Free Poodle Blanket!

I mean, free the information that still remains secret about the 1961 contingency plan for a possible U.S. - Russian confrontation over West Berlin, a plan that goes by the name "Poodle Blanket." That's what the National Security Archive (NSA) urges the Defense Department to do in a post named Why is "Poodle Blanket" Classified?

In a response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, the Pentagon claims that "Poodle Blanket" contingency plans from 1961 for a possible confrontation over West Berlin (no longer divided) with the Soviet Union (no longer a country) still need to be secret for fear of damage to current U.S. national security, according to documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University (here).

It's hard to believe that we still have a national security interest in keeping Poodle Blanket under wraps, especially because many key documents about it were declassified and published almost twenty years ago. As the NSA post continues:

In the early 1990s, the State Department's historical series, Foreign Relations of the United States, published a number of documents on "Poodle Blanket" -- including the highest level National Security Action Memorandum 109.

You can read the whole post, as well as those State Department documents, here.