“I have nothing against him other than his illegal activities.”
-Aug. 23, 1986, e-mail message about Manuel Noriega from National Security Adviser John Poindexter to Oliver North.
Tom Blanton is proof that in the capital it no longer pays to suck up merely to your boss, White House officials or twentysomething producers of public affairs TV shows.
No, you better play nice with the nerd running the backup tapes to the office computer system–especially if you send a lot of e-mail.
Blanton is executive director of the non-profit National Security Archive, whose purpose is to get you, the citizen, access to government records bearing on matters of national security. Your government tends to resist.
Founded in 1985 by Wheaton, Ill., native Scott Armstrong, the archive has used the Freedom of Information Act, court cases, whistle-blowers’ disclosures, and records dug up by others’ investigations to get 250,000 pages of former secrets on such matters as slimy U.S. involvement and human rights abuses in El Salvador, the Iran-contra affair (it published the authoritative chronology), the Cuban missile crisis, the Berlin crisis of 1961, Iraq-gate and U.S. relations with South Africa’s apartheid regime.
What may be its most intriguing effort involves trying to pry loose e-mail from the Reagan, Bush and Clinton administrations. In the process, Blanton’s small band of 15 full-time and 10 half-time (mostly student) colleagues is underscoring the potency and dubious confidentiality of an increasingly relied-on way of communicating throughout society.
“As usual, Miller, you are incredibly screwed up. I believe you may fall into the category we Marines refer to as `untrainable.’ “– Sept. 22, 1986 Oliver North e-mail to Johnathan Miller, manager of President Ronald Reagan’s foreign travel.
Fess up, now. Are you sending torrents of e-mail to colleagues, acquaintances, summer camp chums and catalog houses?
When you’ve purged and seemingly deleted an e-mail message, there likely remains a copy somewhere.
Eddie Becker, a colleague of Armstrong’s and Blanton’s, initially stumbled on the fact that in the waning hours of the Reagan administration, the National Archives & Records Administration planned to destroy millions of White House messages found on e-mail tapes and hard drives and placed in its possession.
Armstrong called the president’s lawyer, who was a friend, and expressed outrage. Staying up all night, Armstrong and pro bono lawyers prepared to run into court only hours before the destruction deadline, Jan. 20, inauguration day for George Bush.
If there was doubt they were touching a nerve, it was dispelled when the acting attorney general showed up to argue the government’s rather preposterous position: that such records were akin to pictures on walls that new White House occupants could replace. The judge didn’t buy it.
“I have watched Alan Dixon up close on the Armed Services Committee, and he is loyal senator who faithfully and aggressively represents the interests of his constituents–without regard for the facts, the U.S. government or the American people in general. It is not by accident that he is regarded by some of the staff as the Prince of Pork.”
–Mar. 26, 1986, e-mail from National Security staffer Michael Donley.
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Four more years of legal dueling took place, as the Bush administration resisted disclosure. As the Bushies prepared to exit in January 1993 a federal judge said e-mail had to be considered like any other government record.
Alas, just as Bill Clinton was to be inaugurated, it was learned that President Bush had cut a deal with the archivist of the United States, putting all e-mail under Bush’s personal control. When that suspect accord surfaced, the archivist, Don Wilson, quit–and took a job as head of the George Bush Presidential Library to be built at Texas A&M University.
While Blanton’s operation has largely won in court on key issues of whether electronic information constitutes records (yes) and if the government must process those records (yes), the Clinton administration has continued its predecessors’ fight on release of documents. The reflexive government desire to hide work is more powerful than political ideology.
In particular, the Clintonites, who talk the talk on a more open government, have by presidential decree made the National Security Council no longer an “agency” of government.
The purpose is to place as many purportedly national security records out of the range of the Freedom of Information Act. Instead, they’d be covered by the Presidential Records Act, leaving them hidden for five to 12 years after a president leaves office (meaning the Bush stuff would not be available for two more years).
An irony is that National Security Adviser Anthony Lake is a former board member of the National Security Archive, which has received needed funding from the Ford and Chicago-based MacArthur Foundations, among others. Armstrong met him at a party recently, with Lake grousing about the allegedly constraining effect of all the litigation.
He pulled a small note pad out of his jacket pocket, Armstrong said, and displayed seven handwritten lines of three words each. Those were his notes of a lengthy meeting that day with Clinton. He received scant sympathy from Armstrong.
The good news is that the efforts of Blanton’s group saved 1,055 computer tapes from the Reagan White House, 4,852 computer tapes from the Bush White House and 135 computer hard drives from the Bush National Security Council staff.
The bad news is that there’s a lot of procedural rigamarole and litigation to play out before the vast majority of the millions of words go public (even then largely through exhausting Freedom of Information Act requests).
And litigation continues on other issues, including whether the National Archives can release printouts of only some National Security Council e-mail, not an electronic version of all.
If the government won, we might get a printout, say, of a memo from Honcho A to Honcho B on North Korea policy but not Honcho B’s response that such an idea was nuts. The first would be considered a government record, the second not. If Blanton won, we’d have electronic copies of the memo and the response.
Blanton does not deny there are valid security and privacy reasons to keep some things under wraps. But too often government cites security and privacy to avoid accountability.
His advice to government e-mail users: “It’s the front-page rule. When you write anything, ask how would it look if published on the front page.”
The correct picture
I begin the New Year humbled.
Last week’s column profiled Rep. George Nethercutt Jr. (R-Wash.), who pulled the huge upset of House Speaker Thomas Foley in 1994.
Although I described him as handsome, rugged and fit for a Coors Beer or L.L. Bean ad, the picture we used was of somebody who resembled an overweight Teamster from Cleveland.
We had the wrong guy. But nobody apparently noticed. Given the inspiring prose, I assume (dejectedly) that readers checked out two, maybe three, paragraphs, then headed to the news quiz.
We offer a shot of Rep. Nethercutt for your edification.