Why Is Obama Keeping Four Seconds of a Nixon-Era Tape Classified?

Editor’s Note: Obama keeps more secrets than most people take breaths in a day. It’s a wonder his closet doesn’t explode in a giant mushroom cloud, it’s so overflowing with skeletons… Also, “Because national security” is pretty much the blanket statement reason for our government getting away with everything ever.

After promising to be the “most transparent” in history, the Obama administration is still refusing to release four seconds of a recording that Richard Nixon’s chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, made 42 years ago.

Ken Hughes, a University of Virginia researcher who’s studied Nixon-era tapes, requested in February that the snippet of the Jan. 12, 1973, discussion on “Vietnam Negotiations” be declassified.

Revealing what was said, however, “would reveal information that would impair U.S. cryptologic systems or activities,” National Security Agency spokeswoman Vanee Vines said in an e-mailed statement.

The NSA last reviewed the four-second snippet, part of Haldeman’s four-year routine of maintaining a daily diary, in June 2013 and decided it should remain a state secret.

(Read more at Bloomberg)