Steven Aftergood, director of the FAS's project on government secrecy, requested disclosure through the Freedom of Information Act of Tenet's budget request to Congress for fiscal 1999. This time, Tenet refused, and Aftergood filed suit.
Once the fiscal 1999 budget took effect Oct. 1, Aftergood amended his complaint to obtain not only the budget request, but the appropriation as well, since a precedent had been established for releasing the amount of intelligence spending. (For the record: $26.6 billion in 1997 and $26.7 billion in 1998). Or so he thought.
Late last month, Tenet, who is also head of the Central Intelligence Agency, refused in court papers to provide either the request or the appropriation. Releasing total figures about Intelligence Community spending, he has argued in court papers, "could be expected to cause damage to the national security, or otherwise tend to reveal intelligence sources and methods."
In releasing the 1997 appropriation, Tenet noted, he committed to disclosing future appropriations only as long as they did not "cause harm to the national security by showing trends over time."
Aftergood is incredulous. "I just don't think there's a case to be made that there's a threat to national security," he said in a recent interview. He cited the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's recently published review of fiscal 1999 budget priorities and said disclosure of aggregate spending would be "benign" by comparison.
The committee reported last month, with more than a little specificity, that spending priorities in fiscal 1999 were to bolster counter-proliferation, counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, counter-intelligence, covert action, ballistic missile intelligence and "new small satellite technologies that provide flexible, affordable collection from space with radars to detect moving targets in all-weather conditions."
Deal for Iraqi Detainees
Six Iraqi opposition members imprisoned in Los Angeles as alleged national security threats on the basis of secret government evidence ran into trouble of a different sort last week when they were beaten up by a group of Chinese detainees in a melee triggered by a pay phone dispute.
The fracas took place in the Mira Loma Detention Center one day after the six Iraqis, all of whom participated in CIA-backed efforts to topple Saddam Hussein, were interviewed by "60 Minutes" about their travails.
Their case has received widespread media attention since former CIA director R. James Woolsey began representing them last year, calling it a "stain" on America's honor to try to deport Iraqi freedom fighters using classified evidence even he has not been allowed to see. "It really is just outrageous that the collective U.S. government would treat people like this who have fought in common cause with us against someone like Saddam," Woolsey said shortly after the Mira Loma incident.
The six, imprisoned for almost two years, have denied they are foreign agents and are appealing deportation orders filed against them by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Francis J. Brooke, Washington representative of the Iraqi National Congress, a leading opposition group with which three of the six are affiliated, said the government has informally offered to release the six on supervised house arrest if they agree to forfeit their procedural rights before the Board of Immigration Appeals and accept deportation to any country of the government's choice other than Iraq. The INS declined comment.
"For the government to tell them to give up their procedural rights in order for them to get out of jail strikes me as a completely un-American procedure that smacks of blackmail," Brooke said.
The Cost of Keeping Secrets
The federal government set a record for the second year in fiscal 1997 by declassifying 204 million pages of documents, bringing the total to over 400 million pages since President Clinton issued Executive Order 12958 on mandatory declassification. Information on fiscal 1998 won't be available until the end of April.
"In two years under your Executive Order, the agencies have declassified 56 percent more pages than in the prior 16 years combined," Steven Garfinkel, director of the Information Security Oversight Office, said in a recent report to Clinton.
But not all agencies performed at record-setting pace. The CIA, which produced 70 percent of all documents classified in 1997, Garfinkel noted, was responsible for only one-tenth of 1 percent of all declassification during the year.
And for the second year in a row, according to Garfinkel's report, classification of documents increased. The cost of government secrecy in 1997, Garfinkel found, was $3.4 billion.
Vernon Loeb's e-mail address is loebv@washpost.com