Pentagon Classifying ‘Impulse’ Criticized
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James Joyner | Thursday, July 8, 2004 |
Washington Times – Pentagon Classifying ‘Impulse’ Criticized
A government watchdog agency has asked the Pentagon to explain why parts of a memo about the interrogation of detainees in the war on terror were once classified. William Leonard, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, said the classification was part of a disturbing trend, what he called a “bureaucratic impulse” for officials to “almost reflexively reach out to the classification system.”
The memo, declassified and released last month, is the report of a working group on interrogation techniques established in January 2003 by the Defense Department’s general counsel. The relevant passage ? marked “secret” prior to declassification ? is part of a discussion of the consequences for criminal and military prosecutions of detainees and others if the public became aware of the use of so-called “coercive interrogation techniques.” It reads: “Consideration must be given to the public’s reaction to methods of interrogation that may affect the military commission process. The more coercive the method, the greater the likelihood that the method will be met with significant domestic and international resistance.”
The administration’s policy regarding secrecy, laid out in an executive order signed by President Bush in March 2003, says that information can lawfully be classified only if its “unauthorized disclosure … reasonably could be expected to result in damage to the national security … .” “Looking at that paragraph,” Mr. Leonard said, “it’s difficult to see how that information [could] … damage national security.”
Lawmakers argue that overclassification is rife in the federal government, and critics of the administration have accused it of abusing classification to hide merely embarrassing or inconvenient information. The working-group report is what classification specialists call “part marked,” meaning that each paragraph has its own code indicating how secret it is. Several paragraphs in the report are marked “U” for unclassified. “On its face,” Mr. Leonard said, the classification of this passage “reflects a disturbing lack of understanding of the constraints and limitations [of] the executive order … .” Mr. Leonard said it was especially disturbing because the working group that drew up the report included some of the most senior lawyers in the Defense Department.
There is certainly no obvious reason why that passage should be classified; certainly nothing higher than For Official Use Only makes sense on its face. The tendency to over-classify is hardly new, however. Doing archival research for the dissertation, I came across routine press releases–and even clippings from the New York Times–that were classified SECRET or even TOP SECRET. That was in 1948, during a period when we weren’t at war.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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I'm glad you pointed that out. My reaction to this was "well, that's nothing new". I'd heard much the same sort of thing from others (newpaper clippings classified and suchlike).
But I'm sure it's Bush's fault anyway, even if it was going on before he was born.
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