Notwithstanding official proclamations of a new era of transparency, public access to declassified historical records continues to be obstructed by procedural potholes, limited resources for processing records, competing priorities and, sometimes, bad faith.
At the Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC), declassified files that used to be open to the public have been withdrawn indefinitely so that they may reviewed for inadvertent releases of classified nuclear weapons-related information, pursuant to the 1999 "Kyl-Lott" Amendment. Nearly all Navy records there dating from the 1960s forward are now completely unavailable to the public, said historians Larry Berman of UC Davis and William Burr of the National Security Archive.
The blanket closure of entire collections, they suggested in an April 29 letter, is "wholly inconsistent with the spirit of the new presidential administration."
As an alternative, Berman and Burr asked the Navy to at least permit expedited review of specific records in response to researcher interests, as the National Archives did when it implemented a similar Kyl-Lott review. Earlier this month, their proposal was denied.
"I regret to inform you that the Navy is unable to support your request at this time due to previously established government declassification priorities," wrote Vice Admiral J.C. Harvey, Jr., Director of the Navy Staff on July 1.
Not only that, he said, but the barriers preventing public access to Navy historical records will remain in place for at least several years to come. "A Kyl-Lott review of the NHHC holdings may start in 2012 barring any change in, or additions to, government priorities."
Until then, researchers interested in Navy history are stymied. "Any researcher who wants to look at Navy records from the early 1960s forward is frozen out by this policy," said Mr. Burr of the National Security Archive. "If David Vine, the author of the recent book on Diego Garcia 'Island of Shame,' which made good use of records at the Navy Yard, was starting his work this year he would be totally out of luck."
Faced with such an uncompromising response, researchers can still employ the Freedom of Information Act, which is arguably even more burdensome for the government to implement but which is legally enforceable.
But Prof. Berman said this option was problematic as well. The Navy "denied access to their finding aids because they feared this would ease my FOIA request," he said. And Navy officials also denied his request for a FOIA fee waiver on the extraordinary grounds that the records he requested will be used to support his work on the first scholarly biography of Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. "Imagine that, a historian plans to write a book," he said.
It is well established in FOIA case law that scholarship, like news gathering, is not a private commercial interest that would disqualify a requester from receiving a fee waiver. Prof. Berman said he would appeal the denial.
"There arguably is no provision in statute that restricts whether and how the Chairman and Ranking Members of the intelligence committees share with committee members information pertaining to intelligence activities that the executive branch has provided only to the committee leadership, either through Gang of Four or Gang of Eight notifications. Nor apparently is there any statutory provision which sets forth any procedures that would govern the access of appropriately cleared committee staff to such classified information."
And as a matter of fact, "there have been instances when intelligence committee leadership has decided to inform the full membership of the intelligence committees of certain Gang of Four notifications," the CRS found.
SOME MORE FROM CRS
Other noteworthy new CRS reports that have not previously been made available online include:
"Afghanistan: U.S. Foreign Assistance," July 8, 2009:
"Chemical Facility Security: Reauthorization, Policy Issues, and Options for Congress," July 13, 2009:
CLASSIFIED INTELLIGENCE LEAKS, 2001-2008
Between September 2001 and February 2008, the Federal Bureau of Investigation initiated and closed the investigation of 85 reported leaks of classified intelligence information, "all of which concerned unauthorized disclosures of classified information to the media," FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III told the Senate Intelligence Committee in a written response to questions dated February 4, 2008.
"None of these cases reached prosecution," he said. As of February 2008, "21 such cases are [still] under investigation."
This information appeared in questions for the record that were appended to "Current and Projected National Security Threats to the United States," a hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee that was held January 11, 2007. The complete hearing volume was finally published last month, and the newly published questions for the record are excerpted here:
The Senate Intelligence Committee has renewed its practice of including questions for the record (QFRs) in published hearing volumes, for which one may be thankful, even when the answers are classified or are not provided by the agencies at all.
Some additional QFRs, also newly published last month, appear in "Statutory Authorities of the Director of National Intelligence," Senate Intelligence Committee, February 14, 2008: