A key element of President Obama’s May 27, 2009, memorandum directing the development of recommendations for revisions to the Executive Order governing the classification and declassification of national security information is the establishment of a National Declassification Center (NDC) “to bring appropriate agency officials together to perform collaborative declassification review under the administration of the Archivist of the United States.” During the Bush administration, I ardently supported and fostered implementation of such a process. However, even at the time I recognized that all an NDC would accomplish is bring significant efficiencies to a declassification process that was ossified under the Bush administration. This ossification occurred when the governing Executive order was changed in 2003 to require:Records containing information that originated with other agencies or the disclosure of which would affect the interests or activities of other agencies shall be referred for review to those agencies and the information of concern shall be subject to automatic declassification only by those agencies” (section 3.3 (h)).
Rather than the declassification process, imagine a situation whereby the challenge was cleaning up a city’s streets in the early 20th century when horse drawn trolleys were the mainstay of mass transit. In such an instance, the creation of an NDC is analogous to giving the street sweepers better brooms and shovels rather than questioning the very need to depend upon horses in the first place to drag around a trolley car.
Dating to the times of FDR, the efforts of any administration to revise national security classification policy has mostly resulted in tinkering around the edges while preserving the fundamentals. When then President Clinton revised the Executive order governing classification and declassification in 1995, he went slightly beyond mere tinkering. Specifically, on November 10, 1994, President Clinton issued an Executive order that declassified, in bulk, a selection of classified records within the National Archives. This unprecedented Order declassified approximately 45 million pages or 14% of the National Archives holdings of classified material, including classified holdings through the end of World War II, and an equal number dating into the 1970s (h/t FAS Project on Government Secrecy).
Thus, even if Obama does not want to embrace real change in classification and declassification policies but is content to simply continue with tradition, the President needs to do something similar to what Clinton did 15 years ago. As a minimum, President Obama should order the bulk declassification of all classified records in the National Archives, at least through February 15, 1989, the date that the final Soviet troops departed Afghanistan. Additional select holdings, at least through September 11, 2001, should also be subject to bulk declassification.
The President should take these steps not only to ensure an informed populace, the lifeblood of our form of government, but also to enhance our national security and make our citizens safer. The above dates are significant because they represent demarcations in the lives of every day Americans akin to the end of World War II. The seeds of the serious national security threats confronting our nation today were sown in our outdated cold war policies that we continued to pursue throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s in areas such as the Middle East and Central Asia. Yet, I am certain that, for example, the average Mujahedeen has a better understanding of the origins of the current troubles in Afghanistan than does our average Senator or Congressman, the very leaders we depend upon to guide and oversee our national security policies. Similarly, the average Iraqi or Iranian likewise has a far better understanding of the origins of today’s conflicts in that area than do many Americans. And a significant reason for our collective ignorance with respect to issues of such grave importance is that much of the official information relating to them remains needlessly locked within the vaults of the National Archives.
Compared to the extraordinary blood and treasure our nation’s citizens have sacrificed during the current decade due to ill-fated national policies fostered out of ignorance more than anything else, there is nothing in the records outlined above that can come even close to inflicting the same level of damage to our national security that we have endured since 2001, and continue to endure. Looking back to Clinton’s bulk declassification in 1994, the world in the early nineties still bore much in common with the world of the late 1940s. From a geo-political, military, economic and technological perspective, the two eras had much in common. We even communicated amongst ourselves the same way, by either writing a letter or picking up a landline telephone. Yet, there is no significant damage to our national security that has ever been attributed to the Clinton bulk declassification order.
In this regard, the world of the late 1980’s is light-years behind today’s world. In every meaningful aspect, but especially from a national security perspective, the concerns confronting our nation today bear little resemblance to those of the Reagan-era. Mr. Gorbachev did indeed tear down "that" wall and the world was never the same.
The maturity of our nation was recently proven when our leaders were able to overcome petty political considerations and save billions of taxpayer dollars by finally cancelling the F-22 fighter, a weapon with its origins in the cold war. To do so, they had to overcome false national security arguments which disguised agendas that had nothing to do with keeping Americans safe. Similarly, President Obama could significantly advance the national security interests of our nation by, at the very least, adhering to tradition and subjecting a significant amount of the holdings of the National Archives to bulk declassification.
As admirable as the establishment of an NDC at the National Archives may be, it maintains a significant wall between Americans and information essential to their well-being. By advancing the cause of bulk declassification, the President may not be able to tear down that wall completely, but he should be able to make a pretty good-sized dent in it. In addition, it should save the American taxpayer a couple of hundred million dollars to boot. Even then, such a step would be just keeping with tradition.
Should the President have the desire to advance real change in this area, I’ll have more to write in future postings.
No comments:
Post a Comment