Government is ramping up document declassifications -
August 29, 2012
NARA ’s
National Declassification
Center -- which in late June
released its fifth biannual status report -- was created to help
implement President Obama’s 2009 executive order requiring a new focus on
publicly releasing historically valuable permanent records while maintaining
national security. Public transparency advocates and researchers carefully
follow the security and history issues -- protection of human intelligence
sources and design details for weapons of mass destruction -- and many showed
up with questions at this third annual forum.
Except for JFK Assassination records - "But No Conspiracy Going On"
"Journalist Jefferson Morley demanded to know why the
Archives in June had rejected a request to release the remaining 1,100
documents related to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in time for
the 50th anniversary of the event next year. Gary Stern, general counsel of the Archives, replied that a
1992 law requires those papers, a fraction of the 3 million to 4 million pages
already released on the assassination, wait until 2017. The CIA
wants to be responsive, but there are substantial logistical requirements and
they don’t have the resources, he said. 'I know it’s frustrating. I’m sorry.
But there’s not a conspiracy going on.'”
Three years into the Obama administration’s push to speed
document declassification, officials touted considerable progress on a backlog
that once was nearly 400 million pages at a public forum Wednesday hosted by
the National Archives and Records Administration.
Addressing about 100 people, officials from Archives, CIA ,
the Energy Department and the Pentagon described how digital communications,
better training and a commitment among agencies to look out for each other’s
interests have helped them make major inroads in processing the backlog.
According to center Director Sheryl Shenberger, agencies
have been able to process 5 million pages a month in 2012, up from 1 million in
2011 and 600,000 in 2010. As of Aug. 7, about 63 million documents had cleared
the review process, and some 191 million remained under review for national
security reasons but were off the “retrieve and review merry-go-round,” she
said.
David Mengel, deputy director of the center, said in the
past two years officials have learned lessons from a dearth of standardization
in guidance, a lack of interagency coordination and too much ad hoc
decision-making that led to a series of re-reviews.
“We see big improvements, huge leaps from where we were two
years ago,” he said.
Don McIlwain, who heads the center’s Freedom and Information
Act and mandatory declassification review division, said the number of FOIA
requests processed government wide doubled since 2010. He predicted that new
procedures would prevent the re-emergence of an unprocessed backlog. Electronic
forms speed the process and reduce errors by letting computers count and label
pages, he said. “We are working with agency records management staff on how
they process documents before they transfer them to the Archives and the public
will be able to make more informed and concise FOIA requests down the road.”
Robert Warrington, who heads the CIA
declassification team at NDC , said the
president’s order “underlines democratic principles for the people” and
stressed that democratic institutions require that secrets be protected. “They
are complementary, not conflicting goals,” he said. “Human intelligence is an
essential and irreplaceable part of the CIA ’s
work, not just technology.” Hence, declassifying documents that betray human
sources “would violate the pledge we make to them.”
Ken Stein, who heads the Energy Department’s Office of
Document Review, said the risk of proliferating nuclear secrets -- on the
Internet, for example -- now is “just as dangerous as it was 70 years ago.”
Although his department welcomed President Clinton’s 1995 executive order
calling for ambitious declassification, the result, he said, was “bulk
declassification without review” of some 200 million pages over several years
that contained “a significant amount of nuclear design information” that had to
be called back and reported to Congress and the White House.
The result was a new set of safeguards under the 1998
Kyl-Lott amendment, including page-by-page reviews conducted by officials
trained by the Energy Department. “Many reviewers didn’t know what they were
looking for,” he said, and the documents often were not marked as or segregated
into batches containing sensitive agency “equities,” as they are called. Even
after 3,000 employees were trained, documents containing restricted or formerly
restricted data still got through, in part because the originating agencies did
not always notify other agencies that their sensitive material was being
released.
Under the new regime and an agency “culture shift,” speakers
said, both CIA and Energy are using
risk-based sampling to get around the impossible task of reading every
document. CIA doubled its presence at NDC
and Energy boosted its reviewing staff from seven to 35. “We’re all in this
together and no agency can go it alone or act only in their own interests,”
said Warrington . “And we won’t stop
until the American people have access to all they’re entitled to.”
The importance of technology to speed the review process was
dramatized by Doug Richards, chief of the Pentagon Joint Staff’s
Declassification Office. His team has used information technology to cut the
average time to process FOIAs from 182 days in 2010 to 38 in 2012. All requests
are put in electronic format, and the hard copies are trashed, so that any
Joint Staff member can search them and processors are able to address all pending
requests—any delays require special permission.
Government wide training at NDC
is expanding, according to NARA ’s
Mathieu Sherman, who described a certificate program “like that for plumbers
and electricians” that will enhance the resumes of future agency job seekers.
In the lively question-and-answer period, Steven Aftergood
of the Federation of American Scientists asked when the center might reach a
“steady state” when the number of documents being declassified will equal those
that are newly classified. That’s not likely ever to happen, answered
Shenberger. “There will always be a bit of a gap, but we won’t fall into that
400-million-page hole again. We are tracking those documents that come in and
agencies are doing a much better job.”
William Burr of the private National Security Archive said NARA
should produce better finding aids for organizing the stacks of papers for
researchers; Archives officials agreed.
Journalist Jefferson Morley demanded to know why the
Archives in June had rejected a request to release the remaining 1,100
documents related to the 1963 assassination of President Kennedy in time for
the 50th anniversary of the event next year.
Gary Stern, general counsel of the Archives, replied that a
1992 law requires those papers, a fraction of the 3 million to 4 million pages
already released on the assassination, wait until 2017. The CIA
wants to be responsive, but there are substantial logistical requirements and
they don’t have the resources, he said. “I know it’s frustrating. I’m sorry.
But there’s not a conspiracy going on.”
BK: Notes: If there is no conspiracy going on, why did the Assist. Archivist of the USA, Mr. Kurtz, originally include the JFK assassination records within the 2013 NDC effort? And what became of Mr. Kurtz after he "misspoke" since he is no longer working for the NARA after over 20 years of service? Was he fired or forced to take early retirement?
If there is no conspiracy going on, why is that Mr. Stern has already gone on record saying that the NARA has consulted with the CIA to see if it is possible to accelerate the release of the remaining JFK assassination records and the CIA said they couldn't do it, when in fact they did do it when they accelerated the release of the records scheduled for 2010 in 2006, exactly what we are asking they do now?
And since Mr. Warrington answered Mr. Lesar's question of how long it will take to review the remaining records, Mr. Warrington eventually answered - two months - then why not review them now so they will be ready for release when it is determined they can be?
And since the NDC has stated they plan on declassifying the remaining 4 million pages of records by 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination, why not add the remaining JFK assassination records to the existing process after the other records are reviewed?
If they are reviewed over the course of two months or added on to the existing process, at least the NARA will be able to answer the question of how many documents and how many pages of JFK assassination records remain to be declassified and released, something they can't do now.
BK: Notes: If there is no conspiracy going on, why did the Assist. Archivist of the USA, Mr. Kurtz, originally include the JFK assassination records within the 2013 NDC effort? And what became of Mr. Kurtz after he "misspoke" since he is no longer working for the NARA after over 20 years of service? Was he fired or forced to take early retirement?
If there is no conspiracy going on, why is that Mr. Stern has already gone on record saying that the NARA has consulted with the CIA to see if it is possible to accelerate the release of the remaining JFK assassination records and the CIA said they couldn't do it, when in fact they did do it when they accelerated the release of the records scheduled for 2010 in 2006, exactly what we are asking they do now?
And since Mr. Warrington answered Mr. Lesar's question of how long it will take to review the remaining records, Mr. Warrington eventually answered - two months - then why not review them now so they will be ready for release when it is determined they can be?
And since the NDC has stated they plan on declassifying the remaining 4 million pages of records by 2013, the 50th anniversary of the assassination, why not add the remaining JFK assassination records to the existing process after the other records are reviewed?
If they are reviewed over the course of two months or added on to the existing process, at least the NARA will be able to answer the question of how many documents and how many pages of JFK assassination records remain to be declassified and released, something they can't do now.
"Robert Warrington, who heads the CIA
declassification team at NDC , said the
president’s order 'underlines democratic principles for the people' and
stressed that democratic institutions require that secrets be protected. 'They
are complementary, not conflicting goals,' he said. 'Human intelligence is an
essential and irreplaceable part of the CIA ’s
work, not just technology.'” Hence, declassifying documents that betray human
sources “'would violate the pledge we make to them.'”
Bill Kelly question: Mr. Warrington, is Lee Harvey Oswald one of those "human sources" and if not, why is the CIA withholding so many JFK assassination records under the guise of "national security"?
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