Classification: Radical, Let Alone Incremental, Reform Is Not Enough!

In last week's Secrecy News, Steve Aftergood writes of the need for a "fresh" start in classification policy. He rightfully notes:

The current Obama Administration review of classification policy will almost certainly produce an incremental adjustment to existing practices.... But it is unlikely to lead to a wholesale replacement of the basic framework of the cold war classification system that has lingered now for more than half a century. The "next generation" of national security information policy is still out of reach.

I agree with Aftergood's assessment, as well as his recommendations for "experimental pilot projects in classification and declassification and related activities" in order to hasten the development "of more efficient and transparent information security policies." However, I believe that they do not address the core challenge with respect to how our government employs the critical national security tool of classification. Specifically, it is still wielded as a blunt instrument with the near total absence of judgment and discernment to the point that it inflicts more harm on our nation than good. Secrecy in government is invoked much too casually with little to no regard to the unintended, but very real and almost inevitable consequences of its employment. The time has come to forsake once and for all the Cold War mindset which continues to serve as the basis for today's classification system.

Secrecy can act like a toxin in the body politic. Much like chemotherapy in the human body, it can have beneficial results when used in an extremely controlled and limited manner. However, neither should be employed lightly as they can easily produce outcomes worse than the ill they are attempting to cure.

In government, secrecy ultimately makes for flawed decisions. It undermines our form of government and facilitates actions inconsistent with our nation’s core values and beliefs. Secrecy in government must be actively avoided and strong policies and oversight must be put in place to limit its use. Secrecy in government should be employed only when disclosure of the information will demonstrably lead to even greater harm to our nation. If we do not take advantage of the current environment and shed the shackles of today’s classification mindset, when will we ever?

I do not make these observations lightly. For those who do not know my background, I spent my 34-year public service career immersed in the arcane field of government secrecy. Like many Americans, I also came to know the value of effective government secrecy in very personal terms through my two sons, both of whom placed themselves in harm's way in service to their country. My eldest son made extensive travels overseas in support of our nation's intelligence efforts. My youngest son was a combat infantry platoon leader during some of the most intense periods of combat in Iraq. In many regards, their well-being depended upon effective government secrecy. I have seen government secrecy work, and I have seen it fail spectacularly, causing grave damage to our nation’s security and overall well-being.

When referring to failures in government secrecy, I am not talking about the absurd examples of classification abuse which many like to rightfully hold up to ridicule. Rather I believe that it can be readily demonstrated that today's classification system continues to do more harm to our national security than it prevents; contributes to the needless squandering of American blood and treasure on an unimaginable scale; results in the death or grave wounding of American military service members who would otherwise not have become casualties of war but for abuses of the classification system; undermines our constitutional form of government and the rule of law; and repeatedly fosters decisions on the part of our national leaders that are flawed and ultimately prove to be detrimental to the overall well-being of our nation's citizens. In short, the excessive use of secrecy by our government has frequently imposed exceptionally grave damage to our national security, the very damage it is intended to preclude. In fact, the indiscriminate use of secrecy has caused more damage to our nation’s well-being than all the espionage cases in our country’s history.

In order to stem this continuing damage to our national security, a new "presumption" must be adopted throughout the government with respect to how information is handled. Specifically, it must be presumed that ALL official information, to include information relating to intelligence sources and methods and other national security matters that is routinely classified today, is subject to immediate disclosure. Withholding based upon classification must become the EXCEPTION, not the norm, and used only when it is clearly demonstrable that the public disclosure of the information would cause greater harm to the national interest than would its withholding from disclosure.

To be clear, what I am addressing herein is the reflexive posture, adopted by almost all in government, to include the three co-equal branches, whereby we consistently genuflect at the altar of "national security" and accept as a given, without the least bit of questioning or introspection, that the withholding of certain types of information, be it relating to intelligence, military, or foreign policy matters, will invariably serve to preclude or minimize damage to our nation's well-being. It is the conventional wisdom in almost every corner, both to the right and the left of the political spectrum, that the withholding of "national security information" from public disclosure is essential to our security and that the practice makes us safer as a nation. No less an advocate of openness in government than Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) has stated "through the classification system and the common law, we've carved out limited exceptions for highly sensitive factual information about military operations, intelligence sources and methods, nuclear programs and the like. That is entirely appropriate and important to protecting our national security.”

I disagree. I believe we must challenge such reflexive thinking and fundamentally reassess in cold, stark terms the consequences of such reasoning and practices. Specifically, we must closely reexamine what is gained and what is lost by our nation when we employ secrecy in government.

In this regard, I believe a good place to start is in reviewing the recent espionage cases our nation experienced, at least those which entailed the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. Since the classification system is intended to preclude the very real damage to our national security which many of these cases inflicted upon our nation, one means of assessing what we gain and what we lose through government secrecy is to examine the damage to national security that these instances of espionage caused and compare it to the damage to our national security which government secrecy in and of itself has wreaked upon our country and its citizens.Although not exhaustive, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) web site, as of the date of this posting, lists 14 espionage cases since 2000 which entailed the unauthorized disclosure of classified information. The severity and seriousness of these cases cannot be minimized -- nor can the damage to national security. Nonetheless, I believe it appropriate to use the damage for comparative purposes. The cases, in order of year of arrest, along with a brief synopsis of the damage caused, are as follows:

1. Mariano Faget (2000) - Worked for the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) where he had access to confidential information about Cuban defectors and dissidents. After being observed meeting with a representative of the Cuban Interests Section in Miami, he was caught in an FBI sting. He was convicted of espionage, converting government records to his own use, failing to disclose foreign business contacts when applying for a security clearance, and lying to the FBI.

2. George Trofimoff (2000) - Allegedly sold classified material to the Russians while serving as the civilian chief of the U.S. Army Element of the Nuremberg Joint Interrogation Center in Germany from 1969 to 1994. He retired from his Army civilian job in 1995. He was alleged to have passed along to the KGB lists of U.S. intelligence objectives, assessments of Soviet and Warsaw Pact military capabilities and evaluations of the threat posed by Soviet chemical and biological weapons. In 2001, he was convicted of spying for the old Soviet Union.

3. Brian P. Regan (2001) - Worked at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) and reportedly attempted to sell classified information to Iraq, Libya, and China. The prosecution sought the death penalty (the first time it would have been used for espionage since Julius and Ethel Rosenberg). While the jury did not impose the death penalty, they did find Regan guilty of three counts of attempted espionage.

4. Ana Belen Montes (2001) - Worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage for the government of Cuba. In 2007, a DIA counterintelligence official alleged that it was Montes who told Cuban intelligence officers about a clandestine U.S. Army camp in El Salvador. The DIA official, who led DIA's investigation of Montes, named Montes as being directly responsible for the death of a Special Forces Sergeant who was killed at El Paraiso, El Salvador, in 1987 during an attack by Cuban-supported guerrillas. In addition, former Undersecretary of State John Bolton has stated that an official 1998 U.S. government report with significant contributions by Montes concluded that Cuba did not represent a significant military threat to the United States or the region. Bolton alleged that because of Montes' espionage, it was not possible to exclude the possibility that the U.S. government may have overlooked Cuba as a potential threat because of Montes' influence and the way she shaped her reporting at DIA.

5. Robert P. Hanssen (2001) - Was a Special Agent with the FBI. He volunteered to furnish highly sensitive documents to KGB intelligence officers assigned to the Soviet embassy in Washington, DC. Hanssen's activities had links to other, earlier espionage and national security investigations including the Aldrich Ames and Felix Bloch cases. Hanssen allegedly compromised numerous human sources of the U.S. Intelligence Community along with technical intelligence operations. He pleaded guilty to fifteen counts of espionage.

6. Donald K. Keyser (2004) - Is a former Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing classified United States documents from the Department of State and to two counts of making false official statements. From 2002 to September 2004, Keyser had an undisclosed personal relationship with a female Taiwanese national who was employed by the National Intelligence Bureau, which is the foreign intelligence agency of the government of Taiwan.

7. Kenneth Wayne Ford (2004) - Is a former employee of the National Security Agency (NSA). In 2004, NSA officials received a tip that Ford had a box full of its secrets that he was trying to sell to foreign agents. As it turns out, while Ford did have boxes of classified information at his home, there is no indication that he was trying to sell them. He was convicted of one count of unauthorized possession of national defense information and one count of making a false statement when he applied for a job requiring a top secret clearance.

8. Lawrence Franklin (2005) - Is a former Iran desk officer in the Office of the Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon. Franklin was charged along with Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, former employees of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) with conspiring with each other to unlawfully disclose classified national defense information. Franklin was also charged in the indictment with conspiracy to communicate classified information to an agent of a foreign government. Franklin eventually pleaded guilty to conspiracy to communicate national defense information to persons not entitled to receive it; conspiracy to communicate classified information to an agent of a foreign government; and the unlawful retention of national defense information. I personally reviewed the "classified" evidence involving Franklin when I served as an expert adviser and potential witness for Weissman. I wrote about the experience here. The charges against Rosen and Weissman were eventually dismissed. Franklin's sentence of almost 13 years was eventually reduced to probation.

9. Leandro Aragoncillo (2005) - is a former U.S. Marine and is one of two individuals from Vice President Dick Cheney's Office of the Vice President (OVP) who were eventually charged and convicted of crimes associated with their handling of classified information. Aragocillo pleaded guilty to espionage and with leaking classified information to the regime of a former Filipino president. Also convicted was Michael Ray Aquino, a former deputy director of the Philippines National Police.

10. Noshir S. Gowadia (2005) - Worked for a defense contractor that built the B-2 stealth bomber and helped develop its propulsion system. Gowadia was charged with three counts of illegally transmitting national defense information and three counts of violating the Arms Export Control Act on behalf of the People's Republic of China and others. As of the date of this post, his trial is still pending.

11. Amen Ahmed Ali, Ibrahim A. Omer and Mohamed Al-Rahimi (2006) - Were charged with passing to Yemen classified information received from a government undercover agent. The trial is still pending as of the date of this posting --Al-Rahimi remains at large.

12. Gregg William Bergersen (2008) - Was a weapons policy analyst at the Department of Defense who was charged with passing classified government materials to the People's Republic of China. Much of the information related to the sale of military technology to Taiwan. He pleaded guilty to a single count of conspiracy to disclose national defense secrets.

13. Hassan Abujihaad (2008) - Was serving as a signalman aboard the USS Benfold. He was accused of sharing classified details about the vulnerabilities and movements of the ship to which he was assigned, and others. He was convicted of espionage and material terrorism support.

14. Harold & Nathaniel Nicholson (2009) - Harold J. Nicholson—a former CIA employee—and his 24-year-old son Nathaniel were charged with two counts of conspiracy, one count of acting as an agent of a foreign government (in this case, Russia), and four counts of money laundering. Harold Nicholson was already in prison, serving a more than 23-year sentence for his 1997 conviction on charges of conspiring to commit espionage for the Russian Federation. While in prison, Nicholson allegedly continued his attempts to maintain his relationship with the Russians through his son. As of the date of this posting, their trial is still pending and Nathaniel Nicholson has been granted pre-trial release.

Again, I do not intend to diminish the severity of most of the cases outlined above, or the damage that they inflicted upon the national security. I most certainly do not intend in any way to condone violations of trust or other covert acts intended to harm our nation or to provide advantage to foreign powers. However, I do believe that it is useful to compare the damage that occurred to our national security as a consequence of the above cases with the damage to national security that occurred as a direct consequence of the government's imposition of classification controls on official information in the following instances:

1. Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US – It is difficult to read this previously TOP SECRET document and be able to justify its classification. Ironically, according to the current policy of the Director of National Intelligence, if our government had its way, since this information appeared in a President's Daily Brief (PDB), it would never see the light of day. It is only as a direct consequence of the efforts of the "9-11 Commission" that the document was eventually publicly released. Even the redacted portions in the released version refer to information we received from foreign intelligence services. Our mindless, reflexive insistence that such information be protected without any forethought or deliberation was covered in this earlier post. Imagine a scenario whereby the information in this PDB was not shared solely with President Bush while he was on vacation in Crawford, TX. Rather, imagine if the contents of this PDB had been subject to public dissemination. It would have undoubtedly been subject to news and editorial coverage in the media. It may very well have also been the subject of Congressional oversight hearings. You can be assured that it would have been the subject of inquiries from everyday Americans who wanted to know what their government was doing in response to such a report. At the very least, we may have been able to, at least inadvertently, dissuade Al-Qaeda from launching the attacks when they did. At best, our intelligence agencies would have been better able to "connect the dots" since rather than depending upon the ineffective sharing of classified information between agencies, they would have simply had to pick up the newspaper and respond to media and Congressional inquiries to understand the true nature of the threat. Damage to national security: Worst foreign attack on the U.S. in the history of the republic; 2,974 deaths, excluding the 19 hijackers, trillions of dollars in losses, incalculable impact upon the health of untold numbers of Americans and upon the overall economy; led to Afghanistan war which continues to this date at the cost of 1,284 coalition deaths including 768 Americans, with at least 3,372 U.S. personnel wounded in action as of August 6, 2009. In terms of treasure, it is estimated the Afghanistan War will have cost almost $440,000,000,000.00 by the end of FY 2009.

2. National Intelligence Estimate (NIE): Iraq's Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction - Prior to their October 2002 vote to authorize the use of military force against Iraq, in order to better inform their deliberations some members of Congress requested that an NIE be prepared on Iraq’s programs for weapons of mass destruction. The NIE and its key judgments, in addition to being wrong, were classified. The NIE was delivered to Congress the week before its vote and, since it was classified, in order to read it members had to go to a special room and sign a log. It’s been variously reported how many Senators actually read the classified report prior to authorizing the President to take our nation to war, but the publication The Hill quoted one senior congressional intelligence staffer as saying that “You can say with 100 percent certainty it’s less than 10.” How many more would have read it had it not been classified is impossible to say – but we can only hope that it would have been more than 10. And what would they have learned if they had read the original NIE rather than rely upon the unclassified white paper which was released by the Director of Central Intelligence at the same time and which was intended as an unclassified version of the NIE? According to the Senate report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, they would have learned of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research alternative view on whether Iraq would have a nuclear weapon this decade and that the Department of Energy dismissed attempts by Iraq to obtain high-strength aluminum tubes as being part of Iraq’s effort to reconstitute its nuclear program. They would also have learned that while the key judgments were almost identical in layout and substance in both papers, the key judgments of the unclassified paper were missing many of the caveats that were used in the classified NIE. As concluded by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, removing caveats such as "we judge" or "we assess" changed many sentences in the unclassified paper to statements of fact rather than assessments – an egregious act since a cardinal rule of the declassification process is to ensure that it does not alter the substance of the information released. What is equally disturbing is the rationale offered by drafters of the classified NIE as to why the unclassified paper omitted the fact that the intelligence community’s own nuclear experts at the Department of Energy did not agree with the NIE’s conclusion regarding the aluminum tubes, even though the allegation was being used by some of our leaders to stir up images of mushroom clouds appearing somewhere over the United States. Again, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, officials at the National Intelligence Council indicated that they did not refer to disagreements between intelligence agencies in unclassified documents out of concern that the country being discussed would be “tipped off to a potential cover story.” Such a concern can understandably justify classification in some rare instances. However, to use it as a rationale for a decision which ultimately led to the production of a paper which has been judged as being misleading to both the Congress and the American people, in as grave a matter as a decision to unleash, by choice, the brutality of war, is a perfect example of how the failure to balance the damage that results from disclosure, with the damage that results from classifying, can have exceedingly tragic consequences for our nation. Damage to national security: The death of more than 4,200 and the wounding of more than 30,100 American service members, the death of up to a 100,000 or more Iraqis, hundreds of thousands of American troops sent into the trials of combat (many for multiple tours), the expenditure of over $1,600,000,000,000.00 by the end of FY 2009 belonging to our country's taxpayers (both today and for generations to come), and the recruitment of countless future terrorists willing to endure "martyrdom" in order to inflict harm upon our nation.

3. Powell’s Presentation to the United Nations: The lead up to the Iraq War provides another excellent example of how even our own intelligence community can be hampered by excessive and needless classification and compartmentalization. Again, it is well known now that when Secretary of State Colin Powell spoke to the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 just before the war, the most impressive part of his presentation which talked about eyewitness accounts of mobile biological labs and an accident that killed a dozen people was a fraud, based upon debriefings by German intelligence officials of a human source aptly codenamed “Curveball.” What is truly noteworthy, however – according to Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin who wrote a book on Curveball – is that at the time of the U.N. presentation, and even not until well after the war had begun, the CIA did not even know the name of the source whose fabrications served as the basis upon which our nation chose to go to war. And, according to Drogin, the reason why is that German intelligence refused to share his name. They did so simply because they could; it was “pride of service”, a form of one-upmanship. Thus, our reflexive insistence that the identity of all intelligence sources regardless of the circumstances remain secret allowed "drunken liar" to lead this country into a war of choice. Damage to national security: See item 3 above.

4. The "Torture Memos" - I wrote about secrecy as an enabler of evil here and about a specific Office of Legal Council (OLC) pure legal, yet classified, analysis of interrogation techniques here. None of these memos would have been written in the manner they were, and used to support the policies they did, unless the authors could be assured of the memos’ secrecy and the public’s continuing ignorance of their content. I have testified to Congress that the March 14, 2003, OLC memorandum represents one of the worst abuses of the classification process that I had seen during my entire Federal career. While only the official who inappropriately assigned classification markings to the OLC memo in the first place can attest to the reasons for that decision, the effects of it are visible to all. In addition to keeping the information in the memo from the American people and the two co-equal branches of government, use of classification in this instance is a prime example of how classification is used, not for purposes of national security, but rather as a bureaucratic weapon to blunt potential opposition. Reportedly, top lawyers for the military services did not receive a final copy of the OLC memo, in part because they opposed the harsh interrogation techniques endorsed in the memo, as well as the lack of transparency about how we handle enemy combatants. Our military lawyers fully recognize that our young men and women we send into battle as combatants are subject to capture and that we needlessly increase their exposure to potential abuse in this and future conflicts by ceding the moral high ground in the treatment of detainees. This is not to say that our enemy in the current conflict is anything but brutal; however, the first pillar of our national security strategy is to not reduce ourselves to the level of our adversary. Damage to national security: We tortured only because we thought we could engage in the practice while at the same time deny its use and keep it secret. Based upon repeated false statements on the part of our national leaders that "we do not torture," it is reasonable to believe that we would never have embarked on this dark chapter in our nation's history had the deliberations on this topic been public, and our leaders knew that. Otherwise, there was no rationale to have classified these interrogation "techniques" and especially the shoddy legal analysis which served as their underpinning. The stated rationale -- not to allow adversaries the ability to know and thus train to resist such techniques, defies common sense. How do you train to resist waterboarding? Also, we can only hope that the concerns of our military JAGs do not come to fruition and that current and future American captives do not find themselves subjected to the same torture as outlined in these memos. Finally, our nation now has a significant credibility problem as we attempt to challenge other nations on human rights abuses.

5. Warrantless Wiretaps: Last month, an unclassified report was released outlining what is quite possibly the worst abuse ever of the President's classification authority. The report by the Inspectors General of five intelligence agencies outlines the extraordinary secrecy surrounding the NSA warrantless surveillance program. This report, taken with other previously released information, makes it very clear that former President Bush and former Vice President Cheney utilized classification authority in order to conceal from Congress, the courts and the American people violations of law and to engage in a cover-up – an abuse which our system of checks and balances is intended to preclude. This much is for certain:
a. The President's program violated the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a factual legal finding of Bush's attorney general, John Ashcroft, his deputy attorney general, James Comey, his FBI director, Robert Mueller, and other senior government officials who all threatened to resign in the face of continued law-breaking by the Bush administration.
b. The then President and Vice-President knew that this program violated the law. This is readily apparent through Jack Goldsmith, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Department of Justice. Goldsmith wrote in his 2007 book The Terror Presidency that senior officials within the government “blew through FISA in secret based on flimsy legal opinions that they guarded closely so no one could question the legal basis for the operations.” Goldsmith further recounted one of his first experiences with such extraordinary concealment in late 2003, when, as he recalls, David Addington of the Office of the Vice President (OVP) angrily denied a request by the National Security Agency’s (NSA) Inspector General to see a copy of OLC’s legal analysis supporting the warrantless surveillance program. Goldsmith wrote: “Before I arrived in OLC, not even NSA lawyers were allowed to see the Justice Department’s legal analysis of what NSA was doing." It is important to remember that the NSA lawyers already had knowledge of the actual details of the program, the very information which would be of interest to an enemy. However, they were being denied access to the pure legal analysis of the program, information that would be of no interest or value to an enemy whatsoever.
c. Bush's actions clearly indicate that he was not interested in a genuine legal analysis of the warrantless surveillance program. As indicated in the IGs' report, "the President made the decision to 'read-in' all non-operational persons, including DoJ officials." As a direct result, a hand-picked lawyer, John Yoo, gave the President a piece of paper which was deficient on almost every level except that it gave the President what he wanted -- legal cover. The secrecy of the program prevented any vetting of Yoo's legal work, to include by the head of the OLC himself, Yoo's nominal supervisor.
Damage to national security: The secrecy of the program, in addition to facilitating law-breaking and undermining our Constitutional form of government caused significant harm to our counterterrorism programs as well. The IGs' report concluded that "extraordinary and inappropriate" secrecy about the warrantless eavesdropping program undermined its effectiveness as a terrorism-fighting tool. Furthermore, had Ashcroft, Comey, Mueller and other Department of Justice officials resigned, an intention known to others to include Cheney but was unknown to Bush, our country would most likely have experienced a constitutional crises the likes of which was not seen since the "Saturday Night Massacre" of the Nixon administration, which eventually contributed in a very significant way to his subsequent resignation in face of near certain impeachment.

6. Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility: Our current national security strategy recognizes that we are engaged in an ideological struggle against many forms of extremism. In fact, the first pillar of that strategy as articulated by the prior administration is promoting freedom, justice, and human dignity, which includes offering people throughout the world a positive vision rooted in America's beliefs, thereby isolating and marginalizing violent extremists. This strategy reflects our success in ending the Cold War, not by defeating the Soviet Union militarily, but rather by promoting American ideals and values which ultimately led to the demise of the most formidable foe our nation has ever confronted. Yet, by maintaining this ill-advised detention facility, we perpetuate one of the greatest sources of continued anti-American sentiment today. As I wrote in this earlier post, it is the reflexive employment of classification more than anything else which precludes our country from addressing this issue in an informed manner. The void left by the absence of substantive information has been filled with irrational fear based upon deliberate and repeated misrepresentations by our nation's leaders that this facility houses the "worst of the worst." This claim is belied by facts as noted in a recent post by Glenn Greenwald who wrote: two more Guantanamo detainees … were ordered released by federal judges on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention. The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar notes this amazing fact: "In 28 of 33 Gitmo detainee cases heard so far, federal judges have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison." Virtually all of those detainees were held for many years without charges and with no opportunity for judicial review. Once they finally got into a court, federal judges (including Bush-43 appointed judges) in the vast majority of cases concluded there was virtually no credible evidence ever to justify their detention. Damage to national security: We have become paralyzed as a nation to the point that our national leaders and the American people cannot have an informed discourse in order to resolve the status of the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay. Thus, rather than providing the world populace with a positive vision rooted in American beliefs we instead provide extremists worldwide with a tremendous recruiting bonanza. We must recognize that we are actually assisting our nation's adversaries in recruiting far too many "martrys" (actually, one is too many), ready to die in order to inflict harm upon Americans. Montes the spy was rightfully condemned for compromising information that may well have led to the death of an American soldier in El Salvador. How many countless American soldiers have been killed or wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan by an individual recruited and motivated as a direct result of our adversaries’ exploitation of our Guantanamo Bay detention policy?

The above is by no means intended to serve as an exhaustive list of instances this decade (let alone throughout our history) wherein government claims of secrecy have actually endangered or caused extraordinary grave damage to our national security. I will write about additional examples in future posts. However, I believe the above clearly establishes that during the current decade, far greater damage to national security occurred as a consequence of the classification of information as opposed to the damage that resulted from compromises through espionage. Continuing my earlier analogy regarding toxins, it is as if for a disease that has a mortality rate of 20%, we came up with a cure that has a mortality rate of 40%. Sooner or later, we must face up to the fact that the cure is worse than the ill.

In furtherance of the above, a telling comparison involves the espionage case of Brian Regan wherein our government wanted to put to death a man who merely attempted to pass classified information to foreign powers. The damage that Regan inflicted upon our nation is less than miniscule when compared to the overwhelming loss of blood and treasure our citizens have endured this decade alone as a result of many decisions by our national leaders that proved to be extraordinarily flawed due, in large part, to the influence of the current classification system. I find it incomprehensible as to how in the former instance, our government literally proposes to execute someone, while in the latter instance our government is perfectly content to continue “business as usual” and allow the toxic power of secrecy to continue to permeate the decision-making process of our national leaders.

While I do want to shakeup conventional thinking on this topic, I do not intend to replace one blunt instrument with another. I accept the need for classification in exceedingly limited circumstances. However, I firmly believe that that overwhelming majority of information classified today, upwards of 90% or more, does not warrant being kept secret. The remaining 5-10% of today’s classified information, especially in military matters, should remain classified. In fact, some aspects of how the military treats classification can serve as a model for the rest of the government, to include the intelligence community. Unlike other countries, we recognize that to consider ALL military matters classified is inconsistent with our form of government and not conducive to facilitating the type of public discourse our society must continually have with respect to the proper maintenance and use of military force. Nonetheless, we do consider ALL, or almost all, applications of intelligence sources and methods to be classified, which, in turn, results in the classification of far too many policy deliberations and decisions. We do this despite the recognition that secrecy comes at a price – sometimes a deadly price – oftentimes through its impact upon the decision-making process. Policy decisions will almost invariably be enhanced as a consequence of a far-reaching give and take during which underlying premises are challenged and alternate approaches are considered. As such, government secrecy just about guarantees the absence of an optimal decision on the part of our national leaders, oftentimes with tragic consequences for our nation.

The time has come for our nation to put Cold War think behind us once and for all and recognize that by needlessly restricting the free flow of information we are needlessly restricting our government's capability to do what is best in the interest of its citizens.

I recognize that the above, although a lengthy post, is still a rather broad argument. I encourage others to comment, and especially to challenge some of the underlying assumptions contained herein. In future posts, I intend to further elaborate on the basic points of this thesis and to provide specific recommendations as to how to achieve a true paradigm shift with respect to the value and use of government secrecy.