Abstract
It's for your own good.” That's one of the government's favorite responses when explaining why it won't reveal things it doesn't want you to know. It's what government officials said when, post-September 11, countless documents were removed from the public domain; when the ACLU tried to obtain statistics on the Justice Department's use of the Patriot Act; when the Federation of American Scientists tried to obtain the 2002 classified intelligence budget … the list goes on and on.
There are now nine exemptions and various exclusions to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the law under which the government must give the public access to its records. Topping that list is, of course, the “national security” exemption; others include the protection of trade secrets, law enforcement files, and medical records. But now the Defense Department is seeking yet another one for the National Security Agency, which has somehow managed just fine for 37 years without one. The move for a new exemption troubles those at another NSA–the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
There are many reasons for classifying government documents, some perhaps serious and proper, others that can border on the ridiculous. Fortunately, there are people who keep an eye on this sort of thing. In May, Thomas Blanton, William Burr, and Jeffrey Richelson of the National Security Archives released a collection of “Dubious Secrets,” a compilation of declassified documents that shows how some classification decisions are arbitrary, subjective, and “show excessive secrecy … rather than real protection of national security.”
Blanton's favorite, which didn't make it onto the list (although you can find it in his book, White House E-mail), concerned a 1987 e-mail to Colin Powell discussing ways in which the United States could support Saddam Hussein against Iran. In a declassification review on June 6, 1994, the reviewer blacked out most of the top and bottom halves of the e-mail. Nine days later, the same e-mail was reviewed again, and this time, just the middle section was blacked out. The two versions of the same document had only one redacted line in common. The kicker? The e-mail was reviewed by the same person both times.
A few items from the “Dubious Secrets” collection, and in some cases even the reasons for their classification, seem to have failed the test of time:
Fear of being seen as silly
In 1999, the CIA blocked the release of a 25-year-old joke that appeared in a weekly report about terrorism. The joke described the threat to “the annual courier flight” of the “Government of the North Pole's” “Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus.”
Didn't know where it came from
Nervous government secrecy fiends sometimes edit out publicly available information that should never have been considered classifiable in the first place. Take the page following the table of contents of the Defense Intelligence College's Espionage in the Air Force, for example. Although it was classified as “secret,” it was actually just a quotation from Eric Ambler's 1962 thriller, The Light of Day.
From the “duh!” files
A once-classified sentence from the 1969 Studies in Intelligence, offered this powerful and dangerous insight: “Newspapers, magazines, books, and foreign broadcasts comprise the greatest volume of open source materials.”
Uh, we forgot it had been declassified
In 2001, the CIA denied a Freedom of Information Act request for a March 6, 1963 document: Sherman Kent's memorandum to the CIA director, titled “Consequences of Israeli Acquisition of Nuclear Capability.” The CIA claimed the document could not be declassified because it revealed intelligence sources and methods. As it turned out, the document was available at the John F. Kennedy Library, having been declassified in its entirety in 1978.
Maybe the public will forget
Elements of the “top secret” missile stand-down deal made by President John F. Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev as part of the denouement of the Cuban missile crisis (the Soviets withdrew missiles in Cuba in exchange for the withdrawal of U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey and Italy) were known almost as soon as the deal was made. But as famous as the episode was, the Defense Department continues to classify the names of the countries–Italy and Turkey–where U.S. missiles were deployed, even though the air force lists them in its public history of the U.S. guided missile program. The locations of other historic nuclear deployments are already in the public record (see past Bulletins for proof), but the Pentagon still treats the information as “Formerly Restricted Data.”
You gotta be polite
Some material edited out of declassified documents may have been cut to protect leaders from potentially embarrassing releases. An example of the (slightly) embarrassing variety can be found in a January 6, 1972 memorandum of a conversation between President Richard Nixon and Japan's Prime Minister Eisaku Sato, in which Nixon–in an apparent attempt at humor–remarked, “Perhaps lady chiefs of state are dangerous, since both India and Israel have been led in war by women.” A 1996 release “sanitized” the quip from the memo, which in 1999 was released in its entirety.
To muddy the waters
In 1987, in the midst of public criticism of U.S. military aid to El Salvador, the CIA released a 1984 report on that country's death squads. The CIA blacked out nearly the entire document, save for two disclosures. The same report was released again in 1993, this time in response to a U.N. Truth Commission request. The two “disclosures” in the 1987 version were entirely contradicted by the content the CIA had blacked out. By careful redacting, the CIA had not only avoided releasing any information that would contradict the Reagan White House's official line, but also provided the desired “disinformation.” (See box below.)
Didn't bother to read it
In an April 5, 2001 cable, Amb. Anne Patterson wanted to clarify the role of U.S. government and contract personnel working in Colombia. Patterson wrote that she wanted “full transparency with the press, as long as it does not put U.S. or Colombian personnel at risk for injury or capture by disclosing specific individuals or locations/employment dates.” The declassification authorities at the State Department deleted large portions of the rest of the document–portions that were extremely unlikely to put personnel at risk.
The full text of “Dubious Secrets” is available on line at www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/.
The rest of the story
Legible in a sea of black ink, one of the 1987 disclosures about El Salvador reads: “Government officials have publicly denounced death squads, and military leaders have pledged … to punish human rights offenders within the armed forces.” But facts revealed in the 1993 release contradict the tone of the misleading 1987 disclosure. Although two midlevel intelligence officers in the Salvadoran army were removed from their posts, the document says, “This gesture is offset by their replacement with ultrarightist officers, one of whom is a [redacted] leader of a police death squad.”
