“When… dealing with multiple targets, such as two hostage-takers, [snipers] must coordinate to fire simultaneously,” according to a U.S. Army sniper training manual.  “Taking [the targets] out one at a time may allow the second suspect time to harm the hostages.”

This was the scenario facing Navy SEALs on the Indian Ocean on April 12.  They fired simultaneously at three Somali pirates, killing them and rescuing an American hostage.

“Shooting simultaneously by command fire with another sniper is a very important skill to develop and requires much practice,” the Army manual advises.

A copy of the U.S. Army Special Forces Sniper Training and Employment manual (FM 3-05.222) was obtained by Secrecy News.  Although the document is unclassified, it is subject to restricted distribution in order “to protect technical or operational information.”

For once, such restrictions appear to make sense and the 474-page manual will not be posted on the Federation of American Scientists website.  But as always, views on the question of disclosure differ.  A 2003 discussion on the “Shooter’s Forum” website presented contrasting opinions on the desirability of publishing this Manual.

Update (04/15/09): As noted at Cryptome.org today, the document has been made available online elsewhere.

“There seems to be no international architecture capable of coping with and preventing global [financial] crises from erupting,” a newly updated report (pdf) from the Congressional Research Service observes.

“The financial space above nations basically is anarchic with no supranational authority with firm oversight, regulatory, and enforcement powers. There are international norms and guidelines, but most are voluntary, and countries are slow to incorporate them into domestic law. As such, the system operates largely on trust and confidence and by hedging financial bets.”

The 109-page CRS report reviews the origins of the current crisis and summarizes its impact in different regions and countries.  The report has not been made readily available to the public, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “The Global Financial Crisis: Analysis and Policy Implications,” April 3, 2009.

The Director of National Intelligence last week named Roslyn A. Mazer of the Department of Justice to be the next Inspector General of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

What makes this an intriguing appointment is that from 1996 to 2000 Ms. Mazer was the first chair of the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel (ISCAP), which is among the most successful classification reform initiatives of the last half century.  At a time when agency Inspectors General may be asked to assume greater oversight over classification policy, she brings an exceptional depth of knowledge and experience to the subject.

One of the ISCAP’s functions is to consider appeals from public requesters for release of information that executive agencies have withheld as classified.  Under Ms. Mazer’s leadership from 1996 to 2000, the ISCAP declassified information in an astounding 80% of the documents that were presented for its review.

In fact, Ms. Mazer’s ISCAP was so successful in overturning spurious classification claims that the Central Intelligence Agency begged for relief from ISCAP jurisdiction.  The CIA plea was rejected in a 1999 Office of Legal Counsel decision.  But in his 2003 executive order on classification (sect. 5.3f), President Bush granted the CIA a veto over ISCAP declassification rulings.

In a 1998 speech to a conference of intelligence agency classification officials, Ms. Mazer criticized what she termed “the Lewis Carroll element of classification policy” which leads to “keeping classified categories of information that everyone already knows.”

During the Cold War, “closed regimes found themselves hopelessly and fatally outpaced by open societies, and ultimately collapsed from exhaustion,” she reminded the assembled intelligence officials. “This is the reason why our democracy endures, why we live under the oldest living constitutional democracy, and why we cannot export democracy like bananas to formerly closed societies.”

“We prevailed over those societies because of our passion for openness, for trusting our citizens more than we empower our leaders. We celebrate our openness. In fact, it is unnecessary secrecy that is timid and cowardly. Openness is courageous. Be courageous. Be as open as you responsibly can,” Ms. Mazer urged.

Ms. Mazer will succeed Edward Maguire, the outgoing ODNI Inspector General who presented his own critique of the ODNI in testimony before a hearing (pdf) of Rep. Anna Eshoo’s House Intelligence subcommittee last week (“IG Report Blasts the Director of National Intelligence,” Secrecy News, April 2, 2009).

“Tactics in Counterinsurgency” (large pdf), a new Army Field Manual that was published on the website of the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and then removed from public access, is now available on the FAS website.

The new manual, a substantial addition to the literature of counterinsurgency, was reported last week in the Washington Post and Inside the Army.  “After The Post raised questions about its contents last week,” wrote Walter Pincus of the Post on March 31, “it was taken down” from the Army website, even though the document is marked for unrestricted release.

An email inquiry to the Army inquiring why it had been removed was not answered.

See “Tactics in Counterinsurgency,” U.S. Army Field Manual Interim 3-24.2, March 2009 (6.2 MB PDF, 307 pages).

“Setbacks are normal in counterinsurgency, as in every other form of war,” the new manual advises (p. C-5).  “You will make mistakes, lose people, or occasionally kill or detain the wrong person….  If this happens, don’t lose heart, simply drop back to the previous phase of your game plan and recover your balance.”

The curious refusal of the Central Intelligence Agency to provide online access to its “CREST” database of declassified documents was examined last week in Mother Jones magazine.

“In a quiet, fluorescently lit room in the National Archives’ auxiliary campus in suburban College Park, Maryland, 10 miles outside of Washington, are four computer terminals, each providing instant access to the more than 10 million pages of documents the CIA has declassified since 1995. There’s only one problem: these are the only publicly available computers in the world that do so.”

See “Inside the CIA’s (Sort of) Secret Document Stash” by Bruce Falconer, Mother Jones, April 3.

A mostly favorable review of the CREST database was provided by historians David M. Barrett and Raymond Wasko in “Sampling CIA’s New Document Retrieval System: McCone’s Telephone Conversations during the Six Crises Tempest,” Intelligence and National Security, vol. 20, no. 2, June 2005, pp. 332-340 (not online).

By denying online public access to the CREST database, the Central Intelligence Agency appears to be at odds with the President’s executive order on classification.  That order states (EO 13292, section 3.7):  “The Director of the Information Security Oversight Office, in conjunction with those agencies that originate classified information, shall coordinate the linkage and effective utilization of existing agency databases of records that have been declassified and publicly released.”

But by refusing to place the CREST database online (or to release it to others who will do so), the CIA is undermining the “effective utilization” of this existing agency database.

The Director of National Intelligence has failed to exercise adequate leadership of the Intelligence Community (IC), which continues to suffer from poor integration, unjustified barriers to information sharing, and other defects, according to a remarkably critical November 2008 report of the ODNI Inspector General (pdf) that was released yesterday.

Even within the Office of the DNI, there is “declining employee confidence in ODNI leadership,” wrote Inspector General Edward Maguire.  He cited a survey which found that the number of ODNI employees reporting a “high level of respect for ODNI senior leaders” declined 10% from 2006 to 2007.

Among numerous other problem areas, the IG said that “The risk of waste and abuse has increased with a surge in government spending and a growing trend toward establishing large, complex contracts to support mission requirements throughout the IC; yet many procurements receive limited oversight because they fall below the threshold for mandatory oversight.”

The Inspector General did not address problems of overclassification in intelligence, but did call for greater efforts to combat leaks:

“The DNI should team with DoJ to develop more effective approaches to stopping the proliferation of unauthorized disclosures of classified information.  Some of these unauthorized disclosures have been extremely harmful to conducting intelligence operations and protecting sources and methods.”

The IG report also did not address continuing questions about the Intelligence Community’s compliance with the law in its surveillance and interrogation activities, but observed that “Legal issues and confusion about what the law actually requires can pose some of the greatest impediments to the IG’s national security mission.”

The Department of Energy this week released its most recent compilation of all decisions to declassify nuclear weapons-related information.

The new release (pdf), dated 2002, is the eighth and the last in what had been an annual series of such compilations.  Unlike the others, however, it was marked “Official Use Only” and was not made publicly available.  But DoE released it in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from the Federation of American Scientists.

See “Restricted Data Declassification Decisions, 1946 to the Present (RDD-8),” U.S. Department of Energy, January 1, 2002, 169 pages.

One of the latest declassification decisions, approved in 2001 and disclosed in the new compilation, acknowledges the previously classified “fact that gas centrifuge rotors are fabricated on mandrels.”  A mandrel is a spindle or metal shaft around which other parts rotate.

Noteworthy new documents on military doctrine of one sort or another include the following (all pdf).

The participation of U.S. armed forces in humanitarian assistance operations abroad is governed by “Foreign Humanitarian Assistance,” Joint Publication 3-29, 17 March 2009, 223 pages.

Almost every function or task performed by the U.S. Army is captured and organized hierarchically in “The Army Universal Task List,” Field Manual (FM) 7-15, February 2009, 480 pages.

The safe and secure operation of U.S. Army nuclear reactors is prescribed in “Army Reactor Program,” Army Regulation 50-7, March 28, 2009, 35 pages.

Last month, Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana announced the adoption of what it calls a “100 percent shred policy for all paperwork and materials generated on base” as a way of eliminating unauthorized disclosures.

“Shredding is vital to the overall security of our base and our mission,” said Eileen Gallagher, 341st Communications Squadron Base Records Manager.  See “Getting into the habit: 100 percent shred policy begins March 17,” Malmstrom AFB, March 10, 2009.

As authority for the new shredding policy, the Air Force cited a March 2008 directive on Operations Security (pdf), which does indeed specify a “100% Shred Policy” (at section 1.4.18.2):

“Whenever feasible, all unclassified paper products across AFSPC [Air Force Space Command], except for newspapers and magazines, will be shredded prior to disposal or removal from the workplace for recycling, preventing our adversaries from exploiting the enormous amounts of crucial information we generate while accomplishing our various mission areas.”

On close inspection, however, the words “prior to disposal” seem to be crucial.  The 100% shred policy apparently applies only to records that have been specifically approved for disposal, and not literally to “all paperwork and materials generated on base.”  Air Force Manual 33-363 on “Management of Records” (pdf) directs all Air Force employees to adhere to legal requirements on preservation of official records.

When Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act last year, it enacted a requirement that the Inspectors General of agencies that participated in the Bush Administration’s warrantless surveillance program must prepare a comprehensive review of that program, which was conducted from 2001 to 2007 outside of the FISA legal framework that normally regulates intelligence surveillance.

The final report of the Inspectors General, due in July 2009, is supposed to address “all of the facts necessary to describe the establishment, implementation, product, and use of the product of the Program,” among other things.  It “will include both unclassified and classified volumes.”

An interim report, completed last fall, has just been released.  The three-page letter report does not present any new findings, but rather lays out the scope of the ongoing review and the division of labor among five agency Inspectors General.

The subject matter of the review ranges widely from legal assessments of the Program (DoJ) to its technical operation (NSA) to communications with private-sector entities concerning the Program (ODNI) to the involvement of the Office of the Secretary of Defense (DoD) and the threat assessments supporting reauthorization of the Program (CIA).

Furthermore, “Each of the IG teams will be alert to other matters … that should be examined as part of a comprehensive review of the Program,” the interim report states.

The newly disclosed interim report was originally submitted to Congress in classified form last September.  An unclassified version of the report (which entailed the removal of one sentence) was prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee in November.  But the unclassified report, dated November 24, 2008, was only approved for public release this week, in response to a request from Secrecy News.

The structure and operation of China’s growing news media sector were examined by the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Open Source Center in two previously unpublished reports.

“Sweeping social and economic changes triggered by more than two decades of reform in China have led to equally sweeping changes in China’s vast, state-controlled media environment, particularly in the quantity and diversity of media sources and the development of the Internet,” according to a 2007 OSC survey (pdf).

At the same time, however, “all pertinent information continues to be filtered through party censors to ensure that it is consistent with official policy. The party exercises especially tight control over the core mainstream media which deliver domestic and international news along with politically sensitive information.”  See “PRC Media Guide,” Open Source Center, March 21, 2007.

The state organs that supervise and regulate Chinese media were discussed recently in “PRC State Council Websites Overseeing Media,” OSC Media Aid, March 17, 2009.

Like most other OSC products, these reports have not been approved for public release.  Copies were obtained by Secrecy News.

The Military Intelligence Professional Bulletin (MIPB), a U.S. Army journal devoted to intelligence policy and practice, has been removed from online public access and transferred behind a password-protected Army portal.

The former MIPB website states that “The MIPB is now being hosted on the Intelligence Knowledge Network (IKN). (AKO account required).”  AKO (Army Knowledge Online) accounts can only be obtained by military and contractor personnel.

The MIPB, which is unclassified, has long been available on the world wide web and has even been sold commercially. Back issues from 1995 to 2005 are available online from the FAS website, though no longer from the Army.

In an attempt to reverse the removal of the latest MIPB issues from the public domain, the Federation of American Scientists today filed a Freedom of Information Act request (pdf) with the Army seeking release of the now-sequestered publication.

“Our intention is to restore public access to the MIPB by posting recent issues on the website of the Federation of American Scientists.  Alternatively, we request that you post them on an Army or Army-affiliated web site that is publicly accessible.”