Washington, D.C., December 6, 2023 - Recent U.S. government decisions on the declassification of historical records on nuclear proliferation demonstrate the good, the bad and the ugly in the current national security secrecy system, according to a new posting today from the National Security Archive. On the plus side are releases that add historically valuable information to the public record, such as the opening of documents that were reclassified after having been released at the National Archives, a newly declassified Kissinger-Nixon telcon, and U.S. embassy messages from 1980 on nuclear nonproliferation policies. In contrast to these good releases are a number of bad and just plain ugly responses from the Pentagon and the U.S. Air Force, among others, highlighting a persistent problem where government agencies—for whatever reason—try to maintain security classification restrictions even in cases where the information has already been released, sometimes decades earlier. Some of the documents now released in full had been held up for 20 years by the review process initiated by the Kyl-Lott Amendment and related provisions, under which the Department of Energy effectively reclassified many historical records already opened to the public at the National Archives. The ugliest cases demonstrate the Pentagon’s overreach, including excisions from 60-year-old documents about Israel’s nuclear program and the withholding of key parts of a Kissinger-to-Nixon memo about the British submarine-launched missile program, a document that was declassified and published in full in the Foreign Relations of the United States series nearly ten years ago. The examples included in today’s publication illustrate the deep and fundamental problems that plague the U.S. secrecy declassification system, including a dramatic lack of resources in government FOIA offices; the vast overreach by the Defense Department in asserting a “foreign relations” claim to redact historical records; the disastrous legacy of the Kyl-Lott reclassification process; the failure of many government declassification reviewers to bring a historical mindset to the declassification review process; and the overclassification that is built into the front end of the U.S. national security information security system and which must be corrected by an updated executive order on classified national security information. |
