CIA delays declassifying congressional report on harsh interrogations
30 April 2014, 13:20 -- The CIA has demonstrated remarkable reluctance to declassify parts of the congressional report on harsh interrogation techniques of suspected terrorists. No more is the agency eager to be open regarding its other sensitive operations and history. In recent years, CIA decision-makers have wrestled with Congress, archivists, journalists, former CIA employees and even an ex-CIA director over what information could be revealed. Usually, secrecy holds upper hand.
The CIA has used its national security authority to prevent embarrassing or damaging disclosures.
'They're tightfisted by nature and the more they are pressed to disclose, the more they resist,' said Steven Aftergood, who studies government secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.
The CIA's own experts have begun what the agency's spokesman Dean Boyd described as an 'expeditious classification review' of the 400-page summary and findings on the agency's harsh interrogation techniques drawn up by the Senate Intelligence Committee. However, Boyd did not say when it will be completed.
In referring the committee's report to US President Barack Obama earlier this month, the committee's chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, asked the White House and not the CIA to take the lead in declassifying the summary, which criticizes the agency for its heavy use of abusive interrogation techniques, for instance, the infamous waterboarding, against people suspected of being linked to al-Qaeda, who were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas. But the White House committed only to having the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, oversee the CIA's work.
Sometimes it has taken CIA decades to declassify information. The infamous 'Family Jewels,' a trove of secret documents recounting covert and sometimes-illegal activities, including several botched assassination attempts on Cuban President Fidel Castro, were kept secret for more than three decades until they were released during the George W. Bush administration in November 2007. The National Security Archive, a George Washington University program that obtains declassified and historic intelligence and diplomatic files, had asked for them more than 15 years earlier.
'What we come up against repeatedly is the CIA's knee-jerk assertion of national security,' said Thomas S. Blanton, the Archive's director. 'That comes down to one reality - the CIA's desire to protect its own power and authority.'
CIA veterans who oversaw the handling of the agency's secret files said critics have a simplistic view of the role the agency is obliged to play.
'The CIA's handling of declassification is judiciously done,' said John H. Hedley, a former CIA veteran who chaired the agency's secretive Publications Review Board for three years in the late 1990s. Hedley's board of experts came from across the agency and ruled on what could be printed in books written by former officials.
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