Pentagon says Incomplete Prison Report Sent to Senate

9/11 panel says too many documents stamped secret
9/11 panel says too many documents stamped secret
By LANCE GAY
Scripps Howard News Service
14-MAY-04

WASHINGTON -- The 9/11 attacks are a classic example of how government over-classification of documents is preventing Americans from learning information and warnings they need to protect themselves, privacy advocates say.

Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 commission, says most of the secret documents he has reviewed involved materials that involved hearsay or cited information publicly available elsewhere, and so weren't true secrets.

"Three-quarters of what I read that was classified shouldn't have been," the Republican former New Jersey governor said.

Kean said the panel, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, is winding up its hearings, and beginning to work on recommendations it will make in a report expected in July. The panel holds hearings in New York next week to reconstruct a timeline of exactly what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, and to get recommendations for what the country needs to do in the future from Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge.

Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the panel, said he already has concluded the government needs to tackle the problem of overuse of secrecy.

"We've got a serious problem of over-classification," said Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana.

Hamilton said there's nothing in the famous Aug. 6, 2001, briefing paper the CIA compiled for President Bush that could not have been shared with the public. The memo warned that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Ladin was planning an attack on the United States, but cited only historical data to buttress this contention.

Hamilton said similar forecasts could have been found on the Internet at the time.

There was no lack of public warning that al Qaeda was planning attacks before 9/11. Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said he routinely included warnings of the dangers that terrorists were going to attack again in his pre-9/11 speeches, although before the attacks occurred Roberts said the warnings got little public attention.

Steven Aftergood, who tracks government secrecy for the American Federation of Scientists, said the war on terrorism requires a new look at how and why the government protects secrets.

In traditional warfare, government officials impose secrecy to prevent an enemy and its government leaders from learning what is known about that enemy. But Aftergood argued this is a much different conflict because terrorists don't have a government apparatus or an army backing their activities, but are targeting the American people with random attacks.

"There are things that we need to do, and we need to be kept aware of," he said.

Aftergood said there are legitimate secrets the government needs to keep, such as protecting the identities of sources of intelligence information, and the details of pending military operations. But there is no reason that other information couldn't be shared with the public.

A joint inquiry by the House and Senate intelligence committees last year found the CIA and the National Security Agency thought some information they gathered was so sensitive it was withheld from FBI agents, who could have used it in their field investigations of potential terrorist cells in the United States.

The Information Security Oversight Office, a federal agency that handles classified documents, says more than 14 million documents were classified last year, and it's costing taxpayers more than $6.5 billion a year to store them. Although the Pentagon, State Department and CIA generate the bulk of the classified documents, the oversight office said the agencies reporting a dramatic increase in use of secrecy stamps last year were NASA, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the office of U.S. Trade Representative.

Hamilton said there's no incentive for government employees to refrain from using the secrecy stamps. "The easiest thing to do is to classify because it will come back to get you if you declassify the wrong thing," he said.

Aftergood suggested that one way of rectifying over-classification is to assign teams of government employees to immediately review classified materials with the authority to declassify those that shouldn't have secret stamps.

Members of the 9/11 commission say they will cite other cases of over-classification in their final report.

Kean recalled reviewing one classified document under the watchful eye of an FBI minder assigned to the panel when it looked at secret material. After reading through the document, Kean said he questioned the FBI agent why the document was classified because it contained no information he hadn't already learned from reading newspaper accounts.

"Yes, but you didn't know it was true,'' Kean said the agent responded.
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On the Net: www.9-11commission.gov