Clinton Orders Less Secrecy In Government Over Cia, Pentagon Objections, Most Documents Will Be Made Public After 25 Years
President Clinton signed an executive order Monday overhauling government secrecy rules and requiring, with certain exceptions, that even the most highly classified documents be made public after 25 years.
The directive, issued after two years of debate within the administration, establishes the least secretive policy on government records since the beginning of the Cold War. It would allow the head of an agency, like the director of Central Intelligence, to exempt some documents, but only with the approval of an appeals panel.
The current rules, established in 1947 and last refined by the Reagan administration, have allowed vast vaults of documents to be kept classified even beyond the 30-year period after which they must be surrendered to the National Archives.
Monday, Clinton promised that his order would “lift the veil” on millions of those documents and keep many new documents from being classified in the first place.
But he left little doubt that the new rules, spelled out in a 25-page directive, would still allow the government to protect the most sensitive of documents from public disclosure.
In a statement, he said the new policy would “maintain the necessary controls over information that legitimately needs to be guarded in the interests of national security.”
Administration officials conceded that the new policy was less open than one the National Security Council proposed a year ago. They said the version reflected White House efforts to accommodate complaints of officials at the CIA, the Pentagon, the National Security Agency and elsewhere, who have argued vigorously that the automatic release of certain documents would be foolhardy.
The administration officials said it was impossible to say precisely how many documents might be ultimately be exempted from Clinton’s order, which is to take effect over the next five years. They said that would depend in part on how vigorously the CIA and others strive to protect their secrets.
But the officials said Monday’s step will require that the vast majority of national security documents be subject to automatic disclosure. When they take full effect at the turn of the century, the new rules will have made available all but exempted information from 1975 and earlier, including millions of pages related to the Vietnam War.
Steven Aftergood, who directs a project on government secrecy for the Federation of Independent Scientists, described Clinton’s directive Monday as representing “a distinct improvement over the current system.”
But Aftergood, a leading advocate of greater openness, argued that the new rules would still permit the intelligence agencies to keep unnecessary secrets.
Nothing in Clinton’s order will force the government to make public the size of the intelligence budget, Aftergood noted, even though it is common knowledge in the capital.
xxxx News conference CNN will carry President Clinton’s 6 p.m. news conference today live. The three major TV networks were undecided on coverage.