A New Presidential Vision for Limiting Government Secrecy

If the timetable he set last spring is met, President Obama will soon receive recommendations for revising the current executive order on when and how to classify information as a national security secret. In all likelihood, he will receive what every President since FDR has in response to similar requests – nothing more than incremental adjustments to existing practices. Obama asked for as much when he identified “overclassification” as the “problem.” The true challenge is that national security classification itself is an antiquated cold war era concept that, in the past decade alone, has inflicted more harm on our nation than all espionage cases combined.

What I learned as the top classification overseer in the executive branch is that 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 illness they are attempting to cure. In government, as we have all seen, secrecy ultimately makes for flawed decisions. It undermines our constitutional form of government, weakens the rule of law, and facilitates actions inconsistent with our nation’s core values and beliefs. It can contribute to the squandering of American blood and treasure and aid our adversaries in the recruitment of future extremists.

In order to stem this continuing damage, when presented with recommendations for incremental change, President Obama must respond by declaring his vision to reduce the amount of information classified by our government by 90% from current levels and unleash the ingenuity of the agencies to achieve this by the end of his current administration.

Imagine a world where the contents of the president’s August 6, 2001 intelligence brief, Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US, had been subject to public dissemination at the time it was produced, rather than after the fact and only at insistence of the “9/11 Commission.” Similarly, imagine if the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s Continuing Programs of Weapons of Mass Destruction produced for Congress in the lead up to the Iraq War had not been classified. According to the Senate report on pre-war intelligence on Iraq, Congress would have learned of alternative views on whether Iraq would have a nuclear weapon this decade and that the intelligence community’s own nuclear experts did not agree with the estimate’s conclusion regarding the issue of 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. Instead, most members of Congress relied upon a contemporaneous unclassified white paper that has been judged as being misleading to both the Congress and the American people. Thus was the choice made to unleash the brutality of war, one that continues to this day.

Likewise, I believe it is fair to ask whether our nation would have descended into the world of torture unless the authors of the flawed memos used to justify such policy could be assured of the memos’ secrecy and the public’s continuing ignorance of their content. Similarly, it seems impossible that our government would have engaged in unlawful intelligence gathering through warrantless surveillance, as determined by John Ashcroft and other justice officials, unless the equally flawed legal analysis which served as its underpinning had been kept secret.

Finally, we have been precluded from having an informed discussion as a nation as to how to resolve one of the greatest sources of continued anti-American sentiment today, the Guantanamo Bay detention facility, because so much of the information surrounding “the worst of the worst” remains classified. Yet, much of this classified information has proven either unsubstantiated or outright false in that, as noted by The Washington Independent's Daphne Eviatar, in 28 of 33 detainee cases heard so far, federal judges have found insufficient evidence to support keeping them in prison. All the while our adversaries’ exploitation of our flawed detention policies serves as an effective recruitment tool for future extremists.

To paraphrase another President who harnessed the prowess of this nation to send a man to the moon and back, in declaring his vision to reduce classification by 90%, Obama can state that we choose this as our goal, not because it is easy, but because it is hard, because the goal will serve to make Americans safer, will reduce the ability of our adversaries to recruit future extremists, will produce better decisions within government, and is highly consistent with our core values and ideals as a nation – it is a challenge we are unwilling to postpone – and as a result we will leave a better America for future generations.