From: "Rich Gauszka" 

I can see why the CIA would want to reclassify this one

"For instance, one document reveals that, in the fall of 1950, the CIA
predicted the Chinese would not intervene in the Korean War; 12 days later,
they did."

http://www.slate.com/id/2136480/

Secret Again
The absurd scheme to reclassify documents. By Fred Kaplan
Posted Thursday, Feb. 23, 2006, at 7:00 PM ET

Those who control the past control the future, Orwell famously wrote in
1984. In the realm of national-security policy, the battle for this control
is heating up.

The latest skirmish started last December, when an independent scholar
named Matthew Aid went to the National Archives to re-examine some
declassified documents that he'd copied several months earlier and learned
that they'd been removed from the public shelves and reclassified.

Looking into the matter further, he discovered that, over the last five
years, in a program that itself has been a secret, U.S. military and
intelligence agencies have reclassified 9,500 documents, constituting more
than 55,000 pages, some of them dating back to World War II. And that's
just so far. The program under which they've been doing this-which has
never been authorized or funded by Congress-is scheduled to continue until
at least March 2007.


Many of these documents "fall somewhere between mundane and
banal," as Aid puts it. (The National Security Archive, a private
research group housed at George Washington University, has reprinted some
of them here.) Several of them were published years ago in the State
Department's official history volumes, Foreign Relations of the United
States (a series that undergoes thorough security-vetting before
publication). Quite a few of the papers seem to have been reclassified only
because they're embarrassing. For instance, one document reveals that, in
the fall of 1950, the CIA predicted the Chinese would not intervene in the
Korean War; 12 days later, they did. (Classifying, much less reclassifying
documents for this purpose, if that was in fact the reason, is not just
stupid but illegal. Federal law states: "No information . shall be
classified in order to . prevent embarrassment of a person, organization,
or agency.")

Why is this happening? Much of the background is laid out by Matthew Aid,
in an essay for the National Security Archive; my own sources have
confirmed and built on his account. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed
Executive Order 12958, stating that all classified documents should be made
public after 25 years, except for those that fall under certain categories.

In 1998, officials inside the Department of Energy, which is in charge of
nuclear weapons, expressed concerns that too much sensitive material had
been mistakenly declassified in the rush to obey Clinton's order. As a
result, Congress passed the Kyl-Lott Amendment, authorizing the DoE to
reclassify any and all documents relating to nuclear-weapons design. Even
many freedom-of-information activists supported Kyl-Lott, though with
reservations.

But then the Energy Department's success inspired other agencies to wage a
counteroffensive against the movement toward historical openness. In 1999,
the CIA, the Defense Department, all three branches of the armed forces,
and the Justice Department wrote to the chief of the National Archives,
claiming that, under Clinton's executive order, thousands of documents had
been declassified improperly. They argued that their agencies had
"equity" in those documents and that, therefore, they should have
been consulted before declassification took place. Statutes governing the
National Archive note that an agency has "equity" in some other
agency's documents if their declassification "would affect its
interests or actions." Let's say a State Department document refers to
some CIA intelligence estimates; according to the "equity"
theory, State should not be allowed to declassify it without the CIA's
permission.

From 1999 to 2000, CIA security officials, citing this argument, removed
and reclassified 1,400 State Department documents, totaling 9,750 pages,
from the National Archives' public shelves. These were among the documents
that Matthew Aid tried to re-examine last December. In early 2001, the CIA
and the other agencies demanded the right to go through all declassified
documents-material released not just through Clinton's order, but over the
last several decades. In September 2003, they announced at a meeting of the
State Department's Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic
Documentation that they would soon expand their search to the declassified
records on file at the Presidential Libraries. (How much they've actually
examined has not been quantified. An official at the John F. Kennedy
Library did not return three phone calls.)

It isn't clear whether this campaign for control is being directed by the
Bush administration or even to what extent political appointees are aware
of it. It is clear, though, that the security apparatchiks-those who have
always resisted the loosening of controls-intensified their efforts after
Clinton left the White House, on the accurate premise that George W. Bush
and his entourage would, at the very least, not mind.

With very few exceptions, we are not talking here about secrets that have
anything to do with "national security" as anyone might
reasonably define the term. In many cases, we are talking about documents
that were publicly released-and have since been widely disseminated-after
careful review by high-ranking military officers and security personnel. It
is also worth noting that much of this reclassification is being conducted
by junior officers, or in many cases private contractors who know nothing
about the historical context of these documents and nothing about whether
the contents are sensitive or innocuous. One military historian told me
that some of these junior contractors have been instructed simply to
reclassify anything bearing the words "atomic" or
"restricted data," regardless of what else the documents might or
might not contain.

On Feb. 17, Matthew Aid and the heads of four historians' groups wrote to
William J. Leonard, director of the National Archive's Information Security
Oversight Office, asking him to conduct an audit of the reclassified
documents. Such an audit is under way. This week, Leonard told Scott Shane
of the New York Times that none of the documents he'd examined so far
should be secret.

The National Archive does not have the authority to reverse the
reclassifications. However, as the official White House adviser on
classified information, Leonard could urge President Bush-who does have the
executive power to direct the declassification of documents-to take action.
Rep. Christopher Shays, a liberal Republican from Connecticut and chairman
of the House Government Reform Subcommittee on National Security, has
scheduled hearings on the reclassification issue for next month. Maybe
he'll call Leonard to testify.

Matthew Aid says that if all this doesn't compel the CIA and the other
agencies to reverse their actions, he will file a request under the Freedom
of Information Act to declassify all documents that have been reclassified
since 2001. If they turn down the request, he will file a lawsuit.

Over the years, some agencies, including the CIA, have released treasure
troves of once-classified documents that no longer have any bearing on
national security. (Take a look at the CIA's and State Department's Web
sites for example. Also check out the online libraries of declassified
documents at the National Security Archive, the Woodrow Wilson Center's
Cold War International History Project, and Steven Aftergood's Secrecy
News, among others.)

But the climate has been changing for a while now. In 1998, around the time
this campaign got under way, the CIA refused to declassify documents about
covert programs dating back to the 1960s. The State Department's advisory
committee complained, in a letter to then-Scretary of State Madeleine
Albright, that without these documents, the official record of U.S. foreign
policy was in danger of becoming "an official lie." The
reclassification of documents is an escalation of this broader campaign not
merely to halt but to roll back freedom of information-to regain control of
the past and all that goes with it.

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5