Dear Pentagon: Please Give Me All Your Secrets

Hazing videos. Hillary's mail to the Pentagon. The military's ESP research. Those are just a few of the requests for the Defense Department's documents, filed under the Freedom of Information Act in 2007. I recently stumbled upon the complete list; it's fascinating reading. And I suppose that if any document should be made public, it's a FOIA list.

A few things jump out. First, god bless the National Security Archive. Many of the most important, and most interesting, documents sought come from William Burr and his colleagues there -- things like the documents from Jerry Bremer's disastrous reign as viceroy of Iraq. There's evidence, too, of other reporters doing a darn good job of investigating and trying to uncover secrets. Take the Dallas Morning News' work to uncover the scam that was the Sniffex explosives-detector.

Second, the Defense Department gets some strange requests - and some that I believe have a low probability of getting an answer. Here are my favorites:

#171. Someone going by the name "K,A" simply wants "All Information Regarding North Korea."

#35. "Blic Daily", A Yugoslav paper, wants all our secrets on the Yugoslav intelligence service.

#334. "Complete abstract of the prior contract for Subsistence Chicken Egg Production."

#559. "All records related to the testing of psychic abilities including extrasensory perception ('ESP') , Psychokinesis ('PK'), remote viewing ('RV') etc. conducted at the Stanford Research Institute from 1940 through 2006."

#681. A convicted bomber currently held in a Bolivian prison, Lestat Montevideo, wants, among other things: " Information pertaining to the military capabilities of Bolivia, Chile, Cuba, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela. Information pertaining to the sanity on Venezuelan Dictator Hugo Chavez, Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro and/or Bolivian President Evo Morales Ayma."

Which requests jump out at you? E-mail me, or leave comments below.