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National Security Archive Update, February 21, 2006
CIA REMOVES 50 YEAR OLD DOCUMENTS FROM OPEN STACKS AT NATIONAL
ARCHIVES
For more information: Matthew Aid, William Burr, Meredith Fuchs 202/994-7000
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.
http://www.nsarchive.org
______________________________________________________
THE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental
research institute and library located at The George Washington
University in Washington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes
declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information
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government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties
and donations from foundations and individuals.
_______________________________________________________
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[ siehe auch:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB179/index.htm
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/21/politics/21reclassify.html
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/69947
sowie weitere Meldungen unter http://news.google.com (U.S.)]