Deep State: Inside the Government Secrecy Industry by Marc Ambinder & D. B. Grady

Author:Marc Ambinder & D. B. Grady
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: American Government, Public Affairs, Political Science
ISBN: 9781118146682
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

is quite good, and he doesn ’t get much credit for it. A billion docu-

ments were bulk-declassifi ed during his tenure. Similarly, there were

few leaks of sensitive information—and there was plenty of sensi-

tive information to be leaked, including virtually everything about

Clinton ’s secret war against al-Qaeda. 17 But habits remained hard to

break. John Podesta, one of the architects of the modern Freedom

of Information Act (FOIA) law and one of Clinton ’s chiefs of staff,

recalls a battle he “won once out of every ten times.” He said,

“Sometimes, someone from the NSC would come into my offi ce

and hand me a newspaper article from overseas. It was marked ‘C’

for Confi dential. I was quite an asshole about this, I admit,” he said.

“I would go to the NSC executive secretary down the hall and ask,

‘Why is this classifi ed at all? It ’s a newspaper article.’ Then inevitably

they would come back and say, ‘It ’s classifi ed because the president ’s

interested in it and that is strategic information.’ Okay. Yeah, right.”

The FOIA is an effective counterweight to government secrecy. It

is also a much-abused law, overburdened by communities of conspir-

acy theorists who overwhelm FOIA offi ces with requests for informa-

tion on space aliens and such. This frustrates professional historians

and reputable transparency advocates, whose FOIA documents are

simply added to the back of the not inconsiderable queue.

By design, the FOIA process is cumbersome for both the peti-

tioner and the government. To ensure that no actively sensitive

material is released, an FOIA offi cer must often submit the request

to colleagues at multiple agencies for review. And though there are

written standards defi ning what exemptions are appropriate, every

federal agency interprets them differently. This inconsistency, espe-

cially concerning matters of national security, frustrates researchers,

and comes back to the fundamental question of what exactly consti-

tutes harm to national security and who gets to decide? And if differ-

ent people given interpretive authority make different conclusions on

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THE STRUCTURE OF SECRECY 173

the same data (inter-rater disagreement, as sociologists call it), does

that not undermine the intellectual edifi ce of both the FOIA process

and national security classifi cation itself?

The National Security Archive at George Washington University

has made a sport out of fi nding examples where one government

agency considers something too sensitive to declassify, oblivious to

the fact that another agency has already released the material. For

example, many Cold War–era memos related to missile defense

and nuclear war planning have been held back by the Defense

Department, even though many have not only been declassifi ed but

actually published by the government in offi cial, unclassifi ed his-

tories. The problem, as university researchers see it, is that the gov-

ernment refuses to establish uniformly enforceable standards for

historical and legacy information and often refuses to revisit earlier

classifi cation decisions. According to William Burr of the National

Security Archive, “Neither historians, taxpayers, nor the secrecy sys-

tem itself are well served when declassifi cation reviewers treat histori-

cal classifi ed information in the same way as today ’s secrets.”

The more secrets an agency holds, the better it is at frustrating

the FOIA process, intentionally or otherwise.

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