Ashcroft couldn't convict any terrorists. The feds can't catch Bin Laden.
But we can rest easy, because they are out there trolling eBay and used book stores to run down six-decades-old books that are suddenly considered too dangerous to be in the public domain: Books' removal a jolt for civil libertarians by Sam Stanton Sacramento Bee 11/21/04.
You're allowed to know that Shasta Dam sits on the Sacramento River 12 miles northwest of Redding, that it's 1,077.5 feet high and consists of 6.27 million cubic yards of concrete.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation thinks it's all right to divulge that the structure is a curved gravity type dam built between 1938 and 1945 and modified in 1995 and 1996. That information is readily available on the bureau's Web site.
But there is plenty the agency doesn't want you to know about Shasta Dam and others, and that quest for secrecy and security led one of its agents to a used-book store in Redding earlier this month to collect two 61-year-old technical books on the dam that the bureau wants out of public view.
"They'll probably be taken and brought back and put in some secure spot, either here in the regional office or in our security office in Denver," bureau spokesman Jeff McCracken said from his Sacramento office last week.
Our tax dollars at work. Well, between mega-deficits, wars of liberation in the Middle East, Star Wars and an expensive privatization scheme for Social Security in the works, they may have to shut down agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation anyway.
And who will troll the used bookstores for us then?
I know! We can start offering snitch money for private citizens to turn in booksellers that have six-decades-old reports from government agencies on their shelves. I mean, who knows what kind of harm The Terrorists could do with statistical tables from the Treasury Department from 1943? Those kinds of books need to be sent to a "secure location," too.
Hey, isn't that where Dark Lord Dick Cheney normally hangs out?
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