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The Horace Mann Review
Representative Henry Waxman speaks to House Committee Chairman Tom Davis during a congressional hearing. Both the Leveretts and Times editors felt that the decision to censor the information was misguided, so they published a redacted version of the article with the lines clearly blacked-out. “In a democracy, transparency in government has to be honored and protected. To classify information for reasons other than the safety and security of the United States and its interests is a violation of these principles,” Leverett wrote. “The White House is using the rubric of protecting classified information not to protect classified information but to limit the dissemination of the views of someone who is very critical of their approach.” The Times article was just one of many incidents of suspect classification over the past several years. The rise in classification began under the Clinton Administration and has further increased during President Bush’s tenure. “In 1995, for example, according to the Information Security Oversight Office [which monitors classification activity], there were approximately 3.5 million classification actions [or decisions to classify information] throughout the government. But by 2005, that number had skyrocketed to 14.2 million classification actions,” wrote Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy in the Federation of American Scientists, in an email. According to the Times, the number of documents classified in 2004 was nearly double that of 2001. In addition, while people have requested more documents to be declassified through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), fewer have been accepted, according to the Information Security Oversight Office. As classification becomes more widespread, organizations such as Open the Government, the Government Accountability Project, and the Project on Government Oversight have emerged to promote open and transparent governments. The director of the prominent FAS project and writer of a weekly blog titled “Secrecy News,” Steven Aftergood is one of the leading experts on classification. “Classification is sometimes necessary to protect national security, but it is a necessary evil. In other words, it always constitutes a limitation on democracy. It undermines public participation in the political process, and impedes public oversight of government activity,” he said. The classification process was redefined on March 23, 2003, when Bush signed executive order 13292, an amendment to Clinton’s executive order 12958. It states, “In no case shall infor-
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mation be classified in order to: (1) conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error; (2) prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency; (3) restrain competition; or (4) prevent or delay the release of information that does not require protection in the interest of the national security.” Issues of classification revolve around FOIA, which, signed in 1966 by Lyndon B. Johnson, grants the American people the right to view federal government information by filing a request to the Justice Department. There is an obvious discrepancy between the policy of the Bush Administration and the Clinton Administration, most policy experts say. “With the Clinton Administration there was more of an effort to get information out to the public… There was an engaged effort to take classified information that should have never been classified in the first place and declassify it,” said Clayton Northouse, a political analyst at the White House Office of Management and Budget, a non-profit organization devoted to government transparency and accountability. Clinton’s order overhauled the rules of government secrecy and reduced the number of classified documents, but it also hastened the declassification process. Attorney General Janet Reno also gave a memo saying that the Justice Department would defend FOIA requests unless the agency “reasonably foresees that disclosure would be harmful to an interest protected by that exemption.” This policy resulted in the declassification of myriad papers and documents. The Bush Administration has focused much of its attention on keeping secrets withheld from the public, concerned that declassifying information could potentially pose a threat to national security. Its first major action on classification was the Administration’s controversial 2001 executive order (13233), which barred public access to the records of former presidents. Then, in 2003, Bush issued order 13292, expanding the ability of the CIA to prevent documents from being declassified and deeming all information from foreign governments subject to scrutiny. It also delayed the declassifica-
“The White House is using the rubric of protecting classified information...to limit the dissemination of the views of someone who is very critical of [its] approach.” tion process for documents and granted the power of classification to the Vice President. The order was widely criticized for promoting secrecy at the expense of government openness. Analysts agree that the question of why classification occurs is a complicated one. Some of it can be attributed to the tightening of national security agencies after 9/11, and Steven Aftergood asserts that this type of classification is mostly understandable. Some incidents of classification are decidedly vital for the nation’s security. For example, the idea that the identity of CIA agents should be classified is seldom disputed, and even ardent classification critics were dismayed by the disclosure of CIA analyst Valerie Plame’s identity in 2004. Also, after 9/11, information about building bombs was ac-