Classified Information

Classification of government information, for the most part, only serves to keep the American people from knowing what its government is doing. The rest of the world certainly knows what our government is doing.
I am always perplexed at American’s lack of knowledge about the world. For example our complete bewilderment at why so many other nations hate us. Why should Iran be so hostile? What have we ever done to them?? Much of Iranian hatred is based on our CIA deposing their democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953 and installing a brutal dictator (the Shah) who gave the US and Britain unlimited access to oil. Our meddling in Iran is highly “CLASSFIED”!
However, in the year 2000 the New York Times obtained a copy of the CIA’s secret history of the coup, revealing the inner workings of a plot that set the stage for the Islamic revolution in 1979, and for a generation of anti-American hatred in one of the Middle East's most powerful countries.* The document remains classified.
The history of our relationship with Saddam Hussein is like that too. The sordid tale of how we tried to use him to overthrow the Iranian government which followed the Shah is, for the most part, still under wraps. Almost half of Americans still believe that he had WMDs before our invasion but few of them realize that we provided the ones he did have to do our dirty work. Now we shame him for gassing the Kurds but at the time they were just “collateral damage” in his attempt to kill Iranian agents he thought were among the Kurds. This was OK with our government at the time.

* http://www.globalpolicy.org/empire/history/2000/0416ciairan.htm