U.S. military commanders “are responsible for the maintenance of the health of their commands to ensure mission accomplishment in the event of CBRN [chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear] attacks,” a new Army Field Manual advises, while noting that “medical planners can expect, as a minimum, 10 to 20 percent casualties within a division-sized force that has experienced a nuclear strike.”  See “Multiservice Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures for Health Service Support in a Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear Environment” (pdf), U.S. Army Field Manual 4-02.7, July 2009.

Among those countries that are “known to possess” nuclear weapons, the new Field Manual lists Israel (at page I-4), although neither Israel nor the United States formally acknowledge such possession.  This is the second time in ten months that a Pentagon publication has cited Israel as a nuclear weapons state, observed Amir Oren in Haaretz on September 13.  A similar reference appeared in the 2008 Joint Operational Environment study.  (“Israel as a Nuclear Power,” Secrecy News, March 17, 2009).

Iranian scientists have published a prodigious amount of research in nuclear science and technology in the open literature.  A bibliography of such publications is available in a newly updated 195-page compilation (pdf) prepared by Mark Gorwitz.

The Congressional Research Service has prepared an updated summary report on “U.S. Arms Sales to Pakistan,” with background on recent weapons transactions and their rationale.

If one were searching for an individual to represent the public interest in promoting declassification of government records, the first name that came to mind would probably not be Michael V. Hayden, the former director of the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency.  But improbable as it may seem, he is the latest appointee to the Public Interest Declassification Board (PIDB), an official body that advises the President on declassification policies, priorities and potential reforms.

General Hayden’s appointment to the PIDB by Senate Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) was revealed in the September 8 Congressional Record.

A professional background in national security matters is of course not a disqualification for participation in classification policy debates (and several former intelligence community officials are already represented on the nine-member PIDB).  In fact, such professionals often possess an unusually clear understanding of the specific failings of the classification system and of the urgency of correcting it.  Few if any outside critics have developed a more severe critique of the classification system than J. William Leonard, for example, the former director of the Information Security Oversight Office, who has called for a ninety percent reduction in classification activity.

But General Hayden is not well known as a classification critic or a proponent of declassification.  As NSA and CIA Director he was integral to the practice of classification in its latest and most decadent phase.  When the late Senator Daniel P. Moynihan conceived of a Public Interest Declassification Board a decade ago, he would not have imagined that the national security classification system might be employed by a present-day U.S. Administration to help circumvent laws against warrantless surveillance or torture.  And yet here we are.

In fairness, Gen. Hayden has not been blind to classification abuse.  “I do think we overclassify,” he told Sen. Ron Wyden at his May 18, 2006 confirmation hearing, “and I think it’s because we’ve got bad habits.”  (They are depraved, so we are deprived.)

And in a June 2007 speech to the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, Gen. Hayden celebrated CIA’s declassification activities.  “In our robust democracy, people want and deserve to know more about the government agencies they pay for and that exist to serve them, even the secret ones. We work for and serve the interests of the American people. When the protection of information is no longer required, we owe it to our fellow citizens to disclose that information,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Public Interest Declassification Board that General Hayden will now join is poised to play an increasingly significant role.  In a September 2 letter (pdf) to Patrice McDermott of Openthegovernment.org, National Security Advisor Gen. James L. Jones said that he intended to task the Board to help develop a substantially new classification system, once the more limited changes to the current executive order on classification are finalized.

“As soon as we complete our revision of the existing Order, I plan to begin discussions with the Board about a more fundamental transformation of the security classification system,” Gen. Jones wrote.

The “qui tam” statutes (such as the False Claims Act) that enable members of the public to file lawsuits on behalf of the government and to seek financial penalties have been “reviled… as a breeding ground for viperous vermin and parasites,” observes a new report from the Congressional Research Service.  But they have also been a uniquely effective instrument for combating fraudulent activity.  See “Qui Tam: The False Claims Act and Related Federal Statutes,” August 6, 2009, and “Qui Tam: An Abbreviated Look at the False Claims Act and Related Federal Statutes,” August 6, 2009.

Other noteworthy new CRS reports obtained by Secrecy News include the following (all pdf).

“Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations, 2001-2008,” September 4, 2009 (first reported by the New York Times on September 7).

“North Korea: Economic Leverage and Policy Analysis,” August 14, 2009.

“‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’: A Legal Analysis,” September 2, 2009 (first reported by the Associated Press on September 9).

“U.S. Tree Planting for Carbon Sequestration,” May 4, 2009.

“Carbon Sequestration in Forests,” August 6, 2009.

“Iran’s Nuclear Program: Status,” August 11, 2009.

The vast apparatus of government secrecy persisted through the last year with only limited changes in the contours of its multi-billion dollar operations, according to the latest “secrecy report card” published by Openthegovernment.org, a coalition of organizations working for increased transparency.

The new report card (pdf), prepared by Patrice McDermott and Amy Fuller Bennett, compiles all available indicators, from classification activity (which declined somewhat in 2008) to declassification activity (also down) to FOIA processing to assertions of executive privilege, in order to provide an empirical, not simply rhetorical, picture of government secrecy as it exists today.  Ideally, such data can be used to inform efforts to revise and correct secrecy policies.

(Interestingly, the Director of National Intelligence has taken steps to frustrate exactly this kind of empirical account of secrecy.  Beginning in 2006, the DNI ordered that DoD intelligence agencies would no longer publicly disclose the amounts of money they spent on classification or declassification-related activities.  Although such previously public information has no plausible bearing on the protection of national security or of intelligence sources and methods, the DNI said that it would henceforth be classified– thereby providing a neat illustration of the underlying problem.)

Judging from its first few months, “The Obama administration so far has a very mixed record on its promise of unprecedented openness,” said Patrice McDermott, director of Openthegovernment.org.  “We look forward to working with the Administration toward meeting this goal, and will continue to work to make sure the public has the information it needs to hold this Administration accountable.”

The new report card was prepared before the announcement last week that White House visitor logs would be publicly released, in response to a lawsuit filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.  That step is “historic” and “groundbreaking,” the White House said.  It is “a major step into the sunlight,” the New York Times enthused in an editorial today, and puts the Obama Administration “well on course to be the most open in modern times.”

From our perspective, this seems like a considerable overstatement that mistakes the formalities of openness for the substance.  Laboriously prepared lists of names of visitors to the White House complex provide minimal insight into the policy process.  (Nevermind that a meeting at Caribou Coffee across the street can easily circumvent the new disclosure arrangement.)  A physical visit to the White House is simply not an essential part of the policy process.  If the Bush Administration had not fought so stubbornly to withhold such information, its release would be even less significant.

Given the choice, we would forgo the monthly lists of thousands of names in favor of routine publication of Presidential Policy Directives and Presidential Study Directives, which are fundamental policy documents that do not appear on the Obama White House web site even when they are unclassified.

Despite isolated exceptions, current attempts to steer secrecy policy in a new direction have not yet succeeded — or failed.  The bumpy road to secrecy reform was surveyed most recently in “How to Keep Secrets: Obama Tries to Get Classification Right” by Clint Hendler in the Columbia Journalism Review, September 2, 2009.

Pakistan was ready to test a nuclear weapon just six years after it first began to enrich uranium, according to A.Q. Khan, the architect of the Pakistani nuclear program and an infamous proliferator of nuclear weapons designs and technology.

“It was 6 April 1978 when we achieved our first centrifugal enrichment of uranium,” Khan recalled in a chatty, wide-ranging interview with Pakistani television (pdf) last week. “We had achieved 90 percent [enrichment] by early 1983.”

“I wrote a letter to General Zia on 10 December 1984, telling him that the weapon was ready and that we could detonate it on a notice of one week,” Khan said.

In addition to a timeline for the Pakistani nuclear weapons program, the Khan interview discusses the costs and logistics involved, and his successful efforts to evade export controls.  “They could not outmaneuver us, as we remained a step ahead always,” he said.

The interview also provides “interesting information about Pakistan’s supply chains, which he says were the same for Iran and Libya as well,” said Ivanka Barzashka, an FAS researcher who is studying the proliferation of centrifuge technology.

The interview with A.Q. Khan, who was recently released from house arrest, was broadcast in Karachi on August 31.  It was helpfully translated from the Urdu by the DNI Open Source Center.  The translated interview has not been publicly released, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan Discusses Nuclear Program in TV Talk Show,” Aaj News Television, August 31, 2009.

Ordinarily, decisions about granting security clearances and determining whether an individual has a “need to know” certain classified information are made by the executive branch.  But a federal judge recently ruled that a court can also make such determinations and can require the disclosure of classified information to a cleared individual even against the wishes of the executive branch.

In an electrifying decision on August 26 (pdf) in the case of Richard A. Horn v. Franklin Huddle, Jr., Judge Royce Lamberth concluded that the parties in that lawsuit need to discuss the classified information they possess with their counsel.  Judge Lamberth therefore ruled — against the government — that counsel in this case have a “need to know” and that they may have access to the classified information that their clients already possess.

“The deference generally granted the Executive Branch in matters of classification and national security must yield when the Executive attempts to exert control over the courtroom,” Judge Lamberth wrote.

That ruling drew an immediate protest.  “The Government respectfully disputes that conclusion as well as the Court’s authority to reach it,” Justice Department attorneys responded on September 2 (pdf), requesting a stay of Judge Lamberth’s order pending appeal.

“The Court is without authority to make a ‘need to know’ determination in this context,” the Justice Department said.  “A court may not order the Executive to grant private counsel or any other person access to classified information.”

At issue are basic questions over the exclusivity of executive branch control of classification information and the court’s ability to regulate its own judicial proceedings.  Those questions are likely to be presented to an appeals court in the near future.

The government’s motion for a stay was naturally opposed both by the plaintiff and the defendants.  “The position that the United States has unfettered discretion to decide who is entitled to receive classified information leaves no role whatsoever for the judiciary in accommodating the interests of litigants and ensuring against abuse of discretion,” wrote attorneys (pdf) for one of the defendants.

There are more Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan today than there are uniformed U.S. military personnel, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service.  Not only that, the ratio of contractors to troops in Afghanistan is higher than in any prior military engagement in U.S. history.

“As of March 2009, there were 68,197 DOD contractors in Afghanistan, compared to 52,300 uniformed personnel. Contractors made up 57% of DOD’s workforce in Afghanistan. This apparently represented the highest recorded percentage of contractors used by DOD in any conflict in the history of the United States,” the CRS report (pdf) said.  A copy of the report was obtained by Secrecy News.

At a time when the deployment of U.S. forces in Afghanistan may be increased (or reduced), the CRS report casts a detailed and fairly nuanced spotlight on the role of defense contractors there.  The report notes, for example, that more than 75% of the DoD contractor personnel in Afghanistan are local nationals.  Only about 15% are U.S. citizens.

Contractors provide essential logistical, translation and other services, while offering increased flexibility.  But they also pose management challenges in monitoring performance and preventing fraud.  In the worst cases, “abuses and crimes committed by armed private security contractors and interrogators against local nationals may have undermined U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the CRS report noted.  See “Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan: Background and Analysis,” August 13, 2009.

Some other new reports from the Congressional Research Service that have not previously been posted online include the following (all pdf).

“United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan: Background and Policy Issues,” July 30, 2009.

“Detection of Nuclear Weapons and Materials: Science, Technologies, Observations,” August 4, 2009.

“The Global Economic Crisis: Impact on Sub-Saharan Africa and Global Policy Responses,” August 25, 2009.

“Filling U.S. Senate Vacancies: Perspectives and Contemporary Developments,” August 21, 2009.

“‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell:’ The Law and Military Policy on Same-Sex Behavior,” August 14, 2009.

“Competition in Federal Contracting: An Overview of the Legal Requirements,” August 20, 2009.

“Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Global Health Programs: FY2001-FY2010,” August 21, 2009.

“The Unified Agenda: Implications for Rulemaking Transparency and Participation,” July 20, 2009.

Robert Steele, the longtime proponent of a robust open source intelligence program, has a new web site which notably includes an archive of intelligence-policy related documents, several of which I had missed.  The collection is accompanied by his own occasionally tart commentary.

The Open Society Institute (which supports the FAS Project on Government Secrecy) announces that it will host a Constitution Day event on September 15 in New York City featuring Daniel Ellsberg and John Dean who will discuss “the dangers of excessive government secrecy and the critical role played by whistleblowers in maintaining democratic values.”

The U.S. Intelligence Community is still pondering its role in cybersecurity and the potential need for new legal authorities, DNI Dennis C. Blair told Congress in May.  “We have more work to do in the Executive Branch before I can give you a good answer,” he wrote in a newly released letter (pdf) to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Two 90-day interagency reviews of government secrecy policies that were ordered by President Obama on May 27 are now essentially complete.

A review of the current executive order on classification policy is finished except for a few “sticky” issues pertaining to intelligence agency authorities, according to one participant in the interagency process.  The recommendations of that review have not yet been transmitted to the White House.  A separate review of procedures for handling “controlled unclassified information” (CUI) produced recommendations that were sent to the White House last week, though the contents have not been disclosed.

Both reviews were the subject of considerable public comment, and the resulting recommendations include at least some proposed changes that are directly traceable to public input, the participant said.  But he also cautioned against overly high expectations for the outcome, especially given the insular character of the deliberative process, which was dominated by agency classification personnel.  “You’ve got a bunch of foxes designing security for the henhouse,” he said.

The recommendations that were produced by the interagency reviews must still be reviewed by the White House and then approved or modified, a process that could take months.  A decision on whether to invite additional public comment has not yet been announced.

Open source intelligence products, which are based on information gathered in the public domain, are often withheld from public disclosure, for various reasons.  These include habit, the cultivation of the mystique of secret intelligence, the protection of copyrighted information, and the preservation of “decision advantage,” i.e. the policy-relevant insight that open source intelligence at its best may offer.

Even when it can be justified, however, such secrecy comes at a price.  By restricting the distribution of unclassified intelligence products, government agencies also limit the opportunities for the discovery and correction of erroneous information or analysis.  Conversely, expanding access to such materials may be expected to yield an improved product.

So, for example, Secrecy News recently published a previously undisclosed Open Source Center report on Bolivia’s Islamic community (pdf).  It had not been approved for public release.  Sure enough, once the report became public knowledge, it became possible to identify mistaken information that had been inadvertently disseminated by the Open Source Center throughout the U.S. government.

The report had listed the Association of the Islamic Community of Bolivia as a Shia organization (at page 11).  That was incorrect.  “La Asociacion de la comunidad Islamica de Bolivia… es una comunidad SUNNITA,” wrote Ahmad Ali Cuttipa Trigo, a representative of the group, in a courteous but emphatic email message from La Paz.  “Quisieramos que enmienden ese error de taipeo.”

In fact, mistaking a Sunni community for a Shia one is more than a typographical error.  It is the kind of thing that under some circumstances could lead a reader to draw significant unwarranted inferences.  And so fixing it is a service to everyone concerned.

From this perspective, the unauthorized publication of such materials may also perhaps be seen as a contribution to the open source intelligence enterprise.

“Japan is a media-saturated nation where the level of consumption of both newspapers and television is extremely high by global standards,” according to a new assessment from the DNI Open Source Center (OSC).  “Furthermore, the news media have the deep trust of the people…. More Japanese adults trust journalism than trust any other institution [including] schools, the police, or religious institutions.”

The 67-page OSC report (pdf) describes the peculiar Japanese media landscape, with profiles of major media categories as well as individual news organizations. It also presents numerous curious observations regarding Japanese production and consumption of news and information.  For example:

“Surveys report that over half of adults in Japan read news content on their cell phones.”

Many posters on online Japanese bulletin boards “use nonstandard Japanese, making their comments difficult to read for the uninitiated.  For example, Chinese characters are often intentionally misused, and keyboard symbols and other special characters are put together to form nonstandard ‘compounds’ that make sense only to insiders.”

“A stable group of prominent bloggers who consistently help shape mainstream dialogue on key issues of policy has yet to emerge in Japan.”  In 2007, however, Japanese was the world’s top blogging language, accounting for 37% of all blog entries posted on the Internet.

“Weekly magazines are notorious in Japan for their loose editorial standards, airing rumor, half-truths, and outright falsehoods with little vetting of the information.”

“Compared to three decades ago, there are many more opinion magazines that express right-wing views about history and security…. This fact tends to amplify right-wing voices beyond their actual influence and crowd out countervailing opinions from the political center and left.”

The OSC report on Japanese media has not been approved for public release, but a copy was obtained by Secrecy News.  See “Japan — Media Environment Open; State Looms Large,” Open Source Center, August 18, 2009.