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STATEMENT ON THE INTELLIGENCE
DECLASSIFICATION PROVISION IN THE INTELLlGENCE REFORM BILL
SENATOR RON WYDEN
December 8, 2004
M. President, I wish to commend
Senators Collins and Lieberman for their leadership in working
round the clock for months to translate the key recommendations
of the 9-11 Commission into reality. Thanks to their tireless
and bipartisan effort, I and my colleagues today can point to
a provision in the Intel Reform Bill that will clear the fog of
unnecessary secrecy that has for too long clouded our national
intelligence picture. As the principal sponsor of this bipartisan
provision, which will establish for the first time an appeals
procedure that members of Congress may use regarding the classification
of materials for national security purposes, I wish to explain
how I envision this new process working.
The power to classify documents
as secret is one of the most powerful tools in American government,
and it seems to be very much in vogue. Over-classification of
documents is now the rule rather than the exception. Documents
are sometimes classified for political reasons rather than to
protect national security interests. Last year alone, the federal
government spent $6.5 billion creating 14.3 million new classified
documents. That is double the number of documents 10 years ago.
This awesome power should be used judiciously, and it surely should
not be the subject of old fashioned horse-trading, as it was last
summer during the preparation of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s
report on pre-Iraq War intelligence.
Last summer the Senate Intelligence
Committee, on which I serve with my co-authors, spent more than
six weeks arm-wrestling with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
over how much of the report on pre-Iraq War intelligence would
be made public. Originally, the Agency wanted to black out more
than half of the report. In the end, “only 20 percent”
of the report was blacked out.
At that time there was no independent
body to which the Committee members could turn to find out what
should and should not be classified for national security purposes.
That is precisely the problem addressed by the provision crafted
by Senators Lott, Bob Graham, Snowe and myself. Our provision
will give Congress for the first time a means of appealing classification
decisions.
The provision gives Congress
the authority to appeal classification decisions to an independent
standing body, the Public Interest Declassification Board. This
Board is made up of nine members with expertise in national security
and related areas; five are appointed by the President and four
by the bipartisan leadership of the Senate and House. Under the
amendments made by Section 1102, when any member of Congress asks
the Board to declassify a document or materials, the Board “shall
advise the originators of the request in a timely manner whether
the Board intends to conduct such review.”
This means that if I or another
member of the Senate were to ask the Board to determine whether
a document is properly classified for national security purposes,
the Board must respond in a timely manner. “Timely”
is defined as “early” or “soon.” It is
my expectation that whether it is a member of Congress or a Committee
seeking the Board’s decision on the proper classification
of information, the Board will get back to the requester expeditiously.
I am of the view that the problems
in our intelligence community will not be addressed until the
problems in the national security classification system are addressed.
Thomas Kean, who chaired the 9/11 Commission, said that three-quarters
of the classified material he reviewed for the Commission should
not have been classified in the first place. Now, as the Senate
acts on the conference report that strongly reflects the 9/11
Commission recommendations, it only makes sense to include this
provision.
I have no illusions that this classification appeals mechanism
will abolish the strongly rooted institutional bias in favor of
over-classification, but taken in conjunction with the overall
review of the standards used to classify information contained
in other sections of the Conference Report, it is a very sound
first step.
I am grateful to Senator Lott,
my principal cosponsor, for championing this matter in conference.
He and his staff worked non-stop to preserve this provision. I
also want to acknowledge the efforts of Senator Bob Graham, another
conferee, and his staff to defend our work. I ask unanimous consent
that my statement be printed in the record.
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