The Foreign Service Journal, September 2008

Although 65 were fully upheld, 16 were partly reversed and six com- pletely reversed. This is lower than the appeal success rate in FY 2005, when the appellant had almost a two- thirds chance of getting at least some redress, and more information. The “Oops” Factor When millions of pages of materi- al are declassified — under consider- able pressure for speed and with clear deadlines that are embarrassing to miss — there are going to be mis- takes. It is these instances of sober second thought (so to speak) that get media attention. Critics trumpet var- iously that the U.S. government refus- es to release widely known facts and material, or material supposedly released or declassified on “open shelves” has been taken back. Whether information ostensibly is widely known by the public does not by itself justify (or require) its official release. Until information is formally acknowledged, it still retains classified standing — regardless of whether its classified nature may appear ridicu- lous to some observers. For instance, for years the exis- tence of satellite photography was widely known but not acknowledged, to avoid questions regarding precision and coverage that might provide tar- gets with information on how to avoid observation. Or a country may be generally recognized as having been a host for U.S. nuclear weapons, but that fact is not officially acknowledged because the foreign government does not want to address follow-up ques- tions of the “when, where, what kind” nature; other nuclear weapons hosts may not want to face the same ques- tions; or because the United States does not want to begin the “slippery slope” exercise of identifying some countries as host/former host states for nuclear weapons. In April 2006, reports of the with- drawal of material that earlier had been placed on open shelves at the National Archives and Records Ad- ministration surfaced in the media. Prompted by a FOIA request for in- formation on these withdrawals, NARA admitted to a secret review of already publicly available material by several intelligence agencies, includ- ing the CIA and at least one other agency (perhaps the NSA), beginning in 1999. Estimates suggest that as many as 55,000 pages of material, in- cluding 7,700 from State Department documents, have been withdrawn from public access. The rationales for this program were rooted both in concern about security lapses — e.g., the 1998-1999 Wen Ho Lee case regarding nuclear program documents — and, more pertinently, a conviction that the mass declassification of documents had included material in which other agencies’ equities were not recog- nized by the declassifiers. The results of the reviews, however, led to efforts to reclassify parts of documents long in the public domain, making the process look either ham-fisted or risi- ble, regardless of the effort by the reclassifiers to stand on principle. Whatever the justification, recap- turing horses long out of the stable is a hard sell for public relations officers — and always will be. n 62 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 8 Whether information ostensibly is widely known by the public does not by itself justify (or require) its official release.