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Eleven Words in Pentagon Papers to Remain Classified
Eleven Words in Pentagon Papers to Remain Classified, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (May 26th, 2011).
The Pentagon Papers that were leaked by Daniel Ellsberg four decades ago have been formally declassified and will be released in their entirety next month -- except for eleven words that remain classified. David S. Ferriero, the Archivist of the United States, announced the surprising exception to the upcoming release of the Papers at a meeting of the Public Interest Declassification Board on May 26.The Real Pentagon Papers, by A. J. Daverede, National Declassification Center blog (May 26, 2011)
The conditions under which the copies of the Report [leaked by Daniel Ellsberg] were made and distributed, coupled with the speed with which the copies were distributed and the urgency to publish the material, meant that the newspaper and magazine releases of the Papers covered only a very small portion of the 7,000 page Report. The copies of the Report that were leaked to Congress ultimately had better luck in publication. Ultimately, Senator Mike Gravel (D, Alaska) made available his copy of the Report to the publishing house of Beacon Press, located in Boston. The Beacon Press editions, published in 1971 in both hard and soft cover versions, were the definitive account of the Report until now. However, Beacon Press had its own copy problems that led to words, paragraphs, and even full pages of the Report being deleted, possibly due to the quality problems in the copy received from Senator Gravel. ...NARA's June release of the Report of the OSD Vietnam Task Force will present the American public with the first real look at this historic document. It is true that 11 words are redacted from one page of a 7,000 page report. However, this is very much a complete release of the Report.Continue reading
Pentagon Papers to be Officially Released
Pentagon Papers to be Officially Released, by Steven Aftergood, Secrecy News (May 11, 2011).
The National Archives announced this week that it “has identified, inventoried, and prepared for public access the Vietnam Task Force study, United States-Vietnam Relations 1945-1967, informally known as ‘the Pentagon Papers’.” As a result, 3.7 cubic feet of previously restricted textual materials will be made officially available at the Nixon Library on June 13, the Archives said in a May 10 Federal Register notice.Nixon Presidential Historical Materials: Opening of Materials Federal Register Volume 76, Issue 90 (76 FR 27092) (May 10, 2011).
Previously restricted textual materials. Volume: 3.7 cubic feet. A number of textual materials previously withheld from public access have been reviewed for release and/or declassified under the systematic declassification review provisions and under the mandatory review provisions of Executive Order 13526, or in accordance with 36 CFR 1275.56 (Public Access regulations). The materials are from National Security Council (NSC Files), Presidential Acquisition Files, Pentagon Papers.Continue reading
Government Secrecy: Essential or Opportunistic or Both?
Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, notes in this L.A. Times Op-Ed that, "Routinely, officials insist to courts that the nation's security will be compromised if certain facts are revealed but then supply those same facts to trusted reporters. Sometimes the motivation for the disclosure is political and sometimes it's personal, but in either case disclosure has little to do with the public's need (or right) to know and everything to do with the official's need to tell."
- National security: When secrecy is a weapon, By Jameel Jaffer, Los Angeles Times, (April 6, 2011).
Unnecessary Secrets
Sanford J. Ungar, author of The Papers & The Papers: An Account of the Legal and Political Battle Over the Pentagon Papers, which won a George Polk Award in 1972, president of Goucher College in Baltimore, and a member of the US Public Interest Declassification Board, writes in the current CJR about overclassification of government information.
- Unnecessary Secrets, Opening government, from Ellsberg to Manning, By Sanford J. Ungar, Columbia Journalism Review, (March / April 2011). Absent, at least from the government's public statements and actions, is any consideration of an obvious underlying problem: that the obsessive over-classification of US official information has reached a point where it is impossible to know with confidence what truly deserves to be kept secret and how that can be done effectively. The government’s instinct to protect so many "secrets" also hinders democracy by keeping vital information from the public. As it happens, the WikiLeaks drama unfolds as we approach the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers, and it is useful to think about secrets through that prism.
Wikieaks, Rumsfeld, and Gawker
Amidst the spirited discussion here and elsewhere about Wikileaks, you might have missed the fact that Donald Rumsfeld set up a web site (rumsfeld.com) with hundreds of "declassified or previously unreleased documents" to accompany his new book. (Rumsfeld compared his "archive" to a sort of legitimate version of Wikileaks.) Rumsfeld didn't have to go through that pesky FOIA process to get or release those documents either. (See: Rumsfeld’s Snowflake, “Subject:Porpoises” and Rumsfeld Memoir Highlights VIP Access to Government Files). Now, here is more news:
John Cook at Gawker has posted a collection of documents that Donald Rumsfeld neglected to include in his archival Rumsfeld Papers website that accompanied the publication of his recent memoir. Cook and company obtained the documents by sending a FOIA request to the Defense Department for all the records that Rumsfeld had requested and previously obtained from DOD via FOIA. The result was many documents that did not make their way into Rumsfeld’s online collection. The documents (available in their entirety here) portray Rumsfeld “curious to know what the rush is” in bringing enemy combatant and U.S. Citizen John Walker Lindh to a speedy trial, interested in rationalizing why administration policies toward detainees was "perfectly legal, proper, and historically correct," and emphasizing that administration officials continued "referring to our 'plan'." --FRINFORMSUM: 2/24/2011, Unredacted, by Seth Maddox.Continue reading
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