 percent more often in 2003 than in 2002.
''The tone is set at the top," Shays said.
''This administration believes the less known the better," said Shays, noting that he was speaking of a GOP administration. ''I believe the more known the better."
The panel's ranking Democrat, Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, noted that President Clinton directed that in cases of doubt, the lowest or no classification be used.
But in 2003, President Bush ordered officials to use the more restrictive level.
Steven Aftergood, director of a Federation of American Scientists project on secrecy, said some classification clearly aimed to conceal illegality or avoid embarrassment, even though that is forbidden.
Aftergood cited the ''secret" stamp on Army Major General Antonio Taguba's report of ''numerous incidents of sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses" inflicted on Iraqi inmates at Abu Ghraib prison.
