SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2004, Issue No. 84
September 27, 2004

INTELLIGENCE REFORM LEGISLATION ADVANCES

Competing versions of legislation on intelligence reform have been introduced in the House and Senate and will be considered this week.

The Senate bill (S. 2845) hews fairly closely to the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission (including intelligence budget disclosure) and was crafted on a bipartisan basis. The text is here:

The House bill (H.R. 10), in contrast, includes numerous controversial provisions to expand law enforcement authority and its authors excluded participation by House Democrats. That bill is here (1 MB PDF file):

The House bill was informed in part by a September 16 White House draft bill. Among other notable features, that draft included a new Freedom of Information Act exemption for "operational files" of the new National Intelligence Director (at pp. 16-17). But the proposed FOIA exemption has not been included so far in the House or Senate bills. See the September 16 White House draft bill here:

INADVERTENT DISCLOSURES OF CLASSIFIED INFORMATION

Having examined some 1.3 million pages of declassified documents at the National Archives, reviewers identified 356 pages of classified nuclear weapons-related information that should not have been disclosed, the Department of Energy said in a newly disclosed periodic report to Congress.

As in the past, the most frequently reported category of inadvertently disclosed information concerned historical information regarding nuclear weapons storage locations abroad.

The Fourteenth Report on Inadvertent Releases of Restricted Data and Formerly Restricted Data was transmitted to Congress on a classified basis in March 2004. An unclassified version was released last week. See:

NEW FRUS VOLUME ON SOUTH, CENTRAL AMERICA

U.S. foreign policy towards South and Central America during the tumultuous years 1964-1968 is documented in a new volume of the official State Department series Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS).

"Many of the [records] document the Johnson administration's responses to a series of crises: the 1964 Panama Canal flag incident; the 1964 coup d'etat in Brazil; the 1964 presidential election in Chile; the 1966 coup in Argentina; the 1967 hunt for Ernesto 'Che' Guevara in Bolivia; the 1968 coups in Peru and Panama" and more, according to a State Department press release.

The full text of the new volume is available here:

In a news release welcoming publication of the FRUS volume, the National Security Archive noted that it disclosed for the first time official documents on political intervention by the CIA in the 1964 election in Chile:

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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

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