Secrecy in the United States government has always been a problem.

From The Pentagon Papers — documents former President Richard Nixon tried to stop The New York Times from publishing — to domestic wiretapping under President George W. Bush, the federal government is always doing something it doesn't want the public to know about — including making declassified documents disappear from the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.

The National Security Archive, a research library at George Washington University, released a memo Tuesday, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, that detailed the National Archives' role in the removal of declassified documents from the archives by the CIA, U.S. Air Force and other agencies.

The memo describes the agencies' program of reclassifying roughly 9,500 records, and claims the documents should never have been declassified or placed in the archives because they could endanger national security.

The CIA and other agencies involved instructed officials from the National Archives not to draw attention to the removals because they wanted to avoid "researcher complaints."

It seems obvious that the government shouldn't hide things at all — and it's especially wrong to hide its efforts to fix an earlier mistake.

But we'll continue drawing attention to this because the government keeps hiding information from us. The government screwed up by releasing documents it shouldn't have, and then tried to cover it up.

The officials involved in removing the records should have been open, admitted mistakes and corrected them.

Instead, we are left wondering what else has simply vanished because our government doesn't want us to know what's going on.

The federal government needs to let people have access to information and stop stonewalling them.

Transparency, not secrecy, is the way the government needs to conduct business.