ACTIONS AND REDACTIONS
Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act
By Nicholson Baker.
464 pages.
Penguin Press, 2020. $30.
Nicholson Baker’s one-way journey down the rabbit hole of state secrecy began nearly a decade ago, when he set out to answer a seemingly straightforward question: Did the United States deploy biological weapons in North Korea and China during the Korean War?
Baker, a passionate and estimable chronicler, had recently finished , his eye-opening exploration of the world’s gradual advance toward all-out global war and Holocaust. Nearly as soon as that war had ended, with the unleashing of atomic weapons on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the U.S. military was looking for more-covert methods of bringing enemies to
