Since 9/11, the National Archives, the keeper of the nation's records, has quietly removed more than 1.1 million pages of government documents from public view.

According to The Associated Press, which broke the story, "entire file boxes were removed without significant review," some of them containing papers more than a century old, because the Archives lacked the time to do a thorough scrutiny.

The Bush administration has occasional justification for secrecy, of course, and at least some of the records at the Archives are a case in point - files on nuclear, chemical and biological weapons technology, intelligence gathering, blueprints of critical facilities, government contingency plans.

But 1.1 million pages worth? One of the reclassified documents was a 1960 map of a Tennessee reservoir; a motivated terrorist could get more up to date information from the local bait and tackle shop.

This would not be particularly worrisome if the Archives had not been caught earlier in a secret agreement to allow the CIA and Pentagon to reclassify documents that had already been made public. Researchers can still file Freedom of Information requests for the sequestered files but they need to know precisely which documents have been removed. At the very least, as one open government advocate interviewed by the AP urged, the Archives should create a public registry of the documents it has pulled from the shelves.