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February 27, 2006
Big Brother is Watching
As a person who does frequent research in the National Archives, I was quite flabbergasted to read in the New York Times that the Government is removing from public access thousands of items that have already been declassified, some of which have been available for public review for years. It struck me as Orwellian and symptomatic of the current administration's secrecy mania, which seems to know no bounds. And to compund things, the program itself is consiedered secret, and therefore nobody will talk about it. The article is attached below.
February 21, 2006
U.S. Reclassifies Many Documents in Secret Review
By SCOTT SHANE
WASHINGTON, Feb. 20 — In a seven-year-old secret program at the National Archives, intelligence agencies have been removing from public access thousands of historical documents that were available for years, including some already published by the State Department and others photocopied years ago by private historians.
The restoration of classified status to more than 55,000 previously declassified pages began in 1999, when the Central Intelligence Agency and five other agencies objected to what they saw as a hasty release of sensitive information after a 1995 declassification order signed by President Bill Clinton. It accelerated after the Bush administration took office and especially after the 2001 terrorist attacks, according to archives records.
But because the reclassification program is itself shrouded in secrecy — governed by a still-classified memorandum that prohibits the National Archives even from saying which agencies are involved — it continued virtually without outside notice until December. That was when an intelligence historian, Matthew M. Aid, noticed that dozens of documents he had copied years ago had been withdrawn from the archives' open shelves.
Mr. Aid was struck by what seemed to him the innocuous contents of the documents — mostly decades-old State Department reports from the Korean War and the early cold war. He found that eight reclassified documents had been previously published in the State Department's history series, "Foreign Relations of the United States."
"The stuff they pulled should never have been removed," he said. "Some of it is mundane, and some of it is outright ridiculous."
After Mr. Aid and other historians complained, the archives' Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees government classification, began an audit of the reclassification program, said J. William Leonard, director of the office.
Mr. Leonard said he ordered the audit after reviewing 16 withdrawn documents and concluding that none should be secret.
"If those sample records were removed because somebody thought they were classified, I'm shocked and disappointed," Mr. Leonard said in an interview. "It just boggles the mind."
If Mr. Leonard finds that documents are being wrongly reclassified, his office could not unilaterally release them. But as the chief adviser to the White House on classification, he could urge a reversal or a revision of the reclassification program.
A group of historians, including representatives of the National Coalition for History and the Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations, wrote to Mr. Leonard on Friday to express concern about the reclassification program, which they believe has blocked access to some material at the presidential libraries as well as at the archives.
Among the 50 withdrawn documents that Mr. Aid found in his own files is a 1948 memorandum on a C.I.A. scheme to float balloons over countries behind the Iron Curtain and drop propaganda leaflets. It was reclassified in 2001 even though it had been published by the State Department in 1996.
Another historian, William Burr, found a dozen documents he had copied years ago whose reclassification he considers "silly," including a 1962 telegram from George F. Kennan, then ambassador to Yugoslavia, containing an English translation of a Belgrade newspaper article on China's nuclear weapons program.
Under existing guidelines, government documents are supposed to be declassified after 25 years unless there is particular reason to keep them secret. While some of the choices made by the security reviewers at the archives are baffling, others seem guided by an old bureaucratic reflex: to cover up embarrassments, even if they occurred a half-century ago.
One reclassified document in Mr. Aid's files, for instance, gives the C.I.A.'s assessment on Oct. 12, 1950, that Chinese intervention in the Korean War was "not probable in 1950." Just two weeks later, on Oct. 27, some 300,000 Chinese troops crossed into Korea.
Mr. Aid said he believed that because of the reclassification program, some of the contents of his 22 file cabinets might technically place him in violation of the Espionage Act, a circumstance that could be shared by scores of other historians. But no effort has been made to retrieve copies of reclassified documents, and it is not clear how they all could even be located.
"It doesn't make sense to create a category of documents that are classified but that everyone already has," said Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. "These documents were on open shelves for years."
The group plans to post Mr. Aid's reclassified documents and his account of the secret program on its Web site, www.nsarchive.org, on Tuesday.
The program's critics do not question the notion that wrongly declassified material should be withdrawn. Mr. Aid said he had been dismayed to see "scary" documents in open files at the National Archives, including detailed instructions on the use of high explosives.
But the historians say the program is removing material that can do no conceivable harm to national security. They say it is part of a marked trend toward greater secrecy under the Bush administration, which has increased the pace of classifying documents, slowed declassification and discouraged the release of some material under the Freedom of Information Act.
Experts on government secrecy believe the C.I.A. and other spy agencies, not the White House, are the driving force behind the reclassification program.
"I think it's driven by the individual agencies, which have bureaucratic sensitivities to protect," said Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, editor of the online weekly Secrecy News. "But it was clearly encouraged by the administration's overall embrace of secrecy."
National Archives officials said the program had revoked access to 9,500 documents, more than 8,000 of them since President Bush took office. About 30 reviewers — employees and contractors of the intelligence and defense agencies — are at work each weekday at the archives complex in College Park, Md., the officials said.
Archives officials could not provide a cost for the program but said it was certainly in the millions of dollars, including more than $1 million to build and equip a secure room where the reviewers work.
Michael J. Kurtz, assistant archivist for record services, said the National Archives sought to expand public access to documents whenever possible but had no power over the reclassifications. "The decisions agencies make are those agencies' decisions," Mr. Kurtz said.
Though the National Archives are not allowed to reveal which agencies are involved in the reclassification, one archivist said on condition of anonymity that the C.I.A. and the Defense Intelligence Agency were major participants.
A spokesman for the C.I.A., Paul Gimigliano, said that the agency had released 26 million pages of documents to the National Archives since 1998 and that it was "committed to the highest quality process" for deciding what should be secret.
"Though the process typically works well, there will always be the anomaly, given the tremendous amount of material and multiple players involved," Mr. Gimigliano said.
A spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency said he was unable to comment on whether his agency was involved in the program.
Anna K. Nelson, a foreign policy historian at American University, said she and other researchers had been puzzled in recent years by the number of documents pulled from the archives with little explanation.
"I think this is a travesty," said Dr. Nelson, who said she believed that some reclassified material was in her files. "I think the public is being deprived of what history is really about: facts."
The document removals have not been reported to the Information Security Oversight Office, as the law has required for formal reclassifications since 2003.
The explanation, said Mr. Leonard, the head of the office, is a bureaucratic quirk. The intelligence agencies take the position that the reclassified documents were never properly declassified, even though they were reviewed, stamped "declassified," freely given to researchers and even published, he said.
Thus, the agencies argue, the documents remain classified — and pulling them from public access is not really reclassification.
Mr. Leonard said he believed that while that logic might seem strained, the agencies were technically correct. But he said the complaints about the secret program, which prompted his decision to conduct an audit, showed that the government's system for deciding what should be secret is deeply flawed.
"This is not a very efficient way of doing business," Mr. Leonard said. "There's got to be a better way."
Posted by rickbeyer at 07:36 AM | Comments (0)
February 20, 2006
Outside Inside
1) Outside: We got coned. A prank...don't know by who. Cones were there on Sunday morning. Somebody (a friend of our son?) went to a lot of trouble. Cops took them away.
2) Inside: Cat on a hot tin monitor. Is she responding to her master's image? No. She just likes the heat.
Posted by rickbeyer at 04:37 PM | Comments (0)
February 08, 2006
Washington Week
The last few weeks have been so busy that haven’t had a chance to write an update. So I have some catching up to do. Let me start with the week I spent in Washington .
Monday of last week I visited the National Archives and looked through the official records of 23rd Headquarters Special Troops. Four slim boxes, with a copy of the unit’s official history, reports on each of their operations, and a few other tidbits here and there. The contents more than made up in value what it lacked in volume. Among other things, I found a great many photos, some of which I had seen before, and some of which I haven't seen anywhere. Tucked in the file on Operation Viersen, the last deception the Ghost Army staged, were aerial photos showing some of their dummy installations.Here's detail from one. All the thanks and truck trailers you see are dummies. Note the tracks that have been carefully made tomake the rubber dummies seem real. They are set up in the area of Anrath, Germany, about 10 miles from the Rhine river, as part of a massive deception to deceive the Germans about where the 9th Army would cross the Rhine. There is also the original commendation letter received from 9th Army Commander William Simpson for that operation…you can read it here. Everything was covered with stamps saying it had been secret, then regarded as declassified. A study of the stamps suggested that at least some material was declassified in 1979.
Tuesday and Wednesday I was attending the Real Screen Summit, a convention of documentary makers and distributors in Washington. I had some very encouraging exploratory meetings with Steven Schupak from Maryland Public Television and Karen Miles from the National Endowment for the Humanities. It is heartening to see how genuinely interested and engaged people are about this story.
Thursday I met with Professor Roy Eichorn, who teaches critical thinking at the Army Management Staff College. His father was in the Ghost Army (George Martin, photographer in the 603rd Engineers). The college is at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. Roy has done a great deal of Ghost Army research and collected an amazing array of material on both the Ghost Army and deception in war. The hours ticked by as we shared materials with each other, and he talked about how he uses the Ghost Army as an example of creative “out of the box thinking.” He left me with a lot of research material and a lot to think about. I asked him to think about being on our advisory board…I was very impressed with his knowledge and insight, and I know it will prove really valuable.
Friday I met with Marta Contreras, whose late husband Belisario Contreras was one of the artist/engineers of the 603rd. She was lovely, warm and welcoming as she showed me a collection of more than 40 World War II paintings—not to mention some of the amazing work he did after the war.
People keep contacting us. We got an email from Bernie Mason, who was a lietuentant in the Ghost Army, who has an interesting story to tell:
I was the platoon leader of the 4th platoon, Co.D,603rd Engineer Battalion that was the 1st unit of the 23rd to land on Normandy's Omaha Beach on June 14th, 1944. My platoon preceded the arrival of the bulk of the 23rd by several weeks. We arrived in a twin engine cargo plane on an improvised metal grid landing strip right on the beach. Our mission was to divert attention from the 980th Field Artillery Battalion emplacements and to try to draw fire to our dummy artillery units that were in place about a mile ahead.
He is going to share his photo album and his memories with us—thank you so much!
Good progress being made on fundraising, more on that in the next update
Posted by rickbeyer at 10:07 PM | Comments (0)