NCH WASHINGTON UPDATE (Vol. 12, #33; 24 August 2006)
1. KYLE-LOTT -- IS THE COST REALLY WORTH IT? 2. CONTROVERSIAL JAPAN FRUS VOLUME RELEASED 3. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY TO OPEN EXHIBITION AT AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM 4. BITS AND BYTES: Smithsonian Launches Online Photography Initiative; NEH Request for Proposals; Endangered Battlefield Nominations Sought 5. ARTICLES OF INTEREST: "Museums Set Guidelines for Use of Sacred Objects" (Philanthropy News Digest and New York Times)
1. KYLE-LOTT -- IS THE COST REALLY WORTH IT? According to a report released last week by the National Security Archive (NSA), as part of a congressionally-mandated review of previously released historical documents relating to nuclear energy and weaponry, the Pentagon and the Energy Department have reclassified as national security secrets historical data relating to the size of the American nuclear arsenal during the Cold War. The report documents that so far the cost of the Kyle-Lott reclassification review to the American taxpayer is over $3,313 per page, a figure that has raised the eyebrows of government watchdog groups that question the relative cost/benefit of the program.
The NSA report details for the public the number of Minuteman missiles (1,000), Titan II missiles (54), and submarine-launched ballistic missiles (656) in the historic U.S. Cold War arsenal – information that had previously been public through the administrations of four Secretaries of Defense in the 1960s and 70s but is now blacked out. Security classifiers also have also redacted from documents deployment information relating to the number of American nuclear weapons in Great Britain and Germany -- information that was first declassified in 1999. Also blacked out -- details regarding the nuclear deployment arrangements with Canada, even though the Canadian government has declassified its side of the arrangement.
The congressionally-ordered review was sanctioned under the 1998 Kyle-Lott amendments. They were crafted in the pre-9/11 era and were designed to re-screen documents for inadvertent releases of information relating to the American nuclear arsenal. More recently, the costly program has been justified in terms of its potential to thwart terrorism.
Thus far the Energy Department has spent some $22 million in implementing the Kyle-Lott amendments. To that end the department has surveyed more than 200 million pages of previously released public documents. The program has certainly kept young historians and contract researchers employed, but there are serious questions relating to the relative cost/benefit of the program and whether America is actually any safer as a result of the re-review.
To date, Energy Department screeners have withdrawn a total of 6,640 pages (.3% of the total pages reviewed) from public access as a result of the re-review. This comes to a total per-page cost of $3,313, but even this figure is deceptively low: Over two-thirds of the documents being withheld are marked with lesser classification rankings than that of "Restricted Data (RD)" – documents of prime concern that could potentially reveal weapon systems design/fuel information that could possibly be of use to a potential terrorist, should such persons actually use archival sources to obtain such information. (There has never been a documented or even alleged case in which information gleaned from any American archival source has been used by a terrorists to plan an attack on a Western target.) "It would be difficult to find better candidates for unjustifiable secrecy than decisions to classify the numbers of U.S. strategic weapons," remarked Archive senior analyst Dr. William Burr, who compiled the NSA report.
Agency officials, however, justify the re-review and reclassification. According to Bryan Wilkes, a spokesperson for the National Nuclear Security Administration, "There's no question that current classified nuclear weapons data was out there that we had to take back...by today's environment, where there is a great deal of concern about rogue nations or terrorist groups getting access to nuclear weapons, this [program] makes a lot of sense."
But critics argue there is no national security reason for the administration to keep such historical information classified, especially since all of it has been publicly available for years. In some cases the information had been turned over to America's then number one enemy, the Soviet Union, in order to comply with two strategic arms reductions treaties.
National Security Archive director Thomas Blanton states, "What's really at risk is accountability in government," a view echoed by Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy who observed, "we still haven't figured out how to do classification policy right, and the government is still botching the matter."
2. CONTROVERSIAL JAPAN FRUS VOLUME RELEASED After over ten years of sometimes heated negotiation between the State Department and various governmental intelligence agencies, the Department of State History Office (HO) has released a new title in the FRUS series: "Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964-1968, Vol XXIX, PART 2, JAPAN," the penultimate volume to be published in the Johnson administration sub-series. What makes this volume unique is that it has been nearly ready for publication for over seven years, but owing to a handful of controversial documents relating to covert operations in Japan that for years intelligence screeners would not permit the HO to include in the volume, PART 2 JAPAN is only now seeing the light of day...but minus the intelligence agency covert operations documentation.
One of the first things a reader of this volume will notice as different is the inclusion of not only the usual "Preface" but also a "Note on U.S. Covert Actions" and an "Editor's Note" posted at the beginning of the volume. Collectively, the preface and these notices serve, in essence, as disclaimers for the HO.
In order to comply with the Congressionally mandated FRUS statute the compilers of the series are charged to include in each volume, "comprehensive documentation on major foreign policy decisions and actions." But apparently, in the case of the second Japan volume, because of the intelligence community's concerns, this was not possible. Sources inside the HO characterize its preparation as "the volume from hell" in that it has been extremely difficult and in some cases impossible to get some documents cleared for publication, and, in the end, the HO simply gave up trying.
The editors had identified 18 documents in full and nine others with excisions of a paragraph or less that the HO considered "key documents [or containing important information] regarding major covert actions and intelligence activities," however, intelligence security screeners would not permit them to be published. After years of negotiation the HO was confronted with the option of continuing to hold the publication of the volume in perpetual abeyance or go ahead a publish without the inclusion of the documents, but instead include an explanatory note. Hence, with the blessing of the Advisory Committee on Historical Diplomatic Documentation, the decision was made to release the volume with a statement laying out the broad contents of the excised documents and establish their contextual importance with other released documents.
So what was of such concern to intelligence officials? It seems that this volume acknowledges the existence of four covert programs targeting a friendly nation -- Japan, including a small covert program begun in the late 1950s and continuing into the 1960s in which American intelligence operatives supported key pro-American Japanese politicians in an effort to split off the moderate wing of the leftist opposition. The documentation shows that the Johnson administration concluded that this program was neither appropriate nor worth the risk of exposure. As a result, in 1964, the program was phased out, but nevertheless, broader covert programs of propaganda and social action to encourage the Japanese to reject the influence of the left continued at moderate levels until 1968. It is this program, in particular, though well documented in various ambassadorial journals and memoirs, that primarily concerned intelligence agency screeners.
In an effort to satisfactorily meet the mandates of the FRUS legislation the editors have included a contextual explanation of the excised documents and their importance within the context of the era. Though readers of this particular FRUS volume are being denied access to the raw documentation by intelligence agencies and there is not the level of detail that one would characteristically expect to see in a volume in the FRUS series, the HO asserts it is not permitting history to be entirely rewritten because of deletions. Nevertheless, one source inside State views the volume as being "minimally acceptable" in terms of meeting FRUS legislative directives.
One does wonder, however, whether the JAPAN volume is merely an anomaly, or is this practice expected to be employed more frequently in future FRUS releases in order to sidestep CIA and other intelligence agency objections. For example, a FRUS volume on the CONGO has longtime been in the making and is still pending publication; according to inside sources, some of the documentation in it also has been difficult to clear with intelligence screeners. Sources inside the State Department HO concede that during the Bush administration "it is getting harder to get stuff released." But according to FRUS General Editor, Edward C. Keefer, the JAPAN volume "is unique and [does not] reflect a trend."
3. NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY TO OPEN EXHIBITION AT AIR AND SPACE MUSEUM As reported some months back in this newsletter, on 5 September 2006 the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History (NMAH) will close its doors for some two years during which time major architectural renovations are scheduled to take place. But arrangements have been made to move some of the most beloved and most recently acquired (though not necessarily the most historically significant) artifacts to the nearby National Air and Space Museum and display them as part of a 5000 square foot "Treasures of American History" exhibition scheduled to open 17 November.
According to Brent Glass, NMAH director, the exhibition will have four themes: creativity and innovation, American biography, national challenges, and American identity. Iconic cultural objects, such as the Scarecrow costume seen in the classic movie the "Wizard of Oz," will be on display as will the NBC microphone from which President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his famous "Fireside chats" to millions of Americans listening by radio during the Great Depression and beyond.
According to Glass, the exhibition is designed to remind people that "the museum’s work in collecting continues" even though the public display area will be closed for some time. To keep this message before the visiting public, objects in the acquisitions display will be rotated every two months. The first items to be displayed will be artifacts from the recent Katrina disaster.
4. BITS AND BYTES Item #1 -- Smithsonian Launches Online Photography Initiative: The Smithsonian's 18 museums, nine research centers, and the National Zoo collectively preserve some 13 million photographs which now, thanks to the Smithsonian Photography Initiative, will begin to be made accessible to researchers online. The images found in some seven hundred collections throughout the Smithsonian are organized by museum and discipline -- for instance, the National Museum of Natural History holds natural science images in its collections, the National Air and Space Museum houses images of flight in its archives, and the National Museum of African Art holds photographs of Africa in its collections. The Smithsonian Photography Initiative is devoted to the presentation and study of these photographic images, viewing photography as an art form, a record keeper, and a cross-disciplinary medium that encompasses science, history, popular culture, and more. Beyond offering more information about where to find photography collections throughout the Smithsonian, a new website aims to be an educational tool, serving anyone who wishes to study, explore, and enjoy photographs of many kinds. To view the website go to: http://www.spi.si.edu/ where you will be provided access to some 1,800 digital images, the work of 100 photographers, who used 50 different processes.
Item #2 -- NEH Request for Proposals: The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Division of Preservation and Access has issued a "Request for Proposals" for Cooperative Agreements for the National Digital Newspaper Program (A Partnership between NEH and the Library of Congress). The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is soliciting proposals from institutions to participate in the next phase of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP). Ultimately, over a period of approximately 20 years, NDNP will create a national, digital resource of historically significant newspapers from all the states and U.S. territories published between 1836 and 1922. This searchable database will be permanently maintained at the Library of Congress (LC) and be freely accessible via the Internet. An accompanying national newspaper directory of bibliographic and holdings information on the website will direct users to newspaper titles available in various formats. LC will also digitize and contribute to the NDNP database a significant number of newspaper pages drawn from its own collections during the course of this partnership between NEH and the Library. The NEH expects to award two-year cooperative agreements (of up to $400,000 each) depending on the availability of funds. The Guidelines for the Request for Proposals are located at: http://www.neh.gov/grants/guidelines/ndnp.html . LC's technical guidelines are found at: http://www.loc.gov/ndnp/pdf/NDNP_200709TechNotes.pdf . For information about the application process, contact Laura Gottesman in the Division of Preservation and Access at 202- 606-8570 or e-mail at preservation@neh.gov. All questions relating to the technical guidelines should be directed to LC staff at ndnptech@loc.gov.
Item #3 -- Endangered Battlefield Nominations Sought: The Civil War Preservation Trust (CWPT), the nation's largest nonprofit battlefield preservation organization, is accepting nominations for its annual Most Endangered Battlefields Report, identifying the most threatened Civil War sites in the United States and what can be done to save these precious links to our nation's past. The 2007 Most Endangered Battlefields Report will be released in February 2007 in Washington, D.C. Any Civil War battlefield is eligible to for nomination and consideration. The ten chosen sites will be selected based on geographic location, military significance and the immediacy of current threats. Individuals and groups are encouraged to fill out the nomination form available online at http://www.civilwar.org/news/topten2007/nominationform2007.pdf. Applications should include photographs of the site and a detailed description of recent threats. Nominations must be postmarked no later than 10 October 2006.
5. ARTICLES OF INTEREST One posting this week: In "Museums Set Guidelines for Use of Sacred Objects" (Philanthropy News Digest and New York Times) 14 August 2006, the Association of Art Museum Directors has adopted a new set of guidelines designed to strike a balance between traditional practice of collecting indigenous objects as art with the competing interests of people who ancestors produced them. For the article go to: http://foundationcenter.org/pnd/news/story.jhtml?id=153700011 .