Senator Marco Rubio Calls For Major Declassification of Material on Flying Objects Following NORAD Interception

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) made an extraordinary pronouncement during Fox Radio’s ‘Guy Benson Show,’ as per Breitbart. The Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee commented that the vast majority of classified material presented earlier to the Senate on flying objects ought to be declassified.

Rubio’s particular remark was that he “believe[s] that 99% — let me be fair, let’s just be generous, 95% of what they shared with us at that briefing today may be classified, but it doesn’t need to be. There’s nothing classified about it.” Later during the show, he mused about the shooting down of three unidentified objects by saying, “Was it the smart thing to do? The answer is, I don’t know until we know at least some more attributes about what it was. The Chinese spy balloon, we knew what it was. We knew why it was there. And I believe that it should have been shot down before it got over Montana.”

He added, “But we fired pretty expensive missiles at a very small object and I’m curious why now…we finally start shooting at these things. Maybe it was the right thing to do, but until we know more about what they have on them, it’s hard to make that — I’m not going to second-guess the view of it.”

BIDEN IN TROUBLE: OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF VOTERS SEE CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS AS SCANDAL

What is clear is that Washington D.C. is a city that thrives on secrets and on the covering up of these secrets irrespective of whether these classified materials are highly pertinent to actual national security. Many individuals have complained about the policy of overclassification that is so rampant in the capital. Justin Amash, a former Republican Congressman from Michigan, complained in a tweet by noting, “Yes, Congress and the administration can fix that [overclassification] anytime they want. They don’t want to. Don’t blame the permanent bureaucracy for that. Blame the politicians. It’s a choice they’ve made. They just want the laws to apply to others and not themselves.”

Is there overclassification? Yes. Congress and the administration can fix that anytime they want. They don’t want to. Don’t blame the permanent bureaucracy for that. Blame the politicians. It’s a choice they’ve made. They just want the laws to apply to others and not themselves.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 24, 2023

Amash has also criticized the practice for being one of the methods that empowers what he terms in a tweet “the police state.”

Politicians empower the police state with weapons like the Espionage Act, Patriot Act, FISA, and overclassification. They can’t get enough of the permanent bureaucracy as long as it’s used on YOU. But they’ll shamelessly blast the permanent bureaucracy when it’s turned on them.

— Justin Amash (@justinamash) January 24, 2023

People and news agencies have used various news items revolving around politicians possessing documents that are marked as classified to highlight their concerns over the practice of overclassification (or, depending on one’s point of view, to excuse their favored politicians’ conduct). Oona Hathaway, a former special counsel at the Pentagon, in an interview with NPR, claimed that “There’s somewhere in the order of over 50 million documents classified every year. We don’t know the exact number because even the government can’t keep track of it all.” NPR further records her saying that “the rate at which the government classifies documents has created a problem that ultimately makes it harder for the public to hold the government accountable.”

A 2004 hearing before the House Committee on Government Reform made similar points. The transcript of the hearing states that “They [various committees and commissions on classification] all found it impossible to quantify the extent of overclassification because no one even knows the full scope of the Federal Government’s classified holding at any given time. Some estimate 10 percent of current secrets should never have been classified. Others put the extent of overclassification as high as 90 percent.”

The immense growth of this vast and unaccountable classification regime occurred in a surprisingly short space of time. The modern classification system was only invented in 1951 by President Harry Truman’s executive fiat. The labyrinthine nature of the leviathan of state secrets should be curbed if we wish to have a more transparent and accountable system of government.