Researchers looking into America’s Cold War foreign policy face other needless hurdles. Declassification requests routinely take more than a decade to receive a final decision. In 2018, an investigative reporter filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the CIA’s internal history of its operations against Lumumba. As of this writing, in 2023, the request is still pending. The United States spends a pittance on declassification: about $100 million a year, a fourth of the Pentagon’s budget for military bands. The U.S. intelligence community has resisted efforts to replace costly manual
...more
