Didn't have enough time to post it yesterday:
"US lags in airing its old secrets; Obama’s timeline to open trove unmet; Agencies can block declassification" by Bryan Bender | Globe Staff May 26, 2014
COLLEGE PARK, Md. — A half-hour’s drive from the White House, nestled between leafy residential neighborhoods, rests a massive repository of America’s classified documents, from the mundane to deepest secrets of the Cold War. In all, some 352 million pages line the shelves.
Four years after President Obama pledged to preside over the most transparent government ever — a vow that included declassifying as many documents as possible contained in the so-called backlog — the majority are still secret.
His whole presidency is a list of broken pledges and promises. The audacity of change.
The failure to release more files by Obama’s self-imposed December 2013 deadline is blamed on several factors; the most important may be that an array of federal agencies retains what amounts to a veto. Any agency can stonewall the release of any document that includes information it generated, no matter how old it is.
As a result of this and other restrictions, the National Declassification Center in College Park has been able to pry open only a portion of the huge backlog of historical documents about military strategy, intelligence operations, and a host of other secret government actions never fully scrutinized by historians, researchers, or the media.
It's not like we would believe anything they put out now anyway. Most of what they have done is an open secret even if an undisclosed secret in the propaganda pre$$.
Of the 134 million pages it has been able to process, nearly half will remain secret, according to officials — despite the fact that most of the documents were subject to “automatic” declassification deadlines that have long passed.
Even some officials reviewing the declassification process say the overall approach is not working.
“The current system is simply not capable of addressing the vast volume of information,” said Nancy Soderberg, chairwoman of the Public Interest Declassification Board, an advisory committee established by Congress in 2000 to promote access to government documents. “It requires agencies to be willing to take a small additional risk for much more benefit.”
She said the requirement for the National Archives to refer all declassification decisions on historical information to one or more national security agencies is significantly slowing down public access.
Sheryl Shenberger, founding director of the National Declassification Center — which was established by Obama in 2009 — has confronted the bottleneck frequently since the new unit began working with some 30 separate agencies that have purview over national security information.
Agencies have often asserted that entire categories of documents, despite repeated reviews, were not properly evaluated and therefore could not be declassified.
“It can happen every few weeks,“ Shenberger said in an interview. “That could affect 100,000 pages, literally, because a whole series will be killed.”
Shenberger said when she receives those responses her staff members “go in the stacks, they pull the boxes, they open it up and they look at the documents. I think we have a really good success rate with having them change their minds.”
The National Declassification Center also attributes some of the continued delay to simply the time-consuming nature of reviewing so much paper with few available technical tools to help ensure that genuinely sensitive information is properly identified.
“It is unfortunate that because this is all hard copy there is only so much technology you can apply to this,” said Shenberger, a former CIA official.
She's a CIA gatekeeper!
Related(?): Bombshell: Barack Obama conclusively outed as CIA creation
A former director was also once president.
Another factor, discovered when the center began its work in early 2010, is that many of the historical documents had been subject to widely divergent — and often shoddy — handling procedures by the agencies that shipped them to the National Archives.
Pfft!
In some cases, staff found that even some of the most secretive intelligence agencies made little effort to determine which secrets should be kept.
“So the records come in here and you’d like to think all the agencies . . . had done a good job,” Shenberger said. “The reality of the situation was there were for the most part varying degrees of good to very bad.”
And you paid for it all, taxpayers. I wonder how many bonuses were handed out.
Shenberger said that officials concluded it would be impossible to review everything.
Sounds like the NSA collection effort.
So the center established a sampling process, reviewing 10 percent of individual collections at a time, to assess whether crucial national security data had been properly identified before arriving at the National Archives.
“All of the 352 million pages have been dealt with,” she said. “We know the stuff that can be declassified.”
I thought that was impossible.
But that doesn’t mean that the bulk of documents will be available to researchers anytime soon, even though many are subject to regulations requiring they be automatically declassified — after 25 years, 50 years, or 75 years, depending on the subject matter. (A host of exemptions are allowed for certain categories, such as information about individual spies.)
With the ultimate declassification authority still in the hands of the national security agencies, a process that was supposed to be relatively quick and automatic has often become slow and cumbersome.
Agencies such as the Department of Defense, the State Department, and the CIA are under little pressure to approve their documents for public release and, according to experts knowledgeable about the classification system, are predisposed to keep raw files locked away.
Related: Globe Not on Guardian
For example, more than a half-century later, one secret episode that has not been fully disclosed is the CIA-orchestrated coup in Iran in 1953 that toppled the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mosaddegh.
EXCUSE ME?
Operation Ajax still classified?
They don't want you to see the template for every U.S.-supported overthrow since, huh?
“There has been an effort over a period of years to assemble documents that would fill in many of the gaps about the 1953 coup,” said Stephen Kinzer, author of “The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War.” “There are huge holes and it is quite clear a lot is missing. It is way overdue.”
See: Kinzer Rekindled
Another controversy surrounds the final — and still withheld — volume of the CIA’s official history of the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by US-trained exiles. A federal appeals court last week sided with the agency, which maintains the volume should remain secret because it was only a “draft,” not a complete document.
They are going to finger RFK for it as they spit on the graves of the brothers for peace.
Besides, we will never get the truth of those times from authority considering who controls access to the records.
Peter Kornbluh, who heads the Cuba Documentation Project at the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which filed the lawsuit seeking the volume’s release, said it is just one example of how national security agencies resist opening up their historical files.
“The people that keep the secrets are not team players” with the National Declassification Center, he said.
Several agencies declined to discuss their declassification procedures. A spokeswoman for the Department of Defense, which has contributed some of the most voluminous collections, declined to make anyone available to answer questions, referring a reporter to the National Declassification Center.
Some experts contend that the only way to ensure public access is for the president to give broader declassification powers to the National Archives. Leaving declassification decisions to the agency that generated the document “totally destroyed the whole concept behind automatic declassification. There is nothing automatic about it,” said J. William Leonard, former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, which oversees the government’s classification system.
Steven Aftergood, a specialist on government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists, agreed. He suggested Obama sign an executive order stipulating that if agencies don’t declassify something after a set period of time, the center be given the authority to act.
You mean he has not issued one here?
“It should not be held hostage to an agency that is unable or unwilling to fulfill its responsibility,” Aftergood said.
In a statement, the White House maintains that the National Declassification Center remains “at the core of the president’s efforts . . . for transforming the security classification system.”
Laura Lucas Magnuson, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, called “significant” its efforts to meet Obama’s goal, including streamlining key processes and coordinating with dozens of agencies.
But executive branch officials also acknowledge more needs to be done. In a December 2013 action plan, the White House laid out new goals for encouraging greater openness, including calling for a review of how historical data covering sensitive subjects like nuclear weapons could be more easily declassified.
“There is a lot of discussion going on to at least be able to review the nuclear stuff such as on the Cuban missile crisis,” Soderberg said. “A lot of the information there is still classified that is of immense interest to historians and most agree it could be put out there.”
But she doesn’t believe Obama is in a position to force the issue by taking the power to declassify away from the national security agencies, because “it would probably backfire on him. You would have a revolt on your hands in Congress.”
There is one in this country and he doesn't seem to give a damn.
Meanwhile, as the National Declassification Center plods ahead, more historical documents are piling up: since January 2010, another 33 million pages.
Same with the NSA records.
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Layers and layers of bureaucracy the sign of a collapsing $y$tem. Anyone who ever took an anthropology class knows that.
Related: Globe Gains Access to Government Secrets
Also see: Saluting War Criminals
"Obama fails to show his vaunted ‘competence’" by Jeff Jacoby | Globe Columnist May 25, 2014
******
Obama came to the White House with a carefully cultivated image.... He may still believe it, but most Americans no longer do.
******
The scandal now boiling over at the Veterans Administration, where at least 40 patients have died
while numerous VA hospitals reportedly falsified data to hide
unconscionable delays in medical care, is only the latest in a long
series of government shambles under a president whose managerial prowess
turned out to be a mirage.
Abuses at the VA have been a problem for years. As a candidate in 2007, Obama claimed that 400,000 veterans were “stuck on a waiting list,” and he promised
“a new sense of urgency” to “make sure that our disabled vets receive
the benefits they deserve.” But that urgency never materialized. In a letter to Obama a year ago,
the chairman of the House Veterans Affairs Committee detailed some of
the “serious and significant patient care issues” in the VA system,
imploring him to address the worsening problems before more veterans
died. Yet nothing happened. The president showed no interest in the
matter, and seemed to have no grasp of the scandal’s magnitude, until he learned about it on the news....
Every presidency has its scandals and messes. George W. Bush’s
included the Hurricane Katrina aftermath, the calamitous post-Saddam
administration of Iraq, and the misbegotten policies that stoked the
subprime mortgage crisis. But Obama went out of his way to contrast
himself with the supposedly bumbling and hapless Bush. He deliberately
put effectiveness and smart governance at the very core of what
Americans could expect if they elected him.
It hasn’t worked out that way, or even come close. The Obama
administration hasn’t been distinguished by cool, cerebral, sure-footed
professionalism, but by something closer to amateur hour. From the
botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act to the bloody aftermath of
the intervention in Libya, from enabling political witch-hunts at the
IRS to being repeatedly outmaneuvered by Russia’s Vladimir Putin, from
swelling the debt he was going to reduce to embittering the politics he promised to detoxify, Obama’s performance has been a lurching series of screw-ups and disappointments.
The 44th president — who once said that his accomplishments could
compare favorably with those of any of his predecessors with the
“possible exceptions” of Lyndon Johnson, FDR, and Abraham Lincoln — has always had a huge opinion of his executive gifts. The American people no longer share it.
As a political creature, Obama’s talents are undeniable. When it comes
to competent governance, they turned out to be anything but.
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NEXT DAY UPDATE: Sallie Mae settles military overpay suit
I'm done with him today.
And with the Globe. Today is a NoPP (no printed paper purcha$e) so I can save some gas.
