Nixon Logs Burn to Ashes
The inside track on Washington politics.
Politics
July 1, 1998
Thousands of pages of history about Richard M. Nixon were tossed into a shredder at the National Archives last month. Just to make sure no one pieces them together again, archives officials had them stuffed into 126 burn bags and hurled into an incinerator at the Pentagon yesterday morning.
for many decades these were used daily
Nixon Logs Burn to Ashes
Politics
July 1, 1998
Thousands of pages of history about Richard M. Nixon were tossed into a shredder at the National Archives last month. Just to make sure no one pieces them together again, archives officials had them stuffed into 126 burn bags and hurled into an incinerator at the Pentagon yesterday morning.
A
burn bag is the informal name given to a container (usually a paper bag or some other
waste receptacle) that holds
sensitive or classified documents which are to be destroyed by fire or
pulping after a certain period of time. The most common usage of burn bags is by government institutions, in the destruction of
classified materials.
Destruction via burn bags is considered superior to
shredding, because shredded documents may be reconstructed. After the capture of the United States
embassy in
Tehran during the
Iran hostage crisis, shredded documents were turned over for painstaking manual reconstruction, which revealed to Iran some U.S. operations including spies. A picture of one such reassembled document can be seen at the
George Washington University website.
[1] Today,
scanners and
computers can reconstruct shredded documents very quickly.
[2] Burn bags are designed to facilitate the destruction process by not requiring the removal of the items to be destroyed beforehand and by indicating if the items require special procedures.
