Following a closed House Armed Services Committee hearing on leaks yesterday, the Department of Defense issued a statement outlining its multi-pronged effort to deter, detect and punish unauthorized disclosures of classified information.

“The Department of Defense has taken a comprehensive approach to address the issue of national security leaks,” the statement said.  “Personnel in all components are continuously working to protect classified information and identify those who do not uphold their obligations to protect national defense information.”

Several of the steps announced have previously been described and implemented, such as new guidance on protection of classified information and physical restrictions on use of portable media to download classified data.  Other measures involve new tracking and reporting mechanisms, and the ongoing implementation of an “insider threat” detection program.

Although many of these changes originated in response to WikiLeaks-type disclosures of DoD information two years ago, their repackaging now might serve to diffuse congressional anger over more recent high-profile leaks, and to preempt more extreme legislative responses.

The new DoD statement does not admit any valid role for unauthorized disclosures under any circumstances.

To the contrary, the Secretary of Defense affirmed that the Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs is the “sole release authority for all DoD information to news media in Washington.”

In other words, DoD Public Affairs is the only legitimate source for defense news and information.  It follows that freedom of the press means the unfettered ability of reporters to write about what the DoD Public Affairs Officer says.

Both as a matter of humanitarian principle and as sound military strategy, U.S. military forces should strive to minimize civilian casualties in military operations, according to new U.S. Army doctrine published on Wednesday.

“In their efforts to defeat enemies, Army units and their partners must ensure that they are not creating even more adversaries in the process,” the new publication states.

“Focused attention on CIVCAS [civilian casualty] mitigation is an important investment to maintain legitimacy and ensure eventual success.  Failure to prevent CIVCASs will undermine national policy objectives as well as the mission of Army units, while assisting adversaries.”

So, for example, “When Army units are establishing and maintaining wide area security, it may be more important to minimize CIVCAS than to defeat a particular enemy.”

However, “While CIVCAS mitigation efforts can greatly reduce CIVCASs, it is unreasonable to expect that CIVCASs can be completely eliminated in all instances.  When CIVCASs occur, the most important part of the response is to determine the facts of the incident, including the numbers and severity of CIVCASs.”

“Recognizing that they are in a constant information battle with their adversaries regarding CIVCASs and other issues, Army units should maintain a consistent pattern of truthfulness and timeliness.”

“Army investigations [of civilian casualty incidents] should strive for integrity, credibility, and inclusion of external perspectives…. Immediate and broad denial of reports without complete and accurate information in hand can undermine credibility, especially if the investigation finds reports [of civilian casualties] were correct.”

See “Civilian Casualty Mitigation,” ATTP 3-37.31, July 2012.

The first new legislative initiative to combat leaks of classified information is a bill called the Deterring Public Disclosure of Covert Actions Act of 2012, which was introduced July 10 by Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC).

“This act will ensure that those who disclose or talk about covert actions by the United States will no longer be eligible for Federal Government security clearance. It is novel. It is very simple. If you talk about covert actions you will have your clearance revoked and you will never get another one,” Sen. Burr said.

As justification for the measure, he cited “a series of articles published in the media that have described and in some cases provided extensive details about highly classified unilateral and joint intelligence operations, including covert actions.”

But this assumes certain facts that are not in evidence.  As Walter Pincus wrote in the Washington Post today, there are numerous official and unofficial sources of information about the Stuxnet covert action story, for example, including private sector companies and foreign sources that do not hold security clearances.  From that point of view, the Burr bill does not seem well-suited to achieve its intended purpose.

But the most peculiar thing about the new legislation is that it appears to validate the spurious notion of an “authorized leak.”

Thus, the text of the bill would revoke the security clearance of persons who publicly disclose or discuss classified details of covert actions — unless they have “prior authorization from an original classification authority.”

This seems to mean that classified information about covert actions need not be specifically declassified in order to be publicly released, but only that its disclosure must be “authorized.”

The question of imposing criminal penalties for disclosure of classified information to the press was discussed lately by Morton H. Halperin, who has been involved as a consultant or an expert witness for the defense in many or most of the leak prosecutions from the Ellsberg case in the 1970s to the present.

“Starting from the premise that more information must be made public and that the government has the right to keep some information secret in the name of national security, we need a public and congressional dialogue about what set of measures would be most effective in meeting these two equally important objectives. Reducing government secrecy must be a key component of any such measures,” he wrote in “Leaks and the Public Right to Know,” Huffington Post, July 16.  See also a longer paper by Halperin on “Criminal Penalties for Disclosing Classified Information to the Press in the United States.”

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that Congress has declined to make publicly available online include these.

Midnight Rulemaking, July 18, 2012

An Analysis of the Distribution of Wealth Across Households, 1989-2010, July 17, 2012

Oil Sands and the Keystone XL Pipeline: Background and Selected Environmental Issues, July 16, 2012

Defense Surplus Equipment Disposal: Background Information, July 18, 2012

Nigeria: Current Issues and U.S. Policy, July 18, 2012

The United Arab Emirates (UAE): Issues for U.S. Policy, July 17, 2012

Timor-Leste: Political Dynamics, Development, and International Involvement, July 3, 2012

In 1972, the United States, the Soviet Union and other nations signed the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention that was supposed to ban biological weapons.  At that very time, however, the Soviet Union was embarking on a massive expansion of its offensive biological weapons program, which began in the 1920s and continued under the Russian Federation at least into the 1990s.

The astonishing story of the Soviet biological weapons enterprise is told in an encyclopedic new work entitled “The Soviet Biological Weapons Program: A History” by Milton Leitenberg and Raymond A. Zilinskas (Harvard University Press, 2012).

The Soviet biological weapons (BW) program was by far the largest and most sophisticated such program ever undertaken by any nation.  It was also intensely secretive, and was masked by layers of classification, deception and misdirection.

“The program’s most important facilities remain inaccessible to outsiders to this day,” Leitenberg and Zilinskas write, “and it has been made a crime for anyone in present-day Russia to divulge information about the former offensive BW program.”  Needless to say, official archives are closed and Russian government officials are uncommunicative on the subject, or deny the existence of the program altogether.

Over a period of a decade or so, Leitenberg and Zilinskas were able to interview about a dozen former Soviet scientists who were involved in the Soviet BW program, along with dozens of other sources.  Their revelations inform the authors’ analysis and serve to advance public knowledge of the subject far beyond previous reports.  Even relatively well-known incidents like the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax epidemic are cast in a new light.  Many other aspects of the program will be entirely unfamiliar to most readers.

Much of the book is devoted to a description of the vast infrastructure of Soviet BW research and production, including descriptions of the various institutes, their history, their workforce and the nature of their research, as far as it could be discerned.  Along the way, many fascinating and sometimes horrific topics are addressed.  For example:

•     In an effort to enhance the weapons-related properties of BW agents, Soviet scientists spent years working to create a viral “chimera,” which is an organism that contains genetic material from two or more other organisms.
•     Other scientists worked to eliminate the “epitopes” on the surface of existing BW agents in order to make them unrecognizable to regular diagnostic techniques.  By using such a modified agent, “the Soviets would have made it considerably more difficult for the attacked population to identify the causative pathogen of the resulting disease outbreak and begin timely treatment.”
•     A project codenamed Hunter (Okhotnik) sought to develop hybrids of bacteria and viruses such that use of an antibiotic to kill the bacteria would trigger release of the virus.  “Unlike other national BW programs, which without exception used only classical or traditional applied microbiology techniques to weaponize agents, the post-1972 Soviet program had a futuristic aspect. By employing genetic manipulation and other molecular biology techniques, its scientists were able to breach barriers separating species….”
•     The Soviet BW program appears to have taken advantage of the declassification in the 1970s of a large number of documents from the United States BW program.  Thus, the design of the Soviet Gshch-304 BW bomblet was found to closely resemble that of the declassified US E-130R2 bomblet.  In 2001, the US Government moved to reclassify many documents on the US BW program, but “nothing could be done about recalling reports that had been distributed relatively freely for more than 35 years.”
•     The quality of US intelligence about the Soviet BW program left much to be desired.  “Intelligence about Soviet BW-related activities is relatively thin for the pre-1972 period; meager and often of dubious value during 1970-1979; and a little less meager and of better quality during 1980-1990.” After 1990, little has been declassified.  “There is an unknown number of still-classified reports concerning the Soviet BW program produced by the CIA and perhaps by other agencies that we do not have,” the authors write.  The state of declassification is such that “we have been able to collect far more information” about the history of Soviet BW activities from interviews with former Soviet scientists and others than from declassified official records.
•     In what the authors term “a horrendous mistake by the United States,” the US government undertook a covert deception and disinformation program aimed at the Soviet Union in the late 1960s which implied falsely that the US had a clandestine biological weapons program.  This unfortunate campaign may have reinforced an existing Soviet belief that the US had never terminated its own offensive BW program, a belief that lent impetus, if not legitimacy, to the Soviet BW program.
•     Today, the situation with respect to BW in the former Soviet Union is “ambiguous and unsatisfactory,” Leitenberg and Zilinskas write. “There remains the possibility that Russia maintains portions of an offensive BW program in violation of the BWC.” Alternatively, “since we do not actually know what is and has been taking place within the three [Ministry of Defense BW] facilities since 1992, perhaps the situation is better than might be feared.”

In 23 chapters, the authors painstakingly examine many facets of the history, structure and operation of the Soviet BW program.  They scrupulously cite prior scholarship on the subject, while sorting out verifiable fact, plausible inference, dubious speculation, and error or fabrication.  (Thus, “No SS-18 ICBM bomblet delivery system was ever completed, none was ever tested, and obviously none could ever have been employed.”)

But even after 900 pages of often dense text, “there are large gaps in our understanding of the Soviet BW program” and “readers are cautioned that much remains to be discovered.”

“We have not been able to resolve definitively some of the most important questions,” they observe.  Unanswered questions involve basic issues such as the motivation and purpose of the program.  Why did the Soviet Union pursue the development and acquisition of biological weapons?  Who was to be targeted by Soviet biological weapons – the US?  China?  Europe? – and under what conceivable circumstances?  And what happens now?

Following a brief period during the Yeltsin years during which Russian officials acknowledged this activity, “Russia’s current official position is that no offensive BW program had existed in the Soviet Union.”

*    *    *

The History of the Soviet Biological Weapons Program was reviewed by author David E. Hoffman in Foreign Policy last month.

In 2010 the US Government signed an agreement with the former Soviet Republic of Armenia to cooperate in the control or destruction of dangerous pathogens, and in other efforts to prevent proliferation of biological weapons.  The agreement, one of several such documents, was published earlier this year.

New and updated reports from the Congressional Research Service that have not been made readily available to the public include the following.

Defense: FY2013 Authorization and Appropriations, July 13, 2012

The Unified Command Plan and Combatant Commands: Background and Issues for Congress, July 17, 2012

LIBOR: Frequently Asked Questions, July 16, 2012

The 2001 and 2003 Bush Tax Cuts and Deficit Reduction, July 16, 2012

Guatemala: Political, Security, and Socio-Economic Conditions and U.S. Relations, June 26, 2012

The recent controversy over publication of scientific papers concerning the transmissibility of bird flu virus was reviewed in a new report by the Congressional Research Service. The report cautiously elucidates the relevant policy implications and considers the responses available to Congress.

“Because of the complexity of dual-use issues, analysis of a topic according to one set of policy priorities may lead to unforeseen complications due to its intersection with other policy priorities,” the report says. “For example, maximizing security may lead to detriments in public health and scientific advancement, while maximizing scientific advancement may lead to security risks.”

See Publishing Scientific Papers with Potential Security Risks: Issues for Congress, July 12, 2012.

Among the latest Congressional Research Service reports that have not been made readily available to the public are the following.

China, Internet Freedom, and U.S. Policy, July 13, 2012

Department of Defense Implementation of the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative: Implications for Federal Information Technology Reform Management, July 12, 2012

Confirmation of U.S. Circuit and District Court Nominations in Presidential Election Years, July 12, 2012

Congressional Liaison Offices of Selected Federal Agencies, July 12, 2012

Hydraulic Fracturing and Safe Drinking Water Act Issues, July 12, 2012

An Analysis of Charitable Giving and Donor Advised Funds, July 11, 2012

The Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP) is preparing to provide improved public notification of its declassification and disclosure decisions.

The ISCAP, among its other duties, considers and rules on appeals from the public to declassify records that agencies have refused to release.  The Panel, which was established by executive order in 1995, has actually succeeded beyond all reasonable expectations, declassifying information in the majority of cases presented to it.  (My own requests were not among those that were decided in favor of disclosure.)  According to the latest annual report from the Information Security Oversight Office:

“Since May 1996, the Panel decided upon a total of 1,195 documents. Of these, the Panel declassified additional information in 64 percent of the documents. Specifically, 291 documents (24 percent) were declassified in their entirety and 477 documents (40 percent) had some portions declassified while the classification of other portions was affirmed. During this time frame, the Panel fully affirmed the classification decisions of agencies in 427 documents (36 percent).”

Last week, the ISCAP issued revised bylaws, including a new section on “dissemination of ISCAP decisions” (sec. 2003.14).

This section corresponds to the so-called “fourth function” assigned to ISCAP by President Obama’s executive order 13526 that required the Panel to “appropriately inform senior agency officials and the public of final Panel decisions….”  That provision did not exist in previous Administrations’ executive orders, which listed only three functions for the ISCAP.

Another revised provision of the bylaws puts the ISCAP at the President’s disposal to carry out other unspecified advisory functions, as needed.  In language oddly reminiscent of the 1947 National Security Act section that was understood to authorize CIA covert action (by which the Agency is “to perform such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct”), the ISCAP bylaws (sec. 2003.15) state somewhat evasively:

“As directed by the President through the National Security Advisor, the ISCAP performs such additional advisory functions as are consistent with, and supportive of, the successful implementation of the Order.”

Newly updated reports of the Congressional Research Service that have not been made readily available to the public include the following.

Armed Conflict in Syria: U.S. and International Response, July 12, 2012

Afghanistan Casualties: Military Forces and Civilians, July 12, 2012

Trade Adjustment Assistance for Workers, July 11, 2012

Burma’s Political Prisoners and U.S. Sanctions, July 5, 2012

The Due Process Guarantee Act (S. 2003) is a bill that was introduced last year by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and colleagues to explicitly prohibit the indefinite detention without trial of United States citizens who are apprehended within the United States on suspicion of terrorism.

The bill was crafted due to a residual ambiguity in last year’s defense authorization act that seemed to leave it an open question as to whether Americans could be so detained or not.

The Due Process Guarantee Act has not progressed to a vote in the House or the Senate.  But the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on it last February 29.  The full record of that hearing has recently been published.

The full hearing volume presents some new material including answers to questions for the record provided by Steven Bradbury, the former head of the Bush Administration Office of Legal Counsel.  It also includes a flinty exchange of letters between Mr. Bradbury and Sen. Al Franken, who said that Mr. Bradbury was unsuited to be be a witness before the Committee because of his “contemptible” legal advice regarding enhanced interrogation during the Bush years.

Further background related to the subject matter of the hearing can be found in Detention of U.S. Persons as Enemy Belligerents by Jennifer K. Elsea of the Congressional Research Service.

“Language and cultural competency” is the theme of the latest edition of the U.S. Army’s Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin.

Topics addressed include cultural relativism, ethnography, “patron-client relations,” the stand-up of AFRICOM (US Africa Command) from an African perspective, and “operational culture training for the French military in Africa.”

The Army does not make the Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin routinely available to the public.  But upon request, the latest issue was released under the Freedom of Information Act.