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Thursday, April 3, 2008

Torture Memo = classification failure

By Rebecca Carr | Thursday, April 3, 2008, 03:57 PM

As public outrage intensifies over the latest “torture document” indicating the Justice Department approved abusive tactics for suspected al-Qaida terrorists, open government advocates see another problem.

The Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo on interrogation of enemy combatants that was declassified this week “exemplifies the political abuse of classification authority,” wrote Steven Aftergood, director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists.

J. William Leonard, the recently departed head of the federal agency that oversees classification, agreed.

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“The disappointment I feel with respect to the abuse of the classification system in this instance is profound,” said Leonard in today’s edition of Secrecy News.

“The document in question is purely a legal analysis,” Leonard said. The content did not warrant a classification marking, which keeps it from the public, he said.

“To learn that such a document is classified has the same effect for me as waking up one morning and learning that after all these years there is a “secret” Article IV to the Constitution that the American people did not even know about,” Leonard said.

This is not the first time that Leonard has been openly critical of the administration. Last year, he formally petitioned the Attorney General’s office to force Vice President Dick Cheney to comply with a presidential order requiring the disclosure of classification statistics.

There is no information contained in this document that gives the enemy an advantage, Leonard said. “The only possible rationale for making it secret was to keep it from the American people.”

The presidential order government classification requires the identification of the person marking the document “classified.” It also requires a “concise basis” for classification. Both were missing.

“All too often, government officials simply assert classification,” said Leonard, who openly battled with federal agencies during his five-year tenure as head of the Information Security Oversight Office to reduce needless classification. “Those basic, elemental steps were not followed in this instance.”

It is “highly irregular” for the Defense Department to declassify a Justice Department memo, he said.

Violations of classification policy pale in comparison to the policy deviations authorized by the Justice Department memo, which was ultimately rescinded, Aftergood wrote.

“Nevertheless, such classification violations are significant because they enabled the administration to pursue its interrogation policies without independent scrutiny or accountability,” Aftergood said.

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