God Quietly Phasing Holy Ghost Out Of Trinity
February 26, 2003
| Issue 39•07
HEAVEN—Calling
the Holy Trinity "overstaffed and over budget," God announced plans
Monday to downsize the group by slowly phasing out the Holy Ghost.
"Given the poor economic climate and the unclear nature of the Holy
Ghost's duties, I felt this was a sensible and necessary decision," God
said. "The Holy Ghost will be given fewer and fewer responsibilities
until His formal resignation from Trinity duty following Easter
services on April 20. Thereafter, the Father and the Son shall be
referred to as the Holy Duo."
CIA Realizes It's Been Using Black Highlighters All These Years
November 30, 2005
| Issue 41•48
LANGLEY,
VA—A report released Tuesday by the CIA's Office of the Inspector
General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of
thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black
highlighters.
CIA Director Porter Goss. According to the report, sections of the documents— "almost
invariably the most crucial passages"—are marred by an indelible black
ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret
highlighting policy that began at the agency's inception in 1947.
CIA Director Porter Goss has ordered further internal investigation.
"Why did it go on for this long, and this far?" said Goss in a press
conference called shortly after the report's release. "I'm as
frustrated as anyone. You can't read a single thing that's been
highlighted. Had I been there to advise [former CIA director] Allen
Dulles, I would have suggested the traditional yellow color—or pink."
Goss added: "There was probably some really, really important information in these documents."
When asked by a reporter if the black ink was meant to intentionally obscure, Goss countered, "Good God, why?"
Goss lamented the fact that the public will probably never know the
particulars of such historic events as the Cold War, the civil-rights
movement, or the growth of the international drug trade.
"I'm sure the CIA played major roles in all these things," Goss said. "But now we'll never know for sure."
In addition to clouding the historical record, the use of the black
highlighters, also known as "permanent markers," may have encumbered or
even prevented critical operations. CIA scholar Matthew Franks was
forced to abandon work on a book about the Bay Of Pigs invasion after
declassified documents proved nearly impossible to read.
"With all the highlighting in the documents I unearthed in the
National Archives, it's really no wonder that the invasion failed,"
Franks said. "I don't see how the field operatives and commandos were
expected to decipher their orders."
The inspector general's report cited in particular the damage black
highlighting did to documents concerning the assassination of John F.
Kennedy, thousands of pages of which "are completely highlighted, from
top to bottom margin."
"It is unclear exactly why CIA bureaucrats sometimes chose to
emphasize entire documents," the report read. "Perhaps the documents
were extremely important in every detail, or the agents, not unlike
college freshmen, were overwhelmed by the reading material and got a
little carried away."
Also unclear is why black highlighters were chosen in the first
place. Some blame it on the closed, elite culture of the CIA itself. A
former CIA officer speaking on the condition of anonymity said
highlighting documents with black pens was a common and universal
practice.
"It seemed counterintuitive, but the higher-ups didn't know what
they were doing," the ex-officer said. "I was once ordered to feed
documents into a copying machine in order to make backups of some very
important top-secret records, but it turned out to be some sort of
device that cut the paper to shreds."
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