WASHINGTON – A former dictator’s cocktail preferences and a facetious plot against Santa Claus were classified by the government to prevent public disclosure.
Also stamped secret for six years was a study that concluded 40 percent of Army chemical warfare masks leaked.
These and other ludicrous and lethal examples of classification were cited Tuesday by members of Congress and witnesses at a House subcommittee hearing into the Sept. 11 commission’s conclusion that secrecy is undermining efforts to thwart terrorists.
“There are too many secrets,” and maybe too many secret makers, said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., chairman of the Government Reform Committee’s national security panel. There are 3,978 officials who can stamp a document top secret, secret or confidential under multiple sets of complex rules.
No one knows how much is classified, he said, and the system “often does not distinguish between the critically important and comically irrelevant.”
The problem is growing, said J. William Leonard, director of the Archives’ Information Security Oversight Office, which monitors federal practices. Officials decided to classify documents 8 percent more often in 2003 than in 2002. Total classification decisions – including upgrading or downgrading – reached 14 million.
“The tone is set at the top,” Shays said.
“This administration believes the less known the better,” added the Connecticut Republican, noting sadly that he was speaking of a GOP administration. “I believe the more known the better.”
The panel’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, noted that President Clinton directed that in cases of doubt, the lowest or no classification be used. But in 2003, President Bush ordered officials to use the more restrictive level.
Steven Aftergood, director of a Federation of American Scientists project on secrecy, said some classification was clearly designed to conceal illegality or avoid embarrassment, even though that is forbidden.
Carol Haave, deputy undersecretary of defense for counterintelligence and security, said most misclassification was unintentional, resulting from misunderstanding or failure to declassify no longer sensitive data. She said a weakness, particularly for anti-terrorism efforts, was that those who collect the intelligence determine its classification.
Leonard said another obstacle to sharing anti-terrorist data was that federal law divides the authority for writing the rules that govern secrets. The CIA director has authority to protect intelligence sources and methods, the Energy Department has power to write regulations to shield nuclear secrets, the Pentagon has control over classifying NATO data and the National Security Agency can define communications eavesdropping secrets.
For the curious: the CIA classified for 20 years longtime Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s preference for pisco sours, according to subcommittee staff members citing previously classified documents published by the National Security Archive, a private anti-secrecy group in Washington.
And a CIA employee made up a story of a terrorist plot to hijack Santa Claus and inserted it into some classified traffic. “So apparently the fact that the CIA had a sense of humor was classified,” said subcommittee counsel Lawrence Halloran.
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