Mark this day

"Bay Of Pigs. Bay Of Pigs. Where are the B's?"


Screen grab credit: Indyfan.com


Mark this day in the calendar, folks. It's one of the few times you'll ever see me write this: the Bush Administration did something right. No, it's not something small or inconsequential, like not getting lost on a bike ride or remembering the name of the prime minister of India, this is something big and very important to a democracy. What's more, they actually did it even though it was something that Bill Clinton thought of. The act in question is following the dictates of an executive order that Bill Clinton signed in 1995. According to Scott Shane of the International Herald Tribune:

At midnight on Dec. 31, hundreds of millions of pages of secret documents will be instantly declassified, including many FBI cold war files on investigations of people suspected of being Communist sympathizers. After years of extensions sought by federal agencies behaving like college students facing a term paper, the end of 2006 means the government's first automatic declassification of records.

Secret documents 25 years old or older will lose their classified status without so much as the stroke of a pen, unless agencies have sought exemptions on the ground that the material remains secret.

U.S. to declassify secrets aged 25 and older

Here's a little background. Up until now, documents would only be declassified if the declassification was specifically requested by U.S. citizens and granted by the government, or if the agency responsible for the documents decided to do a "housecleaning" by reviewing old classified documents to see if they should remain secret. Now, old secret documents will be declassified automatically unless the agency responsible requests that they not be. Essentially, we've gone from the documents being declassified by exception to their remaining classified by exception. As the IHT quote indicates, this will change the status of hundreds of millions of documents.

The IHT also appears to be accurate in saying the Bush Administration have not stood in the way of this change. The executive order the article is referring to is EO 12958, which President Clinton signed in April, 1995. Among other things, it contained this directive:

Sec. 3.4. Automatic Declassification. (a) Subject to paragraph (b), below, within 5 years from the date of this order, all classified information contained in records that (1) are more than 25 years old, and (2) have been determined to have permanent historical value under title 44, United States Code, shall be automatically declassified whether or not the records have been reviewed. Subsequently, all classified information in such records shall be automatically declassified no longer than 25 years from the date of its original classification, except as provided in paragraph (b), below. [3]

Executive Order 12958

President Bush later amended this executive order with EO 13292, which was changed mainly to give the Vice President the power to classify information. The section on automatic declassification was left essentially unchanged:

Sec. 3.3. Automatic Declassification. (a) Subject to paragraphs (b)-(e) of this section, on December 31, 2006, all classified records that (1) are more than 25 years old and (2) have been determined to have permanent historical value under title 44, United States Code, shall be automatically declassified whether or not the records have been reviewed. Subsequently, all classified records shall be automatically declassified on December 31 of the year that is 25 years from the date of its original classification, except as provided in paragraphs (b)-(e) of this section.

Executive Order 13292

Near as I can tell, the only change was to set a different date for the time when this process would start. Considering the way in which the Bush Administration deals with secrecy, this is an astonishing development. The change in the paragraphs cited is what I'd call wordsmithing; the paragraphs cited are essentially unchanged.

There is an implementation directive that tries to clarify procedures that will be used to declassify these documents. A brief glance at it reveals no hidden gotchas. It really looks like this is going to happen.

So, what does all this mean? The IHT article sums it up nicely:

Historians say the deadline, created in the Clinton administration but enforced, to the surprise of some scholars, by the secrecy-prone Bush administration, has had huge effects on public access, despite the large numbers of intelligence documents that have been exempted.

And every year from now on, millions of additional documents will be automatically declassified as they reach the 25-year limit, reversing the traditional practice of releasing just what scholars request.

That's "millions of documents", as in the equivalent of thousands of encyclopedias. Needless to say, much of it will be considerably less informative, but there are more than a few things buried in there that historians would like to know, and that we, as citizens of this country, ought to know.

The IHT article mentions that some documents about the Gulf of Tonkin incident will be declassified. For those who don't know what that is, let's just say that the Gulf of Tonkin was to Vietnam what weapons of mass destruction were to Iraq - in short, the lie that was used as the excuse for the war. What will those documents tell us about what happened that night? Here's what the Wikipedia entry has to say:

The Gulf of Tonkin Incident was an alleged pair of attacks (the second of which did not occur) by naval forces of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam against two American destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. The attacks occurred on 2 and 4 August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin. Later research, including a report released in 2005 by the National Security Agency, indicated that the second attack did not occur, but also attempted to dispel the long-standing assumption that members of the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson had knowingly lied about the nature of the incident.

Wikipedia entry "Gulf of Tonkin Incident"

An American President may have lied to get us into a war, and then classified the radar logs and other supporting documents to cover up his crime. Or, he may not have done it. The newly declassified documents may tell us, one way or the other. This has implications beyond history. Suppose President Bush was considering doing the same thing. Knowing that someday his legacy might be sullied by such a revelation might make him more reluctant to do it.

It seems possible that there will be documents about the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Yom Kippur War. All these things, and many other incidents of the Cold War, occurred more than twenty-five years ago.

There's another benefit to this declassification that even the most ardent unitary executive proponent would like. It will get a whole bunch of classified documents out of the system. Each one must, by law, be tracked and accounted for. If one goes missing, no matter how useless or uninteresting its contents may be to our current adversaries, an investigation must be conducted to find out what happened and who might be to blame. Declassifying these documents relieves the government of a large expense.

So, we saved money and made our society a little more open. On the whole, a very good day. Here's something else you won't read very often in this column:

Good job, Mr. President.