Fwd: Removes 50 Year Old Documents From Open Stacks

[Henk Vreekamp]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

>Date:         Tue, 21 Feb 2006 09:28:09 -0600
>From: Newsroom-l <newsroom-l at NETSPACE.ORG>

>CIA REMOVES 50 YEAR OLD DOCUMENTS FROM OPEN STACKS AT NATIONAL ARCHIVES
>http://www.nsarchive.org
>
>Washington D.C., February 21, 2006 - The CIA and other federal agencies
>have secretly reclassified over 55,000 pages of records taken from the
>open shelves at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA),
>according to a report published today on the World Wide Web by the
>National Security Archive at George Washington University. Matthew Aid,
>author of the report and a visiting fellow at the Archive, discovered this
>secret program through his wide-ranging research in intelligence,
>military, and diplomatic records at NARA and found that the CIA and
>military agencies have reviewed millions of pages at an unknown cost to
>taxpayers in order to sequester documents from collections that had been
>open for years.
>
>The briefing book that the Archive published today includes 50 year old
>documents that CIA had impounded at NARA but which have already been
>published in the State Department's historical series, Foreign Relations
>of the United States, or have been declassified elsewhere. These documents
>concern such innocuous matters as the State Department's map and foreign
>periodicals procurement programs on behalf of the U.S. intelligence
>community or the State Department's open source intelligence research
>efforts during 1948.
>
>Other documents have apparently been sequestered because they were
>embarrassing, such as a complaint from the Director of Central
>Intelligence about the bad publicity the CIA was receiving from its
>failure to predict anti-American riots in Bogota, Colombia in 1948 or a
>report that the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community badly
>botched their estimates as to whether or not Communist China would
>intervene in the Korean War in the fall of 1950. It is difficult to
>imagine how the documents cited by Aid could cause any harm to U.S.
>national security.
>
>To justify their reclassification program, officials at CIA and military
>agencies have argued that during the implementation of Executive Order
>12958, President Clinton's program for bulk declassification of historical
>federal records, many sensitive intelligence-related documents that
>remained classified were inadvertently released at NARA, especially in
>State Department files. Even though researchers had been combing through
>and copying documents from those collections for years, CIA and other
>agencies compelled NARA to grant them access to the open files so they
>could reclassify documents. While this reclassification activity began
>late in the 1990s, its scope widened during the Bush administration, and
>it is scheduled to continue until 2007. The CIA has ignored arguments from
>NARA officials that some of the impounded documents have already been
>published.
>
>"Every blue ribbon panel that has studied the performance of the U.S.
>defense establishment and intelligence community since September 11, 2001
>has emphasized the need for less secrecy and greater transparency," said
>Aid. "This episode reveals an enduring culture of secrecy in the U.S.
>government and highlights the need to establish measures prohibiting
>future secret reclassification programs."
>
>On Friday, February 17, Aid and representatives of the National Security
>Archive, the National History Coalition, Public Citizen Litigation Group,
>and the Society for the Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR),
>wrote to J. William Leonard, director of the U.S. government's Information
>Security Oversight Office (ISOO) asking ISOO to audit the reclassified
>documents, to return documents to the files, and develop better guidelines
>for the review of historical records.

**********
Dit bericht is verzonden via de informele D66 discussielijst (D66 at nic.surfnet.nl).
Aanmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SUBSCRIBE D66 uwvoornaam uwachternaam
Afmelden: stuur een email naar LISTSERV at nic.surfnet.nl met in het tekstveld alleen: SIGNOFF D66
Het on-line archief is te vinden op: http://listserv.surfnet.nl/archives/d66.html
**********