by Lance Gay, Scripps-Howard News Service
May 15, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Too many routine government documents are being stamped secret, say leading members of the 9/11 commission, which is preventing the public from learning about all the warnings and information they may need to protect themselves.
Thomas Kean, chairman of the commission, said most of the secret documents he has reviewed for investigating the tragedy of Sept. 11, 2001, have been reports of hearsay or information publicly available elsewhere, and so weren't true secrets anyway.
"Three-quarters of what I read that was classified shouldn't have been," the Republican former New Jersey governor said.
Kean said the panel, appointed by the president and 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 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 this problem of overuse of secrecy.
"We've got a serious problem of overclassification," 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-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden 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-Qaida 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.
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 federal Information Security Oversight Office 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. 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.
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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