Nate Jones of the NSA gave a short Panel 2 presentation at the CAPA Sunshine Week Press Conference on March 16, 2017
Nate Jones:
Thanks
a lot, thanks for putting this on. It's great to be here today, my name is Nate
Jones from the National Security Archive and despite the official sounding
name, the National Security Archive is a non-profit that files thousands of
FOIA and mandatory declassification review requests each year, and we fight to
get previously classified information declassified and published.
That said, I am not an expert on JFK
assassination, the main reason is because the field is already crowded with
experts, you here. So generally the National Security Archive focuses other
matters, but I'm happy to talk today about perhaps fighting for access to
records, not least of which because the JFK records collection act was one of,
if not the strongest, laws ever passed for disclosing records.
I have a few points that I'll go
through and hit, and anything else we can talk about it in questions.
So, what is needed today, or what we
talked about earlier today, the JFK records collection act, is very important.
The head of the government office of information service, which is in charge of
bureaucrat in charge of collecting classifications government-wide. It's said
on the record that government classifiers joked that they could classify a ham
sandwich. The National Security Archive finally won a lawsuit for official CIA
volume of Bay of Pigs history that the agency with the department justice
lawyers argued to a judge and won, that its release could quote confuse the
public, so it could remain secret. In this case we went to congress and
congress actually passed the FOIA improvement act that, it is typically said
that documents over 25 years can't use this pre-decisional exception anymore,
so we won! But the executive branch didn't do it for us, just like the JFK Act,
we had to go to congress, and congress had to actually pass a law, something
that is rare, but these two anti-secrecy matters happened.
Moving on, I think that the next
step for these JFK records that we talked about earlier is to let the
congressional foresight that they included in passing a law play out. Here is
my understanding of the state of play of these records and Jack Morley knows as
well, I wish he was still here, we could talk, but according my my
conversations with the national archives and ... For the record, when the
national declassification center said which record should we prioritize, the
number one vote was for the JFK assassination documents, and even though that's
not my field I said, yes, do it. It's a wealth of information, think of the PR
boost, and it's the most popular, show your clout by declassifying these. I
also said that Obama need not wait until October 2017 to release these
remaining records. In both cases they didn't listen to me. So the state of
play, so far as I know is that ... I actually have it, you can pass this
around, here.
There are currently, according to
the national archives, 3,603 records withheld in full and another 41,000
records, not pages, records, that are withheld apart. My friend wisely did a
FOIA request to NARA for an index of the 3001 records. Here are just some of
them, you can pass them around, and you can see the names of what I think, I
predict, will be coming out within months. The Nosenko transcript, talked about
earlier are in them.
Essentially what has to happen for
these records and more to come out. The answer is nothing. As far as I
understand the national archives is working right now to release all of the
records as demanded by law, unless an agency petitions the President, and the
President says do not. My conversations with NARA, and they have given some
public statements, say that they are working hard to declassify ... As of
months ago they had it during the Obama administration, they hadn't heard ... I
asked well when are you going to hear? How are you going to hear?
They didn't really
know, but they said they probably would come through agency petitions to the
national security counsel and that ultimately it would be up to the president
to tell NARA not to release. What's going to happen? I don't know, we've
already speculated a little bit we can keep doing that, that's fun, but the
issue is that the ball is in the President's court. Congress, I think, did its
good job and the defacto is they're going to provide, unless the President
stops release.
I would just end with one more point
and we can talk more questions, I'm sure everybody has good stuff, that the
importance of the anti-secrecy strong congressional mandate of the JFK Records
Act and Jim mentioned the Nazi War Crimes Act also. It still resonates and we
need more of that with other documents. Here is the National Declassification
Center's recent report, citing the JFK Collection Records Act in 1992, stating
quote: "that this legislative critic criteria for exemption is much more
stringent, than that would be later required by an executive order on
classification." So today, the situation is that information that is
currently technically properly classified, including those ham sandwiches that
I opened with, and the fact that the Cuban missile crisis ended by taking the
Jupiter missiles out of Italy, is a proper secret, is that the requirements to
be classified, are far too low. Congress did the right thing with the JFK Act
by saying they need to pass the credibility test or ... that's what I call, is
much higher leader standards.
My final point is that this sunshine
week, you should look back and celebrate the JFK Records Review Act.
Optimistically, and I hope realistically, expect that the vast bulk of the
future records will be released in October 2016, that's my prediction, and
celebrate the success and begin working on how we can get congress to mandate
that more records, beyond this very important universe, are also released
congressionally.
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