From: kuryakin@arn.net (Illya Kuryakin) Date: Fri, 28 Apr 1995 20:00:17 -0500
By Ann Devroy
Washington Post
WASHINGTON - President Clinton yesterday issued an executive order aimed at opening government's oldest secrets to public view, and both reducing the number of documents made secret and shortening the number of years they remain classified.
The primary element of the order is the automatic declassification without review of most documents that are 25 years old or older. Previously, documents remained classified indefinitely. Now, unless the document fits into a group of narrow exceptions, it will automatically be open to public view.
The order also puts a 10-year-limit on how long documents remain classified, requiring that after that period they become public unless a review determines they should not be. A number of other steps - less substantive and called mostly rhetorical by outside experts - also puts the Clinton White House on the side of quicker, easier declassification.
"This order strikes an appropriate balance," Clinton said in a statement accompanying the order. "On the one hand, it will sharply reduce the permitted level of secrecy within our government, making available...documents of premanent historic value." On the other, he said, it also enables government to safeguard the secrets necessary to protect national security.
Citing his order as historic, Clinton listed as "firsts" that classifiers will have to justify what they classify, that employees will be expected to challenge improper classification and be protected from retribution, and that "hundreds of millions of pages of information" classified in the past 50 years will be automatically declassified and released.
The order establishes an interagency appeals panel to hear challenges to classification, specifies sanctions for overclassification and establishes an advisory council outside the government to recommend systematic declassification.
The order comes after a two-year struggle among agencies and departments and outside groups that were presented with Clinton's proposals early in his tenure to meet a campaign pledge to make government less secretive. A draft executive order, circulating among agencies last April, met what one offical called resistance with the intelligence community and complaints from outside groups that said it did not go far enough.
A senior administration offical said yesterday that it took "a year of negotiation, lawyering, negotiation and arguement" to produce the final result.
That result was lauded, in one major respect, by outsiders who press for less automatice secrecy, particularly over the government's historical records, many of which they say should not have been classified secret to begin with.
Keeping information secret is a huge operation in Washington. According to offical estimates, the government in 1994 took 6.3 million classification actions, creating an estimated 19 million pages of information that only selected government officals can see. More than 32,000 government workers are employed full time in determining what should be secret.
Automatic declassification of documents older than 25 years should release millions of pages of documents concerning the Vietnam War, experts project as one example. They note that since several agencies classify reams of material and no routine declassification has until now occurred, millions, perhaps billions, of pages of documents might emerge in numerous areas.