This is great:

The Memory Hole > The Justice Dept's Attorney Workforce Diversity Study--Uncensored: "With no notice, the Justice Department recently posted to its Website a long-awaited report. Justice spent $2 million for a study on the racial and gender diversity of its attorney workforce. The report has been complete for almost two years, but the Department stalled its release, despite numerous Freedom of Information Act requests. The report appeared on one of the FOIA sections of the Department's Website sometime in October. It's one of the most heavily-redacted government documents in recent memory. Even Congress' report on 9/11 had a smaller percentage of its contents blacked out. The Memory Hole has posted a version with no redactions; instead, those sections are highlighted in yellow, so you can easily zoom in on the parts originally deemed too embarassing for us to see."

What bothers me about this is the triviality of the material censored by the DOJ. I've looked over the de-censored report. Apparently the DOJ didn't feel Americans should see the following:

• "Attorneys across demographic groups believe that the Department is a good place to work." [Good thing they cut that out -- wouldn't want to associate DOJ with lawyers, whom everyone hates].
• "In particular, the Attorney General's Honors Program is an important tool for increasing diversity." [Does Ashcroft want to avoid being associated with something that might look like affirmative action? I can see no other reason to block out this sentence].
• All -- or nearly all -- proposals for improvement were blocked out. Even the section titles were blocked out. If one were to read the blacked-out version, one might conclude that the report made no suggestions for improvement at all.
• Bold-faced summaries were blacked out if they contained negative adjectives. They were left in if they contained positive adjectives. Often, the data was not blacked out. Only the summary statement, as if to make the reader work slightly harder.
• "We define upper management as the Senior Executive Service (SES)..." [of course it would be dangerous if the public knew how the report defines terms such as "upper management." Christ.]
• "Note the particularly high spikes in female and minority representation in grades 11 and 12. Attorneys in these grades fall into one category: recent Attorney General's Honors Program hires." [Somebody really doesn't like this Honors Program thing, whatever it is...]

There's a lot of stuff blacked out. The last third of the report is pretty much blacked out. A lot of this material just doesn't make any sense. I, Joe Public, am thoroughly insulted by some of the trifling bits and pieces that they decided I shouldn't see. I'm not that upset by what the report says. I am extremely upset that they went through all that trouble to censor such stupid little sentences.